A beautifully written novel shows how small moments can make a big difference in people’s lives.
A chance meeting with an old college friend leads a novelist to revisit memories of her freshman year in the fifth novel by Monier (The Rocky Orchard, 2020, etc.).
Esmé is a novelist in her 60s who is about to give a reading of her new book when she gets a shock. Someone from her freshman year of college, a year she hated at a school she disliked in a town she despised, appears and says hello. It is Tom Killarney, a friend from that alcohol-soaked year, whom she hasn’t seen in 40 years. Esmé, who is moving in with her partner, Gino, begins to recall difficult but consequential moments from the early 1970s, when she left tiny Clarion, Pennsylvania, to attend a private college in a city seven hours away by car. An only child whose father died when she was 5, she was lonely and penniless but bright enough to become one of only 10 students accepted for a coveted English lit program at the school. Her dorm room was impressive, and the other students well dressed but lacking in intellectual curiosity: “Kids my age opened their doors to fetch their WSJs wearing pajamas that looked as if they’d be ironed, covered by plush monogrammed bathrobes, their feet toasty in sheepskin scuffs.” Disillusioned, Esmé found solace in friends like Tom, and in Monier’s novel, reconnecting with him causes her to reexamine her post-college life. A question at the heart of this novel is: What happened to the young people of her generation who were so ready to take on the world? Monier deftly spans the decades and writes incisively about how the answers aren’t always easy to find. She gives shape to fragmented and loose connections between people, however dispersed they have become, and thoughtfully explores an idea that may resonate with many members of her heroine’s generation. As Esmé puts it: “Perhaps it’s not the past that catches up with me, but rather the other way around.”
A beautifully written novel shows how small moments can make a big difference in people’s lives.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Amika Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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