A brainy, challenging, and engrossing trek into a battered but unbeaten future.
A young woman is entangled in a literal power struggle over a postapocalyptic city’s electrical grid in the latest by Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer and Kirkus Prizes for Trust (2022).
Diaz’s unnamed protagonist is a “pincher,” someone who breaks into power lines to fuel batteries (aka “bricks”) that are used for currency, energy, and (her particular interest) electricity for live concerts. The story is set many generations in the future, following a long stretch of political and environmental collapse; society is practically post-literate, with scant populations occupying “vaguely sovereign” city-states. The pincher’s gift for brick engineering has caught the scrutiny of one observer, which is troubling news in this “shipwrecked world of dilapidated bygone grandeur”; she doesn’t need the scrutiny of the private power company, or the shady moblike figures who seem to regulate commerce in the city. The identity of the pincher’s stalker proves to be more complicated, and it opens up the second half of the novel, which is focused on the idea of creating a new utopian society and the potential of warping the space-time continuum to get there. Trust seduced readers and critics with its clever shifting of context and perspective, and though this novel isn’t as overtly playful, Diaz uses the quantum physics subplot to tinker with questions of how we perceive ourselves and what our identities become when they’re run through others’ filters. The rhetorical subtleties this demands (points of view, tenses, and pronouns get deliberately wobbly) makes this a less immediately engrossing novel than its predecessor. But as the title suggests, there are layers of rhetorical gambits that reward rereading. And Diaz always returns to a simple but demanding question: To build a better world, how deeply must we get into the heads of the people around us?
A brainy, challenging, and engrossing trek into a battered but unbeaten future.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780593719541
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
A shaky balance between saccharine and sage will nevertheless appeal to the author’s fans and readers seeking balm.
An elderly man’s posthumous journey back through his life has unexpected consequences for several people, and lessons for everyone.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that readers adore any novel set in a reading group, bookshop, or library, from the terribly sad (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, 2008) to the puzzle-heavy (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, 2012) to the downright clever (The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, 2007). Haig, who’s already written The Midnight Library (2020), mines a similar vein in this novel centered on a bookseller named Wilbur Budd; place this one in the seriously sentimental category. Wilbur dies at 81 just after receiving a call from his ex-wife, Maggie. He finds himself on a classic steam-train carriage, accompanied by a younger version of the woman who founded the bookstore he turned into a global conglomerate. As Mrs. Agnes Bagdale explains, he’s on a trip to significant places and events from his life, but he’s forbidden from interfering in them, thus possibly changing the course of other people’s lives. True to his maverick tendencies, Wilbur struggles with the three rules of the train (“You get on and off the train as required. You never try and speak to yourself. And you must never be there when you fall asleep”) and struggles even more mightily as he realizes that Maggie was his true love and lifelong lodestar. While some moments verge on maudlin, as when Wilbur and Maggie goggle at Venice during their honeymoon, these are tempered by quieter observations, as when Wilbur’s oldest friend, Charlie, tells him frankly during lunch at a trendy restaurant that his constant ambition is a failing. This isn’t a subtle book and it’s not trying to be; it’s urging readers to think about their own choices, wherever they find themselves.
A shaky balance between saccharine and sage will nevertheless appeal to the author’s fans and readers seeking balm.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9780593833377
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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