A collection of stories that reveal crisis as a crucible of character.
Natural calamity and human miscalculation put characters in peril, which many don’t survive.
Shepard’s latest story collection reinforces his command of what has been called “catastrophe fiction.” Settings range across continents and calendars, often putting the reader in media res before there’s any indication of what country and century provide the context. Some stories introduce a number of characters, rather than focusing on a protagonist, and those characters and the reader won’t initially have much sense of what connects them, or what fate or chance have in store. Though the Acknowledgements indicate that the stories have been researched for historical and scientific accuracy, there is no sense of dry scholarship in the vivid prose. The deadly hurricane that sweeps through the Florida Keys in the Depression-era “Village of Islands” and the devastating forest fires that burn through 1910 Montana in "The Devil’s Broom" both provide visceral detail of such tragedies. They build from a foreboding anticipation among a cross section of isolated communities to a frenzy that finds those without the necessary knowledge or resources doing their best to hold the line to the heroism of those who might have never known they had it in them. The few who survive generally do so through the selflessness of others. The concluding title story focuses on two young women on the Lusitania and a budding relationship that defies societal norms. There are a pair of epistolary stories, one set during the Civil War (“Our Day of Grace”) and the other from a member of a British colonial regiment in World War I to his wife (“Where Are the Lads of New Zealand Tonight?”), conveying complex relationships from a battlefield’s distance. The range of other stories extends from Adolf Eichmann to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde to 16th-century Spanish mercenaries. The outlier is the apparently autobiographical “The Mentally Ill Are Not Alone,” in which the narrator tries to determine where his dysfunctional family went “off the rails” and belatedly recognizes his own complicity.
A collection of stories that reveal crisis as a crucible of character.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593804414
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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