An incisive novel about relationships, both of the organic and paid-for varieties.
In Morel’s novel, an Estonian man signs up to be a paid companion for women, unaware of the impact the job could have on his relationship.
In Tallinn, a man named Toomas begins a new gig working as a paid companion for a company that has very strict rules. He’s not a sex worker; his job is to accompany women who are lonely, unsure, or maybe need a date for a company function. There are women contractors who are making a lot of money at this company, but Toomas has just three or four clients. He also has a girlfriend, named Annika. Toomas used to work in marketing but now is freelancing, while Annika has a corporate gig that keeps her busy. She knows what he’s doing, and she has plans for herself—she’s outgrowing Estonia and wants to move to Berlin. The move could mean big changes for Toomas, since he could work in marketing in Germany, but he has his reasons for staying. His clients include Karin, whom he really wants to kiss, but it’s against policy; Eliise is intriguing, and he obviously likes her; and then there’s Helene, an elderly woman who’s seeking human connection. Toomas can’t help but feel like his worth is being determined by a website and its algorithm, with its constant demand for feedback. He must determine the trajectory of his life while confronting the facts that Tallinn isn’t all that big and that Annika may be leaving. Morel’s concise novel is well paced; the language is spare, but the ideas she explores are complex. The author places Toomas in a compelling context—he’s become stalled in life, but he’s rich in the number of interesting people surrounding him. Morel plainly and perceptively discusses the ways in which technology affects contemporary relationships, going beyond a simple account of juggling multiple people. Vivid details about the setting add color (“wasn’t that why Estonians had so many sayings about saunas?”), with characters feeling tied to the place while also being pulled away by various forces.
An incisive novel about relationships, both of the organic and paid-for varieties.Pub Date: July 28, 2026
ISBN: 9789730441819
Page Count: 163
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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