More steampunk than SF, this gently eccentric tale of familial challenges will delight fans of Matt Haig and TJ Klune.
An SF-adjacent cappuccino: Frothy on top, good hearty brew beneath.
By the time you discover how the characters who narrate different chapters of this novel are connected, you’ll have long willingly suspended any disbelief about how the Sydney-based Time Travel Agency operates. Proprietor Dr. Katya Nastevski is a physicist who seems more interested in baking cakes than in refining the software she claims allows people to visit any time, any place, from last week in a nearby suburb to Mesopotamia. She hired Anna Salone, a somewhat hapless single mom to 13-year-old Nicola, following the briefest of interviews, and readers are tossed into a delicious stew of mothers, teenage daughters, eligible men, and Anna’s sweet colleagues at the Agency. Author Moriarty is clearly even less invested in physics than her Dr. Nastevski. Although there’s a massive choice of (mainly) authentic garb for historical cosplay and the staff spend loads of time researching eras of their choice (for Joon, Iron Age Mongolia and the golden age of cricket; for Anna, the Ming Dynasty and Latin American literature—she even develops “tours” of famous authors’ lives, like Frances Hodgson Burnett and Jane Austen), the real workings of the time-travel booths remain a mystery. That makes the author’s big game, the mysteries of the psyche, more obvious, despite the sometimes-madcap action. Anna longs for a partner, Nicola has mean-girl troubles, a man named Teddy has lost his wife to his brother, and a local woman, Jade, mourns her dead sister. When a software glitch brings about some resolution for the main characters, it feels as sugary as a batch of the doctor’s brownies—yet also as carefully baked, a treat for anyone who needs a reminder that time can heal anything, even the human heart.
More steampunk than SF, this gently eccentric tale of familial challenges will delight fans of Matt Haig and TJ Klune.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820339
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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
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
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