The New Sobriety will have to wait—the party novel is not dead. At least in Ireland.
Three housemates in Belfast deal with their grief after the death of a fourth friend, relying on alcohol, cocaine, sex, and even a few therapy sessions.
The three young women at the center of O’Hare’s debut—Róise, Maggie, and Harley—are closing out their 20s with a bang. Though “Róise assumed they would evolve naturally from twenty-something buck eejits into secure and self-actualized young women who had skincare regimes and remembered to pay the council tax on time,” this is definitely not on the agenda during the time period covered by the novel, which sees more than one 30th-birthday celebration. Since they moved in together as a foursome years back, both the rundown house itself and their friend group have suffered great depredations, with the biggest blow being the death of their fourth friend, Lydia, in a car crash. This loss was complicated by the fact that it happened very shortly after a drunken betrayal involving Róise’s boyfriend had everyone on the outs. Though Maggie sees a rather unhelpful therapist, the women’s approach to grief relies largely on self-medication and casual sex; there is so much drinking and partying in this book that readers may themselves begin to feel a bit hungover. Maggie sleeps with women, Róise sleeps with her sort-of boss, Harley sleeps with their landlord, who is also their coke dealer; all are grimly aware that nothing is as fun as it used to be, though the effect is somewhat lightened by O’Hare’s insightful and humorous depiction of their weltschmerz: “The music has been turned down low in the living room to accommodate a game of Never Have I Ever, which, when everyone is in their thirties, becomes less of a light-hearted drinking game and more of an informal support group.” It’s a little harder than it should be to keep the characters and their supporting cast straight, and the witty writing works better than the more serious aspects of the story, but these are forgivable flaws in a promising debut.
The New Sobriety will have to wait—the party novel is not dead. At least in Ireland.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798217088997
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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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