A vivid Cold War story about pursuing a dream in a world of Soviet oppression.
Buchanan’s novel follows the evolution of a chess prodigy in the Cold War–era USSR.
Yakov “Yasha” Basmajian is a young man in Soviet-era Armenia. Just before Yasha’s mother enters the hospital to have a mass removed from her throat, she teaches her son to play chess. So begins Yasha’s obsession with a game that will define his life. Chess is important in the Soviet Union—“part of the official Soviet educational curriculum”—and Yasha travels to Moscow to study with an elite coach. As Yasha comes to understand, the point of chess, according to the Soviets, is “to prove to your opponent the ideological superiority of your intellectual preparation, the superiority of your tactical acumen, the superiority of your nerves and reflexes, and the superiority of your strength of will.” It’s heavy stuff for a young man playing a game, but, as Yasha will learn, he’s playing a very dangerous game indeed. Alongside Yasha’s journey, the narrative offers analyses of chess matches and insights into the practice of Soviet espionage (one character observes, “We exist in a highly paranoid state in these backward Republics”). One thread of the narrative concerns plans to build a powerful chess computer, though the Soviets would just as soon develop a discreet earpiece to help players cheat. The story features entertainingly colorful personalities (like a cranky American named Jimmy Hunter who seems loosely based on Bobby Fischer, and Yasha’s coach, who tells the protagonist that if he loses, “I shall truly despair of you”) and evocatively illustrates a time when the USSR was obsessed with preventing its citizens from defecting. Some scenes feel drawn out, but readers will be compelled to follow Yasha as he advances and confronts various obstacles in the bizarre landscape of elite international chess.
A vivid Cold War story about pursuing a dream in a world of Soviet oppression.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9789083488240
Page Count: 425
Publisher: Thinkers Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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