A bloody and beautiful sojourn in the distant past.
The debut novel from a much-heralded Scottish playwright.
There are many ways to go about writing historical fiction. Two of the most common are situating the reader in the past by using archaic language and imagery—or language and imagery that feel archaic—and helping the reader find commonality with characters situated in the past by letting them speak and behave in ways that feel familiar. Each of these stylistic choices has its own pleasures and pitfalls. Greig has chosen the latter path, and the resulting story is a small treasure. The “I” of the title is the island now known as Iona, the tiny dot of land off the Scottish coast where St. Columba founded an abbey in the sixth century. We first see the holy isle through the eyes of a Viking called Grimur as the ship he’s aboard approaches the shore. The resulting raid is a real disappointment. Killing unarmed peasants and monks who desire martyrdom is no fun, and the only treasure Grimur finds is the best mead he’s ever tasted. But his deep appreciation of that mead will leave him so incapacitated that his fellows will bury him on the island before they leave. When he crawls out of his premature grave, Grimur will find that the only other human inhabitants left on the island are Una, the mead-maker, and Martin, a monk who hid himself in the latrine during the raid. Left alone, these three survive by forming a community in which they help each other achieve what they need. Grimur finds peace and family. Una experiences life without an abusive husband. And Martin finds purpose as the lone steward of Christian faith after the raid left the abbey without inhabitants. If this sounds tidy or precious, it is neither. The story is messy in the ways that being human is always messy. And it’s messy in ways that make the ninth-century Hebrides feel real.
A bloody and beautiful sojourn in the distant past.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661276
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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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