An artful and affecting novel of loss and reconnection.
A museum curator’s job in London forces her to confront an old heartache in Ward’s novel.
Noel Enfield has been stuck in her position as the Director of Collections at Massachusetts’ Field-Lyons Museum for years. She allowed her career to languish to give her full attention to her husband and stepdaughter, Alice. Now, just as her marriage is ending in divorce and her relationship with Alice is in doubt, Noel has received an offer: a six-month appointment at the renowned Addison Gallery in London, to be followed by a promotion when she returns to the Field-Lyons. She leaps at the opportunity—how could she not, especially when she learns her accommodations will be large enough for Alice to come visit? But London isn’t exactly a clean slate for Noel. She was a university student there, years ago, when she fell in love with Bryn Jones, a Welsh artist whom she planned to marry. The relationship ended soon after Noel discovered she was pregnant, and she retreated to America without a husband, a child, or her degree. Now, Noel’s position at the Addison has placed her at the center of the London art scene, where long-lost acquaintances from her university days—including the now-established Bryn—pop back into her life. It turns out the past is much more complicated than Noel ever knew, but will pursuing a chance at the family Noel might have had cost her the one she’s desperately fighting to save? Ward writes of art and the art world with precision and vigor, as here when she describes one of Bryn’s paintings: “The painting—unfinished—was of a lake…Bold strokes and varying thicknesses of paint suggested textured fields in the distance, remnants of snow on the mountains, red flowers—or were those lichens?—dotting the rocks lakeside.” The story deftly leaps back and forth between the early 1990s and the present, crafting a romance that, while predictable in places, always manages to hold the contented reader in the palm of its hand.
An artful and affecting novel of loss and reconnection.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9798896360667
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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