This controlled, quietly moving portrait of a life in decline coasts to a halt in an unexpected place.
A man facing the empty-nest phase of a disappointing marriage drops his daughter at college and hits the road.
Published in the U.K. earlier this year, now shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Markovits’ 12th novel establishes the unstudied and confiding voice that carries it so compellingly forward in the first sentence: “When our son was twelve years old, my wife had an affair with a guy called Zach Zirsky, whom she knew from synagogue.” As the story unfolds, this voice often addresses the reader directly, saying things like, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound about it the way I probably sound,” and “I should probably say a word about our friendship,” and so forth, increasing the intimate effect. For the sake of his kids—there’s also a daughter, then 6—Tom Layward made a deal with himself that he’d stay in the marriage until they left home. The book opens at that point, 12 years later. “What we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.” Other things are also going poorly: Tom, a law professor on leave from his university after counseling the owner of a basketball team accused of racism and sexism, has also refused to add his pronouns to his email signature. Markovits, who was born in Texas, played pro basketball in Germany, and now lives in London, develops this tricky aspect of the situation in a notably nuanced way, as part of the complexity of Tom’s character rather than as a dive into the breach of the culture wars. Tom is also suffering from undiagnosed but serious-seeming health symptoms, which he vaguely ascribes to long Covid. When an argument between his wife, Amy, and daughter, Miri, erupts on the day they are to take her to campus, Amy stays home in suburban New York. And without ever actually deciding to, Tom ends up on a cross-country road trip, visiting an old basketball teammate, an ex-lover, his brother, and ultimately his son on the West Coast. Though Markovits has never been big on plot, the reader’s sense that this is all leading up to something is not wrong.
This controlled, quietly moving portrait of a life in decline coasts to a halt in an unexpected place.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781668231562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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