A lyrical, exquisitely detailed account of one woman’s inner and outer worlds.
Quietly, painstakingly, a woman begins to care for a horse.
“Horses had moved into my consciousness slowly and then quickly, gathering pace and rhythm and volume,” says the narrator of Haworth-Booth’s first novel for adults. Like her author, the narrator writes children’s books and, from her home in a sleepy part of England, teaches writing online. She’s married but her husband, also unnamed, plays little role here. At first that seems counterintuitive, since the narrator’s central struggle—whether or not to have children—would very much seem to involve him. But Haworth-Booth’s focus isn’t on a couple’s shared decision; it’s on women’s bodies and women’s choices and what happens when what we thought was a choice is suddenly circumscribed. For many reasons—climate change and environmental catastrophe not least among them—the narrator has long thought she didn’t want to have children. As the book progresses, she finds out that, in any case, she can’t. Her body undergoes mysterious changes; there are doctor visits, estrogen patches and creams. Does womanhood hinge on the ability to give birth? If the book were content with questions like these it would be on rich enough ground, but Haworth-Booth complicates things infinitely—and exquisitely—by marching horses into the mix. The narrator becomes a “sharer” in a horse’s care: Several days a week, she feeds, brushes, and rides the horse who is, for all intents and purposes—and for a fee—hers on those specific days. Lest you suspect Haworth-Booth of facile comparisons, the horse is not a surrogate for a child. “I didn’t know how to describe who the horse and I were to each other…” the narrator says, mystified herself. “What is between the horse and me is inexpressible but not insignificant.” Haworth-Booth’s book is a marvelous exploration of what it means to be a woman, to live in a woman’s body, to contemplate motherhood—and it is equally about the relationships between people and animals, women and girls and horses. Every step of the way, she resists easy answers.
A lyrical, exquisitely detailed account of one woman’s inner and outer worlds.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9780374617707
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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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