A tender and realistic cataloging of a relationship as it shifts, changes, and grows over time.
A young woman builds the life she thinks she wants over the course of a decade.
Stanley’s expansive sophomore novel follows one couple over the course of 10 years. On the verge of 30, Coralie Bower has recently relocated under duress from Australia to London. She works as a copywriter at a brand agency and harbors dreams of writing a novel. One morning at a cafe, she has an alarming yet charming meet-cute with Adam Whiteman, a political journalist, and his 4-year-old daughter, Zora. Adam, a divorcé, has a cordial relationship with his ex-wife, Marina Amin, and shares custody of Zora. Coralie and Adam’s chemistry—which is heavily rendered through playful banter—is immediate. Seemingly overnight, Coralie becomes a stepmother and moves into their family home, her life grafted onto theirs in ways she cannot quite see yet. The novel follows the couple’s relationship as they navigate home renovations, parental loss, unexpected career trajectories, parenthood, global turmoil, and complicated family dynamics. With the novel set between 2013 and 2023, politics weighs heavily on its plot—including a revolving door of British prime ministers and the Covid-19 pandemic. While Adam’s career catapults with every political scandal, Coralie struggles to manage her career, their shared home, and an overwhelming share of the childcare. The unending politics can feel exhausting at times, but also helps amplify Coralie’s feelings of claustrophobia, weariness, and anger. Stanley writes beautifully about the tension among wants, needs, and desires, especially in motherhood. When Marina gets pregnant, Coralie can admit her desire to be a mother: “The gap between having a baby and not having one yawned so large. Not having one: your longing made you silly, at the mercy of fate, a clichéd figure of fun, mockable.” However, when she becomes a mother, Coralie realizes she is both closer and further from herself in equal measure. This realization, which leads to the novel’s climax, offers Coralie the opportunity to find herself again.
A tender and realistic cataloging of a relationship as it shifts, changes, and grows over time.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9798217044993
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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
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
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