An uneven but often entertaining book.
After entering an essay contest with a $1 million prize, one man wrestles with memories of women, boats, and David Hasselhoff.
In his first book, Barbarian Spring (2015), the Swiss writer satirized capitalism and conspicuous consumption. Here he takes wry shots at academia, technology, and venture capitalists via a self-centered German professor with money woes and unsettling memories. Richard Kraft’s current marriage is collapsing and his finances are in tatters from a previous one. He travels to California, where judges will choose the winner of the essay competition, which requires the writer to defend Alexander Pope’s proposition “Whatever is, is right” in relation to technology. After a week, though, Kraft has produced nothing. Mostly his mind wanders. He recalls Ruth, a lover who rarely appears without a reference to the size of her breasts and/or hips, and Johanna, another, who ended their four-year affair inexplicably and left for San Francisco. He remembers watching the 1980s TV series Knight Rider, starring Hasselhoff and a talking car, and climbing the Berlin Wall, where he is reunited with Ruth and a son he was unaware of as Hasselhoff sings about “looking for freedom” from a crane basket. Elsewhere in essay-avoidance, Kraft goes rowing in the San Francisco Bay and loses his bearings, his boat, and his clothes before getting rescued and charged $8,000 for the lost boat and oars. He goes searching for Johanna and learns why she left him. And he has high-end macaroni and cheese with the contest’s wealthy sponsor, who is also backing a floating-island project that would fit right in on Swift’s Laputa. As with Robert Menasse's in The Capital, Lüscher’s satire requires some knowledge of recent European history and politics. It’s also diffuse, but Kraft’s seriocomic fumblings and failings help to hold it together.
An uneven but often entertaining book.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-18214-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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