Adichie weaves stories of heartbreak and travail that are timely, touching, and trenchant.
Four African women are poised at emotional crossroads that compel them to scrutinize their lives.
Isolated by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Chiamaka, a novelist-turned–travel writer sheltering in suburban Maryland, is struggling to stave off boredom and loneliness through regular Zoom calls with family and friends in the U.S., Europe, and her native Nigeria. It’s not enough, and soon this professional tourist resorts to filling the empty spaces of time with mental excursions through the ruins of past love affairs beginning with Darnell, “the Denzel Washington of academia,” whose magnetism created waiting lists for his art history classes and had Chiamaka looking past his personal slights—for a while, anyway. Then there was Chuka, a more considerate and less mercurial man who shared both her African homeland and an address in the Washington, D.C., area. Nothing wrong there besides what Chia characterizes as “that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love.” As in her previous works of fiction—most recently Americanah (2013)—Adiche makes her prose hum and throb with elegantly wrought and empathetic observations. This style extends into the stories of three other women in Chia’s life. Zikora, her best friend, is a tough-minded Nigerian attorney accustomed to speaking brutal truths to others but vulnerable to ill-starred love affairs with men she thinks of as “thieves of time,” one of whom leaves her while she's pregnant, forcing her to raise a child alone—though not without unexpected help. Kadiatou, Chia’s Guinean housekeeper, has overcome challenging odds in raising her gifted daughter, Binta, by herself in America, but is the innocent victim of a sordid scandal that jeopardizes her future. And Chia's cousin, the glamorous, self-possessed Omelogor, is a formidable presence in Nigerian finance but prone to melancholy, rumination, and regret. In today's world, when people seem at once too cut off and too much in each other's business, readers will feel communion with these tense, put-upon, yet resilient women in crisis.
Adichie weaves stories of heartbreak and travail that are timely, touching, and trenchant.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593802724
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
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
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