With a generous vision, Assadi has created an unforgettable character in a multidimensional world.
In a sweeping, deeply personal novel based on the life of Assadi’s father, a Palestinian exile roams from the Middle East through Europe and America, picking up and discarding identities, always yearning to find his true home.
But what is home? That is the idiosyncratic Sufien’s central question, one he still struggles to answer from his deathbed while recalling his life journey. In 1948, 5-year-old Sufien flees Palestine, first to a Syrian refugee camp, then to Kuwait when his father gets an engineering job. At 17, he goes to Italy to study, renaming himself Franco Leone, but lack of money cuts his schooling short. He ends up in New York City driving a cab. He marries, has a daughter, and relocates to Arizona, where he remains until returning to New York for medical care. The outline of Sufien’s experience fits within the conventions of Palestinian diaspora fiction, but the particulars of his life will surprise readers. He loves life in the refugee camp. In Italy, he hangs out with radical anti-Zionists but also meets his lifelong best friend, Bernard, who happens to be a wealthy American Jew. So is Sufien’s eventual wife. With each move and each new relationship, Sufien believes he's found his home, until he changes his mind. While he confronts external disasters—the loss of his family’s 600-year-old home, his father’s financial ruin, prejudice, cancer—he has a safety net in Bernard, who pays his way to New York and bails him out of every crisis. As rendered in Assadi’s dreamy, lyrical, sometimes over-the-top prose, Sufien is thoroughly beguiling—charming, smart, funny, and spiritual—but suffers from melancholia. With age, his charms lag. He drinks too much, commits adultery, takes out loans he shouldn’t and makes terrible business decisions. Nevertheless, family and friends never stop loving Sufien. Neither does the reader.
With a generous vision, Assadi has created an unforgettable character in a multidimensional world.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593804056
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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