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
SEEN & HEARD
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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