A soulful journey that offers surprises and unforeseen victories.
A boy with a fatal disease sets out to help a political refugee restore his shattered family in Gordon’s debut coming-of-age novel.
In the late 1970s, Lee Adams is just 12 years old and has a rare condition called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, which causes his cells to age rapidly. He weighs only 35 pounds and has the wizened appearance of a bald, 102-year-old man; he’s also plagued by arteriosclerosis and arthritis and is likely to die from a heart attack or blood clot in his teens. He has a sharp mind and a keen interest in American history, especially Benjamin Franklin’s motivational wisdom; he wants to indulge this interest during a long-anticipated trip from his Newark, New Jersey, home to Washington, D.C., accompanied by his mom, Cass, and soul mate, Kira Throop, a 13-year-old girl who also has progeria. After Kira dies suddenly, Cass finds herself unable to take off work, so she insists that Lee make the trip anyway, accompanied by newly hired caretaker Tomás Concepción. Lee is suspicious of Tomás, who drags him around Washington on mysterious errands, but the boy finally gets him to tell him what’s going on: He’s an Argentinian journalist who was jailed and tortured in his home country three years ago along with his wife, Violeta; he’s now searching for news of her and their baby, who he fears may have been taken away and sold on the black market. Lee eagerly joins in Tomás’ quest, and they’re helped by Margaret, a Washington Post reporter, and Alicia, an Argentinian expat connected to the “Abuelas,” an underground network of women who gather information about the disappeared. Lee and the others finally uncover leads that may result in the reunion of Tomás’ family—and also learn why this might be a bad idea.
Gordon’s novel is a plangent study of a fearsome disease, depicted in language that’s raptly evocative but never sentimental: “There weren’t any words created that could say why he was on this treadmill with time, or why his collarbones were disintegrating like limestone, or why his spine felt like a brittle trail of broken teeth.” It’s also a dark, gripping investigation of Argentina’s experience with brutal dictatorship in the 1970s and ’80s, full of paranoia and sinister, Kafkaesque atmospherics, as when a character watches secret police descend on her family’s house in Buenos Aires: “She…saw the shadows of two figures being hauled out of her parents’ house—first her father, who had difficulty walking, then her mother sagging behind….She knew she would never see her parents again.” Gordon’s prose is vivid and subtly allusive, conjuring character and feeling from details of appearance and behavior, as in a description of Tomás’ “industrial lunch box and paratrooper shoes” and how he has the “depressed cross-eyed delirium of an undertaker.” The end result is a searching meditation on mortality and hope that’s all the more powerful for being filtered through the quirky point of view of a child.
A soulful journey that offers surprises and unforeseen victories.Pub Date: June 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64603-230-3
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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