A fast-paced thriller with its finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary social discourse.
An aspiring literary translator attends a mysterious language school in the hopes of advancing her career only to discover the institution harbors a dark secret.
Londoner Anisa Ellahi was born and raised in Pakistan but moved to England for college. Nearly two decades on, she subtitles Bollywood films for a living but dreams of parlaying her linguistic skills into more stimulating, meaningful work. When she meets future boyfriend Adam at a translation studies conference, she is captivated by his savantlike ability to speak nearly a dozen languages, including Mandarin, Italian, Russian, and Japanese. They soon move in together, adopt a kitten, and begin considering marriage. Despite Anisa’s best attempts, however, Adam is strangely incapable of mastering even basic phrases in her mother tongue, Urdu. During a trip to Anisa’s home city of Karachi, a dispute forces Adam to come clean. He’s no wunderkind. He has taken courses at an elite, enigmatic school known as the Centre that promises total fluency in any language within 10 days, for a hefty fee, of course: $20,000. More than willing to cough up the money for a chance at realizing her ambitions, Anisa persuades Adam to recommend her for the program. When Anisa arrives at the Centre after an exhaustive application process, she finds a secluded retreat that follows a strict schedule and forbids almost all social contact in the service of achieving optimal results. Her efforts to find out more about the school eventually turn up disturbing truths about the Centre’s methodology and jeopardize her close relationship with a staff member. Filled with astute insights into life as a brown person in a predominantly White country and how differences of class, religion, and nationality can bring about rifts in solidarity between people who share a racial or ethnic background, the novel offers a mystery rife with social critique, though it could have done more to scrutinize Anisa’s own sources of privilege, particularly in relation to Adam.
A fast-paced thriller with its finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary social discourse.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781638930549
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gillian Flynn/Zando
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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