Part heartfelt coming-of-age tale, part brutal Irish noir, this is a spectacular read for Donna Tartt and Tana French fans.
Irish author Walsh makes an assured debut with this gritty heartbreaker of a thriller.
On the west coast of Ireland sits the tourist town of Kinlough, where, in 2003, six teenage friends—Kala, Aoife, Helen, Aiden, Joe, and Mush—are enjoying the “summer of [their] lives,” daring each other to race their bikes down a hill across a busy main road, exploring first love, and building tight emotional bonds. When 15-year-old Kala, the gang’s charismatic but troubled leader, disappears in November, the friends’ relationships fracture: “There was no clear point where you made the decision to let your lives unbraid themselves from one another.” Fifteen years later, three of the friends meet up again. Hard-edged Helen, now a freelance journalist living in Canada, has reluctantly returned home for her father’s wedding to Pauline Lyons, Mush’s aunt. Joe, a self-absorbed rock star with a drinking problem, is back to relaunch a local music venue with a summer residency, and the solitary Mush, self-conscious about his facial scars, has never gone anywhere, preferring to sit in his mother’s cafe drinking beer and watching the summer visitors. But the discovery of Kala’s bones at a building site and the disappearance of Mush’s 16-year-old twin cousins propel the trio to reconsider their past in a dangerous search for the truth. Skillfully blending the psychological complexity of a literary novel with the propulsive pace of a thriller, the author juggles three disparate points of view (including a second-person perspective) and two timelines with masterful flair. His striking prose (“hair pineappled into an elegant mess”) is flavored with colorful Irish slang (“beor,” “craic”) without becoming twee. The handy cast of characters clarifies the family relationships, but at times the convoluted plot is confusing as it builds to a haunting conclusion.
Part heartfelt coming-of-age tale, part brutal Irish noir, this is a spectacular read for Donna Tartt and Tana French fans.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780385549639
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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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