A haunting, slow-burning story about the hunger for connection and the pressures of family.
A graduate student struggles to overcome generations of inherited trauma and an existential crisis in Morris’ novel.
Jake Luria is pursuing a doctorate degree at Harvard and struggling under a significant amount of pressure. His research is not going well, adding to the animosity already expressed by his boss and colleagues. At home, Jake takes responsibility for keeping an eye on his twin sister, Sara, a brilliant physicist and lecturer at MIT who struggles with depression. After mental health episodes threaten Sara’s life, their “great uncle,” Sol, insists that Jake must serve as her eternal protector. However, his recent struggles with his research and the possibility that his thesis might face rejection mean that Jake must put in longer hours than usual. One night, Sara visits Jake in the lab and, after muttering the words “The flesh burns, but the letters fly free,” ingests a flask of phenol, a potentially fatal chemical. Jake is quick to rush her to the emergency room, where she narrowly survives the night. As Sara recovers in the hospital, Jake looks for answers as to why his sister would suddenly want to harm herself. With these answers come revelations of generational trauma and family secrets, and Jake must grapple with his own dwindling sense of self. From the first page of this stunning, melancholic story, readers will understand the amount of pressure Jake is under and will likely feel it themselves. Morris’ prose is honest and hauntingly poetic, evincing a deep, breathtaking emotionality. All of the characters are wonderfully complex, especially Jake, who, unlike some of his more clichéd counterparts in contemporary literature and film, is empathetic and thoughtful. While readers may initially blanch at the weight of the emotional subject matter, Morris treats the sensitive topics with care, delivering an enthralling read from cover to cover.
A haunting, slow-burning story about the hunger for connection and the pressures of family.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781934639313
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Chami and Shim Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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