A lovingly detailed novel of guilt and rumination in the City of Light.
In Harris’ novel, a troubled Australian couple hoping to save their marriage find themselves at the center of a tragedy.
Perth resident Marian Featherstone knows that her relationship with her husband is in trouble when she calls Jason during his business trip to Sydney and hears the laughter of a “Jezebel” on the line, which she sees as clear evidence of adultery. The call occurs a few weeks before Marian is due to debut a series of collaborative artworks at a Paris art gallery—a momentous occasion in her long career. Sensing an opportunity for reconciliation, Jason accompanies her, and the couple seek to recommit to their love by snapping a small padlock onto the Pont des Arts bridge over the Seine—part of a longtime tradition in Paris. Jason finds a panel on which to attach their lock, and just after they do so, the damaged panel rips free and falls, apparently directly into the river. The following day, though, they learn that a boat was passing beneath the bridge at the time, and that the falling piece killed a child tourist from Venezuela—a lottery winner from an impoverished background on the trip of a lifetime. Wracked with guilt, Marian wants to report their involvement, but Jason downplays their culpability and insists that they must stay quiet. As the news spreads, it stokes a latent fire of French xenophobia, calling into question how Marian views not only her art, but her own place in global systems of appropriation and suppression. Some of the moral subtext in Harris’ novel can feel a bit heavy-handed. Fortunately, the author does well to balance these blunter moments with richly rendered set pieces from the Parisian streets—which often have no small amount of subtext themselves: “The persistent sweet, metallic under-smell of blood permeated the famous street despite coffee sipped from hundreds of cups, and thousands of wintertime flowers from Africa.” Harris’ eye for meaningful detail more than makes up for any lack of subtlety elsewhere.
A lovingly detailed novel of guilt and rumination in the City of Light.Pub Date: July 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781836284345
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Troubador Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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