Brilliantly constructed and puzzling in a good way, the way that even our own lives can be puzzling to us.
In late-1970s suburban Melbourne, a cluster of family and friends is disrupted by shifting allegiances.
This new edition of the short 1984 novel many consider the eminent Australian author's masterpiece has a foreword by Rumaan Alam in which he admits to having a hard time encapsulating its virtues. In the end, he cedes the mic to Garner herself, quoting from her diary: “The best I can do is to write books that are small but oblique enough to stick in people’s gullets so that they remember them.” This small, oblique, and gullet-sticking book circles around a group of nine people: Dexter and Athena Fox; their children, Billy, who has a developmental disability, and Arthur; Dexter’s long-ago ex Elizabeth, who in the wake of her mother’s death has been joined by her teenage sister, Vicki; Elizabeth’s sort-of boyfriend, a rocker named Philip; and Philip’s daughter, Poppy. In brief scenes, the perspective of the novel flits around the group from one shoulder to the next, often not making it immediately clear which characters are involved. This elusiveness inspires careful reading and works to closely focus attention on the key issue of how each character understands and misunderstands the others. For example: “Athena’s life was mysterious to Vicki. She seemed contained, without needs, never restless.” Young Vicki is going to be quite surprised when Athena’s needs and restlessness drive her to an action that affects everyone in the group. Garner gives a master class in her own technique with some advice musician Philip offers an aspiring songwriter: “Take out the clichés....Just leave in the images. Know what I mean? You have to steer a line between what you understand and what you don’t. Between cliché and the other thing. Make gaps. Don’t chew on it. Don’t explain everything. Leave holes. The music will do the rest.” There are continual references to music in this book, but it’s the music of the prose and the hyperlucid imagery that “do the rest” here. One small example—as Athena and Elizabeth’s friendship becomes ever more complicated due to shifting relationships with men, the two of them collaborate to fold a sheet coming off the clothesline, passing it by the corners, one relinquishing, one accepting, as “the light left the garden.”
Brilliantly constructed and puzzling in a good way, the way that even our own lives can be puzzling to us.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780553387414
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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