A thoughtful story of heartbreak, hope, and desire.
The bond between a selfish hotelier and a courageous Syrian refugee transforms an island in Kokkaris’ novel.
Surrounded by the serene waves of the Aegean Sea and home to Paradisos II, an exclusive boutique resort, the island of Phaedros rests on a bedrock of family, faith, and rigid roles that are not to be tested. Emilio Politis, “on the verge of becoming Greece’s most celebrated hotelier,” has recently opened Paradisos II, fulfilling his mother’s promise of “a life in paradise.” Descended from refugees but now living a posh life filled with drink and women, Emilio has grown cold, calloused, and selfish. Meanwhile, in a refugee camp in southern Turkey, young pharmacist Maryam plans an escape with her husband and daughter—they take a boat to Greece, planning to pass through to Germany and then make their way to Canada. When the boat capsizes during a freak storm off the shore of Phaedros, Emilio is the one to pull Maryam to safety; with this act of heroism, paradise will never be the same. With the arrival of Maryam and another Syrian refugee who survived the sinking boat, the people of Phaedros are forced to reckon with their own biases, intolerance, and previously unchallenged views of the world, and when a murder shocks the island, tensions rise to a boiling point—Emilio must fight to preserve his family and his paradise from total collapse. This tale of paradise found spans hundreds of years, tracing the arcs of refugee and immigrant families from 1817 through 2015 to illustrate that the line dividing refugees fighting for their lives and a rich hotelier is shockingly thin—paradise can be taken away just as quickly as it was achieved. Though the plot and character development may have benefitted from more focus on Maryam and Emilio’s relationship, the fascinating histories of both of their families compellingly bring themes of religious intolerance, racism, and societal norms to light. The characters and their stories are both unique and universal, and Kokkaris’ depiction of their everyday lives broadens the reader’s understanding of the world.
A thoughtful story of heartbreak, hope, and desire.Pub Date: April 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781764522809
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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