A heady and heart-filled debut novel by an author whose first story collection was published when she was 80.
A novel about love and loss in the long century after World War II.
In 1946, a woman writes a letter to a man with whom she had a romantic encounter after he saved her from a bomb blast during the Blitz in Liverpool five years earlier. She believes that her daughter might be his, though she has married another man and lives a happy life. She asks her brother to send it, but he doesn’t, because days later she and her husband are killed in a car accident, leaving their daughter an orphan. Fast-forward 50 years or so, and that daughter, Agnes, is grown up, her own daughter is getting married, and her uncle decides he should give Agnes the letter at his grandniece’s wedding. He’s read the missive, and he knows that, through a series of uncanny coincidences, Agnes has already met the man who might be her father. Indeed, he has become part of her extended family. This is not a spoiler. These connections are revealed in the first section of the novel, which alternates between the long, leisurely first-person narratives of Agnes’ uncle, Agnes herself, and the man who might be her father. The novel’s true subject is not will or reason, the engine of many plots, but rather the opposite: the murky unconscious. The 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza comes up repeatedly, with all three characters quoting some version of his critique of free will: “If a stone that had been thrown had consciousness it would believe that it had chosen its own trajectory.” Each character slowly comes to feel the force of loss, the way the past “tends to leak into the present all the time,” and the deep mystery of love and connection. Campbell probes these complicated ideas in clear, shimmering prose, turning the characters’ engagement with their psyches into something quite intoxicating.
A heady and heart-filled debut novel by an author whose first story collection was published when she was 80.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780802162885
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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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