Raw thriller meets darkly funny coming-of-age for an enjoyable, unsettling debut.
In this dark and twisty debut, Setton crafts a clever thriller-cum–expat narrative for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth, and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station.
Daphne, a directionless 26-year-old Londoner, lands in Berlin with little plan for her time there. Living off her parents’ money, Daphne expects to make friends, find love, and discover her real life, the one she keeps expecting to appear and replace her bleak and circumscribed existence. A strange and violent event one night at her subleased flat leads to her gradual paranoid spiraling and the transformation of the city in her eyes. Berlin devolves from a hipster mecca into a nightmarish hellscape as Daphne struggles to hold on to her tenuous sanity. Setton’s sentences are the real draw here. She peppers Daphne’s speech with sharp observations about modern life, youth, and the burdens of contemporary womanhood. As Daphne's time in Berlin drags on, marked by her waning body mass and increased running mileage, she encounters many colorful characters, including internet dates, local Berliners, fellow expats, one ex-boyfriend, and a possible stalker. Daphne’s unreliability—her tendency to double back, correct the record, and manipulate the reader—creates a sense of disorientation that only enhances the slippery plot. Setton expertly portrays the wily, seductive nature of addictions and dysfunctions, and her novel's humorous voice belies horrors both small and large. While most of the book eschews thriller genre conventions, replacing usual plot beats with rumination and drifting (and the occasional footnote), the novel never lags. Daphne’s youthful despair and loneliness are horror stories in and of themselves—ones from which it is hard to look away, especially when coupled with the evocative German setting.
Raw thriller meets darkly funny coming-of-age for an enjoyable, unsettling debut.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780143137627
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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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