An engrossing tale as brooding, unpredictable, and invigorating as the sea and storms affecting the characters’ lives.
A trilogy about a youth’s search for belonging finds its completion in a moody, lyrical, deeply life-affirming final installment.
In his Trilogy About the Boy, Stefánsson follows an unnamed teenage orphan—poetically gifted and deeply sensitive—through trauma and loss, toward a fragile sense of safety and belonging. In the earlier volumes, Heaven and Hell (2025) and The Sorrow of Angels (2025), the boy witnesses his best friend’s death in a fishing accident and nearly dies while accompanying a postman across Iceland’s harsh west fjords. The last we saw them, they were tumbling down a snowy mountain with a coffin in tow. In this final installment, they survive—just barely—and recover under the care of locals before returning to the Village, a remote Icelandic port town where passions and prejudices collide in a landscape “scorched by volcanic fire and blasted by wind but with green valleys like dreams…” The book starts slowly, meandering through the pair’s recovery but gaining momentum in its second half. Still mourning, the boy begins to thaw, like the land around him, drawn to a fiery redheaded woman who helps nurse him and, back home, to Ragnheiður, daughter of the petty merchant Friðrik, who feels contempt for the boy’s lower social status even as she’s drawn to him. Torn between grief and desire, he realizes his heart is “divided into two compartments, one called happiness, the other despair.” Stefánsson excels at capturing the rhythms of village life—the gossip, grief, and constant threat of sea and storm—while offering moody reflections on life and death in a place shaped by the forces of nature. What’s also forceful is the power of language. Words surround the poetry-struck boy like fog creeping in from the sea. “Words are not lifeless rock or gnawed, wind-whitened bones up in the mountains,” writes Stefánsson. They “can grow distant over time and be transformed into museums that house the past, what is gone and will never return”—something not just true of the books the boy reads, but of this one, too.
An engrossing tale as brooding, unpredictable, and invigorating as the sea and storms affecting the characters’ lives.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9781771967143
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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
An existential crisis that steps on its own final moments.
With only a month left until the world ends due to a swiftly approaching black hole, Don and Rodney, a retired gay couple, road-trip from Maine to Washington to spend their final days with their son.
After reports that a planet-swallowing black hole is making its way toward Earth, Rodney and Don—who have been together for 40 years and survived everything from homophobia to the HIV crisis—decide to pack their belongings into an RV, say goodbye to their neighbors, and travel from Camden, Maine, to Washington to uphold a promise to spend their final days with their son. They can’t wait any longer, since there’s already chaos around the country: “Military vehicles in the streets of most cities and towns. Looting, rioting, the burning of cars and buildings and people, all of it had already happened.” As they make their way west across the country, they encounter fellow travelers ranging from close-knit families to free-spirited hippies, some of whom have come to terms with the impending end of the world and others who haven’t. While the story seems to be asking readers what they would do if they had 30 days left to live, and reflects on what different kinds of acceptance might look like in the face of unavoidable tragedy, it loses some of its poignancy in a series of thinly padded monologues about the meaning of life. Clearly intended to pack an emotional punch, it’s failed by an abrupt ending, and the way the journey’s mystery—which will be obvious to many readers—is revealed by an info dump in the last chapter.
An existential crisis that steps on its own final moments.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781250881236
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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