A striking novel about fathers and sons in 21st-century Ireland that does not quite live up to its potential.
Two brothers try to help their terminally ill father end his life in a rural Irish town.
Doharty Black and his older brother, Cormac, are stunned when their domineering, terminally ill father, known to them as the Chief, asks them to look in the Bible and “find the bits that reference suicide.” The two brothers reluctantly embark on a quest to find a safe way for them to help the Chief commit suicide. But while the older and more successful Cormac can temporarily escape to his home and job in town, Doharty must remain with his parents at their struggling farm and deal with the day-to-day reality of their father’s illness. Doharty’s lifelong resentment of Cormac festers as they attempt to navigate their familial duties and is further complicated when they both become involved with the same woman. This novel, set in 2014, functions both as a biblical parable and an indictment of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economic boom of the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in the 2008 financial crash. The Chief’s physical decline mirrors the decline of the family’s economic prospects in the wake of an ill-advised loan. Hughes is attentive to the larger political context of her narrative and to more granular details of language and place, and her prose is vivid and unsparing: “His mind was a luxury,” Doharty thinks bitterly of Cormac, “…at any moment something you’d say would be turned inside out like a child’s eyelid to traumatise you.” The novel would be more successful, however, if its plot and the relationships between its characters were as vivid as its sentences. So much is left unsaid between Doharty and his family that these fraught relationships begin to feel threadbare.
A striking novel about fathers and sons in 21st-century Ireland that does not quite live up to its potential.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78607-780-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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