Another stunning missive from Harpman’s repertoire.
The three stories that constitute Harpman’s latest collection to be translated into English (again by Schwartz, who quietly dazzles) further testify to the writer’s nuanced brilliance.
In I Who Have Never Known Men, which was republished in a revised translation in 2022, Harpman’s eerie prescience was on full display in a tale about 39 women and a girl held for decades in a bunker for reasons never made clear to them. The book, which was first published in 1995 in the Belgian writer’s native French, became a sleeper hit of sorts, in part because of Harpman’s interest in fascist or otherwise authoritarian control, freethinking, and the status of women in society, among other topics that have once again become painfully relevant. Harpman returns to these topics in the new collection. In “The Ardennes Forest,” a squad of men and women soldiers patrol a mysterious wooded area in the service of a war that may or may not have ended but that they are forbidden from fleeing. In “The Outcast,” a woman remembers her early, school-aged acts of defiance when—like Harpman herself—as a young girl in WWII-era Casablanca, she refused to parrot France’s (wavering) party line in her schoolwork. And in “The Broom Closet,” a woman boards a train, where she then imagines alternative lives for the character she becomes in her own mind, bringing the act of fiction-making itself into the spotlight. As a whole, the volume speaks to Harpman’s exquisitely subtle prose style, psychological acuity, and almost terrifying foresight—but it also hints at her sense of humor, which has previously been overshadowed, perhaps, by other qualities. Renewed interest in Harpman’s oeuvre isn’t just warranted: In works like this, she reveals herself to be one of the major writers of the 20th century, comparable to Gogol and Kafka but with a style and outlook entirely her own.
Another stunning missive from Harpman’s repertoire.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798893380583
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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