A bleak, timely, and painstakingly imagined exploration of a future that none of us want.
Four generations of Scots labor—on Earth and Mars—to save humanity from the climate crisis.
It’s 2025, and Hannah, a frustrated young fusion scientist vacationing in Scotland’s Western Isles, is visited by a disfigured young man who was born in a colony on Mars and has come back from the future to help her perfect fusion technology in time to save Earth from runaway climate change and civilizational collapse. Now it’s the 2070s and Hannah’s son, Andrew, has become one of Scotland’s leading political figures by fighting against billionaire futurists and arguing that society has “the means to save ourselves… if we work together.” Yet his daughter, Kenzie, is building on her dead grandmother’s unfinished research to construct a fusion reactor for the Tevat Corporation, which has given up on the planet and intends to evacuate its Shareholders (wealthy investors, corrupt politicians, and useful scientists like Kenzie) to Mars. Now it’s 2103 and Kenzie’s son, Roban, who lives with the painful physical disabilities experienced by the first generation of humans born in the Corporation’s frighteningly totalitarian Colony, is learning to function with the assistance of a mechanical exoskeleton—and to gradually distrust the Corporation’s vision for a better future. Can Kenzie build the reactor her grandmother first theorized? Can Andrew convince his daughter to labor toward a better future on Earth rather than off it? Can Andrew’s political career survive Kenzie’s plans to abandon Earth and its people? Can Roban find a way to communicate his mother’s fusion discoveries to his long-dead grandmother before it’s too late? Is “the alteration of the past by the future” even possible? Dancing between decades, characters, and planets, Reed’s latest may lack some of the lyrical beauty that marked his previous two books, but it succeeds in brilliantly dramatizing some of the great questions of our time. Can we technologize our way out of the climate crisis or should we instead focus our energies on collaboratively solving the problem with the tools we have? Is Earth our only viable planetary home or can we adequately replicate its richness elsewhere? If the latter, who will get to go? And what fate awaits those left behind? And is the future worth living for those who manage to leave?
A bleak, timely, and painstakingly imagined exploration of a future that none of us want.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781324079378
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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