A sobering tale of complex politics and histories.
Elgammal’s novel explores a young Egyptian man’s competing loyalties to country, faith, and family.
As the story begins, the protagonist’s father Omar takes on the unenviable task of combing through his recently deceased son Nasser’s journal searching for confirmation of his alleged ties to terrorism. The narrative then moves to the past: Growing up in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 1980s and ’90s, Nasser El-Mohammedi is raised by Omar in an uncommonly secular fashion. An esteemed professor, Omar schools his son using his extensive personal library, and when Nasser comes of age, he falls in with a small group of brilliant friends who go on to study engineering. Their sisters and girlfriends become part of the group, too, and when two members of the cohort leave for America to pursue graduate studies, it is with heavy hearts for those they leave behind. Nasser, on the other hand, is confronted at his graduation by a long-lost uncle, who tells him he needs to come South because it is finally time to visit his mother’s real grave. Once there, Nasser discovers that his mother (who died when Nasser was a child) lived a life of immense secrecy and estrangement from her family due to her insistence upon pursuing a secondary education. When Nasser learns that Omar has lied about Nasser’s mother’s radical past for years, Nasser’s own latent radicalism is inflamed. America is rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, setting the table for a new era of danger, radicalization, and division among Nasser’s once-bulletproof friend group. Elgammal’s novel is deeply felt and richly detailed, vividly capturing the gravity of the circumstances in which his characters find themselves: “Still, he hated the horrible helpless feeling that had seized him—history was happening, people were suffering and dying two miles from where they were sitting, and they couldn’t think of a single useful thing to do.” Some readers may wish to spend longer periods with a single character—Elgammal jumps perspectives regularly—but the shifting POV effect creates a rich texture that helps to separate the novel from its peers.
A sobering tale of complex politics and histories.Pub Date: May 12, 2025
ISBN: 9781069167408
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Escape Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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