With his gift for creating vibrantly specific characters and settings, Stuart again taps profound human truth.
In Scotland’s Hebrides islands, a closeted gay man returns home to an insular community of sheep farmers and weavers, where complications and secrets await.
Stuart follows his Booker Prize–winning debut, Shuggie Bain (2020), and acclaimed second novel, Young Mungo (2022), both set in Glasgow, with a coming-of-age story set in a very different part of Scotland. John-Calum Macleod has left art school in Edinburgh, broke and without prospects, called home to the Isle of Harris by his father because his grandmother is unwell. Ella, his mother’s mother, lives with her former son-in-law on his croft while her remarried daughter lives elsewhere with her husband and younger children. The reason for this unusual arrangement will become clear slowly, along with other key issues: Why Cal’s father, also named John, a pillar of the extremely conservative local Presbyterian church, is so tortured; what led to the end of his marriage; whether Cal’s attempts to hide his sexuality from everyone except the neighbor boy who used to be his lover have been successful. When that boy, Doll Macdonald, gives Cal an icy cold shoulder upon his return, his attention falls on his father’s best friend, Innes MacInnes, a never-married man who lives with his own ancient, infirm father and emotionally estranged brother. Could Innes possibly be gay? Cal wonders. The 22-year-old Cal exists at the confluence of two profoundly different cultures. On the one hand, he speaks Gaelic with his father, works nights weaving traditional tweed on their loom, helps with the sheep, and attends his father’s evangelical church. On the other, he takes ecstasy, goes to a booze- and sex-focused hullabaloo on a party bus, tries to find a hook-up in the personal ads (it seems to be the 1990s). The central question of the book, which is facing all the main characters, is whether it’s possible to inhabit the place one calls home as one’s genuine self. Stay or go? Life or death? By the end, this issue is resolved in a variety of tragic and hopeful ways.
With his gift for creating vibrantly specific characters and settings, Stuart again taps profound human truth.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780802167194
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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