The reliable pleasures of McInerney’s writing make even this darkest chapter a fun read.
The fourth and final installment in the saga of a well-heeled Manhattan family.
Russell and Corrine Calloway face a sobering finale in McInerney’s conclusion to his tetralogy, written over the course of 34 years. It opens in the early spring of 2020, just as the first effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are being felt; it’s just what you’d expect of this prominent pair that they attend glitzy back-to-back social gatherings despite the growing sense of alarm that will soon put a stop to such things. The first is an anniversary celebration for their best friends, Washington and Veronica Lee; like the Calloways, this couple has weathered major infidelities and come out the other side, and their respective children, Storey and Mingus, have evolved from childhood friends to romantic partners. The second is the opening of chef daughter Storey’s new restaurant; the reader is painfully aware how inopportune this timing will be. Finally, Russell will attend his monthly wine dinner, a somewhat appalling event where eight extremely rich men (as a publishing guy rather than a finance guy, he is the plebe of the group) gather in a private room at Per Se to open bottles valued in the four and five figures, paired with endless courses of gourmet concoctions; as always, McInerney’s food and wine writing glows. Wife Corrine is much less sanguine about all this than her husband, and indeed the body count eventually racked up in this episode of the saga is high; the coronavirus is not the only villain. As a writer whose early work famously celebrated the joys of “Bolivian marching powder,” it is fitting that McInerney includes fentanyl among the evils of that annus horribilis; police brutality, racial unrest, and cancer appear as well. As the curtain closes on the Calloways’ fraught love story, faithful readers will feel sad but satisfied.
The reliable pleasures of McInerney’s writing make even this darkest chapter a fun read.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780593804797
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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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