A quiet, poignant, and deeply human novel.
An astronaut looks back on his life during an unprecedented mission.
“Earth is now a pale blue smudge,” writes Commander Oliver Ines from aboard the Talos. Growing up in a small English village, where he had celestial wallpaper in his bedroom, Ollie had no idea he would grow up to become one of the most famous astronauts of all time. As he floats through space with his three crew members, Ollie thinks back on everything that led him here. He remembers his idyllic yet suffocating childhood, especially one summer he spent with Philly, his neighbor’s strange but lovely niece. There were the years he spent excelling academically—not socially—in London, and then his wildly successful though unfulfilling Royal Navy career. And, finally, his relationship with Philly, as they reconnect, fall in love, and create a family together, serves as the emotional through line. When Ollie is approached by a charismatic, controlling, and controversial billionaire, given the opportunity to train as an astronaut and take a one-of-a-kind mission to Europa to find out if there’s life beneath its glittering surface, he must make a life-changing decision: Will he continue to chase greatness and glory even if it means leaving his loved ones behind for more than a decade? During one trip back to his village, Ollie thinks, “Time can distort events, but it can just as well bend them back into shape.” As he gets closer to Europa and further from his loved ones, Ollie’s life—and his potential legacy—begin to come into sharper focus. As the novel boomerangs between memories and the mission, it becomes clear how much has been sacrificed—and the ways that ambition can equally propel and poison one’s life. Pin’s perfectly melancholy prose offers a sweeping yet grounded portrait of a man whose aspiration becomes the guiding principle of his life. The novel beautifully explores loneliness, memory, belonging, grief, and the cost of chasing one’s dreams.
A quiet, poignant, and deeply human novel.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781250863492
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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