The complexities of love and the passage of time enrich this insightful, original collection.
These six short stories by award-winning Danish writer and translator Jessen take an unshrinking look at love in various forms.
A woman who makes a living reupholstering furniture finds herself reevaluating her husband after a visit from a dying friend. Trapped in her marriage by love and hope, she considers the other small-business owners in their seaside town: “Even in the crippling economic crisis, optimism prevailed, or perhaps more accurately stubborness [sic], indomitableness...making the best of a bad situation.” In another story, told from multiple points of view, the mother of two young children is murdered, and an elderly couple with information about the crime faces an agonizing choice. A translator in a sexually unsatisfying marriage fights with her husband, then reconciles, then fights again. “How horrid a love,” she thinks. Romantic or maternal, love demands a steep price. In the story “Mother and Son,” Lisbet imagines she can see her wayward 20-year-old “surrounded by a light so fierce that even a bitterly cold day in a dismal parking lot feels like unrequited love.” Jessen's writing is graceful, unhurried, convincing. The narratives unfold in unexpected ways. In the title story, a young woman witnesses a bus accident and meets a man. The story then jumps ahead 20 years. Returning to the city where it happened, she reflects on how that small event changed her life and on the girl she'd been then. An awareness of time—whether years or eons—brightens otherwise bleak situations. The furniture repairer muses about the previous ice age: “Digging in the garden, she would find remains of seaweed embedded deep in the sandy soil. And far out on the open sea, fishermen would discover in their nets the roots of trees from a bygone forest. She took some measure of comfort in this, the knowledge that in time everything came round again.”
The complexities of love and the passage of time enrich this insightful, original collection.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953861-22-1
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
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
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