With stark, precise poetry, Humphreys builds a palpable, almost unbearable sense of inevitability and loss that echoes both...
The underappreciated Humphreys (Wild Dogs, 2005, etc.) offers a journey through the dark night of the soul that was the November 14, 1940, bombing of Coventry.
Middle-aged Harriet is serving as firewatcher on the roof of Coventry Cathedral when the German bombers arrive. The church in flames, Harriet finds herself wandering the burning city with another firewatcher, a young man named Jeremy who recently moved to Coventry for its wartime jobs with his mother Maeve. Harriet, whose husband died at Ypres only months after their marriage in 1914, does not realize that Maeve is the same young woman with whom she shared her first ride on a doubledecker bus the day she saw her husband off to war. The women felt a bond but remained nameless strangers. Since then Harriet has stayed in Coventry as a solitary widow, while Maeve, who never married, has led a mildly nomadic life with Jeremy as her emotional center. When the bombs fall, Maeve is in a pub. She soon leaves the safety of her shelter to return home and wait for Jeremy. Meanwhile, Jeremy and Harriet encounter scenes both horrific and surreal—dead bodies of children, a burning river of melted butter. They find Harriet’s house destroyed. By the time they reach Maeve and Jeremy’s house, Maeve has already been pulled into the exodus out of the city. The note she’s left behind for Jeremy gets lost in the kitchen debris. Harriet and Jeremy find a moment of respite in the house and despite their age differences make brief, exhausted love. Before Jeremy returns to the streets, he lends Maeve’s coat to Harriet. Joining the exodus, Harriet runs across Maeve, who recognizes her coat, and they unite to look for Jeremy. By the time they learn Jeremy’s fate, they have recalled their first meeting and formed a new, lasting bond.
With stark, precise poetry, Humphreys builds a palpable, almost unbearable sense of inevitability and loss that echoes both John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06720-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
Another triumph for Enright: a confluence of lyrical prose, immediacy, warmth, and emotional insight.
A daughter reveals the intertwined tales of her mother—a theatrical legend—and herself, a mature retrospective of sharing life with a towering but troubled figure.
Katherine O’Dell, star of stage and screen, blessed with beauty, red hair, and a gorgeous voice, “the most Irish actress in the world,” was not Irish at all. She was born in London, and the apostrophe in her name crept in by error via a review following one of her appearances on Broadway. However, the fact that Katherine is “a great fake” doesn’t cloud the love her daughter, Norah, has for her, a bond which exists alongside the unanswered question of Norah’s father’s identity, “the ghost in my blood.” The complexities of this mother/daughter relationship and its context in Ireland, the men it includes, and the turns both women’s lives take through the decades are the meat of this tender, possessive, searching new novel from Man Booker Prize–winning Irish novelist Enright (The Green Road, 2015, etc.). Saga-esque, it traces Katherine back to her parents, strolling players from another era who invited her on stage at age 10, scarcely imagining the luminous, internationally recognized figure this “useful girl” would become. But the novel is no fairy tale. Katherine’s life was marked with loneliness; disappointing, sometimes exploitative, and abusive men; the pressure of trying to remain successful; a desperate act of violence; and a breakdown. Norah narrates both her mother’s life and her own—she’s the author of five novels, a mother, a sexual being, and also the sole offspring of a parent she both adored and observed at a distance. Fame, sexuality, and the Irish influence suffuse the story, which ranges from glamour to tragedy, a portrait of “anguish, madness, and sorrow” haunted by a late, explanatory glimpse of horror which nevertheless concludes in a place of profound love and peace.
Another triumph for Enright: a confluence of lyrical prose, immediacy, warmth, and emotional insight.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00562-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
A big old banana split of a book, surely the cure for what ails you.
Someone told Vivian Morris in her youth that she would never be an interesting person. Good thing they didn't put money on it.
The delightful narrator of Gilbert's (Big Magic, 2015, etc.) fourth novel begins the story of her life in the summer of 1940. At 19, she has just been sent home from Vassar. "I cannot fully recall what I'd been doing with my time during those many hours that I ought to have spent in class, but—knowing me—I suppose I was terribly preoccupied with my appearance." Vivian is very pretty, and she is a talented seamstress, but other than that, she is a silly, naïve girl who doesn't know anything about anything. That phase of her life comes to a swift end when her parents send her to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg. Peg is the proprietor of the Lily Playhouse, a grandiose, crumbing theater in midtown that caters to the tastes and wallets of the locals with week after week of original "revues" that inevitably feature a sweet young couple, a villain, a floozy, a drunken hobo, and a horde of showgirls and dancers kicking up a storm. "There were limits to the scope of the stories that we could tell," Vivian explains, “given that the Lily Playhouse only had three backdrops”: 19th-century street corner, elegant parlor, and ocean liner. Vivian makes a close friend in Celia Ray, a showgirl so smolderingly beautiful she nearly scorches the pages on which she appears. "I wanted Celia to teach me everything," says Vivian, "about men, about sex, about New York, about life"—and she gets her wish, and then some. The story is jammed with terrific characters, gorgeous clothing, great one-liners, convincing wartime atmosphere, and excellent descriptions of sex, one of which can only be described (in Vivian's signature italics) as transcendent. There are still many readers who know Gilbert only as a memoirist. Whatever Eat Pray Love did or did not do for you, please don't miss out on her wonderful novels any longer.
A big old banana split of a book, surely the cure for what ails you.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59463-473-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
