A powerful chronicle of the search for peace and identity amid constant disruption.
A Palestinian exile recalls his ordeals as a child and young adult.
This work by the acclaimed Lebanese author Khoury is a follow-up to his novel The Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam (2019). While that novel considered the life and death of its title character in a fragmentary fashion, here Khoury’s approach is more straightforward, if still suffused with irony and anguish. Adam grew up in Lydda, a ghetto formed by Israel during the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians known as the Nakba. As a teenager in the 1960s, Adam escapes his abusive stepfather, finding odd jobs in a garage and a restaurant, eventually landing in Haifa and pursuing the study of Hebrew literature. But he cloaks his Palestinian identity to get by, tweaking his last name slightly (from Dannoun to Danoun). On a class trip to Warsaw, he meets a participant in the Jewish ghetto uprising there, provoking a debate between him and his teacher about whether it’s best to stand one’s ground or live in exile. Khoury has long been focused on the aftereffects of the Nakba, most notably in Gate of the Sun (2006), emphasizing the cruelty of the forced expulsion and the confusions of statelessness; Adam satirizes the bureaucratese that makes him a “present absentee” in Israel. But though death and loss are key themes (major plot points involve murder and suicide), romance is also central to the novel, as Adam recalls his intense, hopeful, and difficult relationships with women. That doesn’t soften the harshness of the events Khoury chronicles, but it does add lyrical and deeper elements to what’s ultimately a tragic story.
A powerful chronicle of the search for peace and identity amid constant disruption.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781962770064
Page Count: 473
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
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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