If it’s indeed the end, Barnes has closed his career gracefully.
An autofictional remembrance from the Booker Prize winner, keeping an eye on the exit.
“This will be my last book,” writes Julian Barnes, the narrator of this novel, early on. Age and illness are deciding factors; diagnosed with a manageable but incurable blood cancer, he fills many of the pages with matters of mortality and the deaths of his literary friends Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. But he’s also questioning the merits of novel-writing as an endeavor, the way it prompts the writer to exaggerate and betray. As Exhibit A, he points to his role in the relationship of two friends, Stephen and Jean, classmates at Oxford who would later split and then (with Julian’s assistance) reconcile. “You fucking novelist, couldn’t resist, could you?” Jean snaps when she’s ambushed by the two men, resentful of his determination to turn life into a story. Julian had also promised not to use their relationship as novelistic fodder, but his life is a trail of “your harsh forgettings, your dissimulations, your broken promises, your infidelities of word and deed.” Late Barnes has been a mix of tart domestic dramas (The Only Story, 2018) and gentler, Proustian reminiscences (Elizabeth Finch, 2022); this shades closer to the latter, intensified mainly by the pressure created by death’s inevitable approach. The story, such as it is, meanders, but it’s clear that Barnes is writing with a certain urgency, not to take a victory lap but to quit on his own terms, though even his cheer is cut by darkness. (“Let me thank you for your sturdy presence—invisible yet lurking, like my cancer,” he writes to the reader.) Does he mean it when he says he’s done? A book so concerned with a novelist’s urge to lie and betray suggests it’s at least an open question.
If it’s indeed the end, Barnes has closed his career gracefully.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593804506
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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