Bracing, guilt-haunted SF-noir set against the timely backdrop of a politically divided America.
In Eadington’s speculative novel, a former National Guardsman traumatized by politically motivated violence and civil conflict learns his memories may be deceptive implants.
The story begins in 2048, in the aftermath of several years (a period called “the Lapse”) of right-wing violence and reactionary terrorism perpetrated by fundamentalist Christian militias and anti-immigrant “patriots” that tore the United States apart. Pete Bascom is a former National Guardsman in California who is traumatized by physical and psychological wounds and works in a government department devoted to victim Redress and Reparations as society recovers. Suddenly, however, the program is discontinued, leaving Pete without a cause until he overhears another ex-Guardsman’s boasts about his past; the man’s history is identical to Bascom’s. Pete is forced to consider the possibility that his memories are not his own, but rather some kind of advanced neural transplant that has successfully repressed his origins. He learns that he may actually be Jacob Leiter, an unsavory character of the bygone era who was hip-deep in the realms of pornography, sex work, and political extremism. Every thread the hero follows on his private inquest deeper into California’s ugly underground leads to more stonewalling and evasion (even by those closest to him, like a part-time lover), and there are threats from especially menacing characters warning him to leave things from the bad old days alone. The Philip K. Dick-like premise of scrambled identity in a futurescape of disquiet and deceit is effectively rendered in an arid, noirish fashion that may remind readers of the classic film Chinatown (the use of the name “Jake” and the ways in which the West Coast water supply figures into the plot further cement the comparison). As in Dick’s work, absolute truth and full closure elude the protagonist; via scraps and oblique references, readers get a fragmentary picture of the fateful 21st-century awfulness between red and blue states (“I can call the mid-30s what they were. People were shooting each other, bombing each other. Chrissakes, thousands of people died in the Battle of Akron. That’s a war”).
Bracing, guilt-haunted SF-noir set against the timely backdrop of a politically divided America.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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