Capable and confidently insightful, Athill delivers a stylish, candid life lesson.
The coming of age—and the reaching of happiness—of a sharp-witted woman of good breeding in post–World War II England.
Celebrated memoirist and noted book editor Athill, who died in 2019 at age 101, published this, her first and only novel, in 1967. Now reissued with an afterword by Helen Oyeyemi, the book traces the emergence of Meg Bailey, the granddaughter of a baronet, against a background of 1950s Britain. Class undoubtedly flavors the tale—“they ate jam out of the pot it was sold in”—but it’s Meg’s acerbic, judgmental narrative voice that dominates. She is a loner, the misfit daughter of a Church of England parson and his irritated wife. At school, Meg is deemed conceited, superior, and affected, which in some ways she is, but she’s also shy and short on self-confidence, forever seeking like-minded figures who will assuage her desire to be “seen.” Roxane Weaver is her one close friend, and Meg lodges with the Weavers while attending art school in Oxford, learning there that she is better at design and illustration than painting. But Meg’s true future lies in London, where she moves into a rackety household and finds a community of friends. True intimacy, however, comes with guilt after she begins an all-consuming affair with Roxane’s husband, Dick. Athill grants Meg a forthrightness of tone that is both challenging and disarming. Withering opinions and almost comically damning truths—“At least I was able to disguise from Henry the degree of my revulsion”—are delivered without cease as Meg plows forward, compromised by her feelings for Dick and Roxane. An episode with an Egyptian friend is a weakness in the novel, but helps usher in the surprising discovery of where Meg’s heart has led her.
Capable and confidently insightful, Athill delivers a stylish, candid life lesson.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781681376110
Page Count: 192
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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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