A blunt study of damage with a well-earned glimmer of hope.
A successful author helps his mother make her final break from abusive men.
This short novel and the simultaneously released Collapse marks the conclusion of Louis’ autofictional saga about domestic abuse, sexuality, and class begun in The End of Eddy (2017). Here, the unnamed author’s 55-year-old mother, Monique, is desperate for help after years of enduring her partner’s alcoholic rages. The narrator is in Greece for a writing residency, but arranges for her to move temporarily into his Paris apartment while planning her next move. Inevitably, Monique’s crisis resurfaces his memories of abuse; it also forces him to reconnect with his sister, from whom he’s estranged for writing about ugly family secrets. Monique was infuriated with him, too, for a period; he recalls a time she appeared unannounced at one of his readings, a traumatizing experience for both. Still, he rationalizes, hasn’t his literary success writing about his family given him the means to help his mother move on? (“My hurt and hers are linked, because they’re twinned, without separation, without boundaries, I have no regrets because what had hurt her was me expressing my own hurt, I can’t regret it because without this common Hurt, this Hurt that is neither hers nor mine but entirely ours, none of what was happening…would have been possible,” he writes.) The novel weaves between the narrator assisting Monique with apartment-hunting in northern France and meditating on his family’s past. The history is ugly, and as ever, Louis is gifted at detailing abuse in plainspoken, powerful language. But this is also easily the most sunlit of Louis’ works of autofiction, emphasizing the idea that abuse is profoundly harmful, but is not destiny. “Talking over these tiny details moved me deeply, because they were the most tangible manifestation of her future freedom, because freedom is also a matter of details,” he writes.
A blunt study of damage with a well-earned glimmer of hope.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780374616809
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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