An unforgettable and storm-lashed tale of two lovers fighting their way back to each other against the odds.
A woman takes to the sea to find her missing husband in this conclusion to Giordano’s Strange Eden trilogy.
The novel opens in New Providence, an island in the Bahamas, in the spring of 1794—nearly three years after Lady Eliza Sharpe left her English home to join her husband, Charles, at Pleasant Hall. Now she’s in crisis. Charles has been missing for two weeks, following their failed attempt to free an enslaved person on their property. In Charles’ absence, Lord Dunmore sends a flood of creditors to Pleasant Hall claiming debts that Eliza can’t disprove. As a woman with almost no legal standing, she finds herself dismissed and patronized: “They treated her like a foolish girl. They couldn’t even afford her the respect of a woman.” The visitors threaten not only her home, but also the enslaved people that she and Charles have vowed to release from bondage—an act that would destabilize Nassau’s economic order. Eliza is sure that her spouse is alive, despite others’ insistence that he’s dead. When Capt. Hiram Bruin, a privateer described as “deranged, violent, and show[ing] little mercy for women,” comes to Pleasant Hall to kill Eliza, she persuades him to instead accompany her on a quest to find Charles. Although she soon changes her mind, he subsequently drugs and kidnaps her, setting the stage for months of harrowing confinement on a ship. Parallel chapters follow Charles, who awakens on another vessel that harbors a brutal shipboard fight ring; he’s determined to escape and reunite with Eliza.
Once the novel heads out to sea, Eliza is concerned almost exclusively with her own survival and locating Charles, which leaved the fate of the enslaved people at Pleasant Hall frustratingly unexamined. Still, the book offers a compelling, if uncomfortable, portrayal of racist hierarchies persisting even in the worlds of privateers and pirates. The prose is strikingly vivid, lingering on dazzling natural beauty (“neighboring mountainous islands, looming so large and vast that she felt as though she could grasp them”) and the visceral brutality of shipboard violence (“Bodies laid sprawled all over the deck, their hot blood running in thin rivulets”). Longtime readers of the series will appreciate the deepening of Eliza and Charles’ once-rocky relationship, although some may struggle to forgive earlier violent behavior, which this installment reframes. New readers, however, will be able to jump right in, as well-placed flashbacks from prior entries fill in gaps without slowing momentum. The story is enriched by its mythological echoes—most explicitly the Orpheus/Eurydice dynamic acknowledged by Eliza, but also the wandering trials of Homer’s Odyssey, which lend an epic scale to Eliza’s and Charles’ struggles. The persistent threat of sexual violence in this narrative, while historically grounded, may deter some readers, and one major twist could have been revealed later in the narrative to deliver a fuller shock. Ultimately, though, the novel challenges readers to confront “what you would do if you lost what you value most.”
An unforgettable and storm-lashed tale of two lovers fighting their way back to each other against the odds.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2025
ISBN: 9798986983448
Page Count: 478
Publisher: Käferhaus Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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