An exemplary anti-war novel from a little-known theater of conflict.
Searing novel of war by dissident Ethiopian writer Girma.
Part spy thriller, part melodrama, roman à clef through and through, Girma’s story centers on a moment of Ethiopian history that, in that demographically young country, is all but forgotten. It is the early 1980s, and Ethiopia, under a Marxist military dictatorship, has set out to conquer neighboring Eritrea. “Every day another campaign of some sort,” complains his fiancee, Roman, to a propaganda officer named Tsegaye Hailemaryam. “Now the Red Star Campaign to fix the Eritrean problem. We are addicted to campaigns, but I can’t wait until we can be done with them.” Caught up in the excitement of certain victory, Tsegaye jumps at the chance to go to the front, exalting the invading forces and excoriating the Eritrean resistance, which he depicts as terrorists. The soldiers in Girma’s narrative are pawns, but the officers are well-rounded: One general is so militarily perfect that “even his Afro, though thinning, has sharp edges,” while a schoolmate of Tsegaye’s, Colonel Wolday Tariku, can’t wait to fight: “Give Wolday a drink and a rifle and he is a happy man.” As Roman foresees, Tsegaye forgets his vows to her and falls in love with an Eritrean beauty and Mata Hari named Fiammetta Gilay. Girma’s writing is most immediate in the slaughterhouse of battle, which is not for the squeamish: “A decapitated torso with blood pumping from where a neck once was....A bullet-ridden corpse with an open mouth and unblinking eyes staring up at the red sky.” As the tautly written story resolves, failure, death, and disillusionment are its constants. It’s worth noting that, although the Marxist regime tried to suppress it, Girma’s novel was an underground bestseller in Ethiopia in the early 1980s—and for his criticisms of that regime, Girma paid with his life.
An exemplary anti-war novel from a little-known theater of conflict.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781641296663
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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