A gentle, engaging, and heartfelt tale of family secrets and emotional closure.
In this debut novel, a man returns to his childhood home to unravel a vexing family mystery.
Australian journalist Chilton’s tale is a family-centric affair chronicling the life of Liam Murray, a city dweller from a small Aussie village who has lost his footing in the urban jungle. He attempts to fill the unhappy void with sleep, work, and, perhaps most dangerously and desperately, a torrid affair with Hannah, his married upstairs neighbor. Though tragic, the news of his mother’s sudden diagnosis of breast cancer spurs Liam to quit his dead-end job and move back to Elanora, his hometown. There, he feels most needed and wanted, though the memory of his father’s disappearance two decades prior still haunts him. He was just a boy when his father went fishing by himself and only the charred remains of his boat returned. Reuniting with childhood friends and caring for his mother (who’s started seriously dating again) fill his days at home, while memories of fishing and oyster hunting with his father permeate his mind. Stubbornly overwhelmed by open emotional wounds, Liam determinedly resolves to dig deeper into why his father disappeared. Was he depressed and suicidal when the family lost its second child, Annie, in the womb? What starts as a ransacking of his father’s old shed soon turns serious, and dark, personal secrets and a messy, hidden life are uncovered. If the story meanders a bit too leisurely for some readers, Chilton’s vibrant and smoothly lyrical prose more than makes up for a rather slack plot. Her consistent use of similes is also an appealing and effective touch: Female workers rushing through city streets on their ways to work have high heels sounding “like the start of rain,” and Liam’s childhood bedroom gives him an unsettling feeling, “as if it was he who had disappeared without a trace as a child, not his father.” Determined to live unencumbered by the past, Chilton’s characters yearn for love, understanding, and some semblance of a resolution. Combining lush details of the Australian landscape with players who draw readers in with humble hearts, this is a stirring first novel.
A gentle, engaging, and heartfelt tale of family secrets and emotional closure.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-00-515025-9
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.
A relationship between young screen actors is magical, fraught, and relentlessly public in Green’s first novel for adults.
“Every movie romance needs an Obstacle, a reason the characters don’t naturally fall into each other.” In the off-screen romance between actors Juniper Castillo and Kai Laramie, the obstacle is a moving target. Juniper notices early on that as flirty and forward as Kai is, he seems “closed off to a romantic connection”; that turns out to be the tip of a very problematic iceberg. The two meet in the lobby of a Pittsburgh hotel where they will be spending the evening with Matthew Malone, the megastar playing Andy Warhol in a movie they’re about to begin shooting, Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Kai has been cast as Andy’s intern, Juniper as a journalist who gets in over her head. This is Juniper’s first adult role after a long run as a Nickelodeon child star, and newcomer Kai’s first role of any kind. Green evokes in compelling detail all the phases and aspects of the film project, from the table read to the screening of the rough cut, from the social media fanfare to the public premiere and the press junket, moving back and forth between Juniper’s and Kai’s first-person perspectives. In a meeting with one of the ubiquitous publicists, Kai learns that somehow “the high school stuff” he never talks about—despite their growing inseparability and seemingly profound connection, he hasn’t even brought himself to share it with Juniper—has surfaced. Details emerge slowly, then blow up in the media; the book’s third act focuses on the destructive potential of celebrity culture in a climate that makes Warhol’s milieu look innocent by comparison. After a long break from writing fiction—his last two books were Everything Is Tuberculosis (2025) and The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021)—Green fills this novel with carefully observed details of Hollywood culture and characters, including running jokes about vegan cuisine, media training, and the way Kai’s agent constantly and boorishly consults his young female assistant on points of political correctness. Can he talk about “hot girls”? Can he quote T.S. Eliot? OK to say “dog vomit”?
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9780525426073
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: tomorrow
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
