At once bewildering and beguiling, and a groaning-table feast of words.
An ouroboros—and a big one at that—of a postmodern yarn that threatens to swallow itself at any moment.
Rachel Zozanian is a “notorious recluse misanthrope,” author of the decidedly centrifugal tome Lotteryland, which just happens to share a display table at the local chain bookstore with Helen DeWitt’s Your Name Here. The two share more than that: There’s an alter-ego dimension here as DeWitt and her co-author, Australian journalist Gridneff, play off Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. As is her wont, announced in her brilliant debut novel, The Last Samurai (2000), DeWitt ranges across time to pepper her pages with references to the greats: Foucault, Homer, Debord, the X-Men. The dominant second language throughout is Arabic, reflecting the author’s current passions—to say nothing of statistics, the classics, and “Habermasian ideal speech situations.” If there’s a plot, it hinges on efforts to shake Rachel out of her torpor, on a slowly declining film director’s attempts to figure out how to film the unfilmable (“Forget Lotteryland,” says one interlocutor, “have you seen Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt? I was talking to Johnny Depp and he loves it, he’d love to work with you, what are you waiting for?”), and on DeWitt and Gridneff’s attempts via email to wrestle down whatever the hell their collaboration is supposed to yield. Call it high-pomo hijinks, where the story gives way to layered language, graphics, and meta-references (“And then there’s the engagement of the characters with Arabic, something that would have been unthinkable fifty, even ten years ago”); though, as if in a nod to traditional form, there is a surprise plot twist that relieves Rachel of her preoccupations. To call the book experimental is to understate, however, as Gridneff brightly notes late in the text, only if one isn’t up on “those 18th-century prepostmodernist time travellers Sterne and Diderot.”
At once bewildering and beguiling, and a groaning-table feast of words.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781628976267
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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 evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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