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 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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