An absorbing and fast-paced novel of war, romance, and espionage in WWII-era Indonesia.
In Putterman and Ishak’s historical novel, an ambitious man strives to make a fortune in colonial Indonesia.
In 1937, Avram Shabbes, a Jewish Pole of modest background, is building a life in Batavia (later Jakarta), a city of smugglers, thieves, spies, and concubines. He has a sharp eye for opportunity and, unlike many other Europeans, respects the Indonesians; he’s learned the local language, which helps him build a shipping operation that enjoys great success—until the Japanese conquest. Meanwhile, at home in Poland, Avram’s family waits for him to pay their passage overseas. By the time he realizes the extent of the horror in Europe, it’s too late to save them—instead, Avram pours all of his cunning and resources into staying alive in occupied Indonesia, working for the Japanese and Germans to stay out of internment camps. His native wife, Sarinah, is a militant nationalist, convinced by a prophecy that the Japanese will be the route to independence (“they are coming to liberate us from the Belandas,” she says, referring to the Dutch). Avram’s chance for redemption comes when he’s recruited into a spy ring, using his chummy rapport with German seamen to extract information. As more atrocities come to light, the couple undertake dangerous espionage missions to save themselves and help win the war. This is an inventive spin on both the immigrant story and the Holocaust narrative. The atmosphere of a mid-20th-century colonial outpost is palpable, evoking the environment of European racism and oppression in the East Indies. Avram is an everyman but also an outsider, and his in-between status is a clever device that the authors capably use to interrogate social norms and assumptions. Avram is often a slave to circumstance, but he proves himself to be a resourceful and motivated survivor and a complex, flawed hero. His compelling journey poses complicated questions about what is ethically permissible and when the ends justify the means.
An absorbing and fast-paced novel of war, romance, and espionage in WWII-era Indonesia.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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