A timely callback to Peruvian political bloodletting that blurs the line between victims and perpetrators.
A Peruvian woman seeks a cousin lost to the siren call of political violence.
In her intriguing first book to be translated into English, Peruvian novelist Pacheco Medrano explores “what there [is] to be learned from [the] abyss.” Her story centers on the intimacy and horror generated by Shining Path rebels and Peruvian government soldiers who slaughtered residents in spasms of dueling atrocities. The author, an anthropologist, makes certain to give the official count: 69,280 people killed and disappeared from 1980 to 2000. But this ambitious, intelligent novel casts its spell narrowly, through a trio of women: the charismatic and reckless Bárbara Varas; her grandmother, Bernarda, a widowed shepherd tucked high into the Andes; and the narrator, Nina, Bárbara’s younger cousin. Forty years after Bárbara disappears, a middle-aged Nina spots her cousin’s doppelgänger in Madrid. The shock propels Nina back to the Andes, where she and Bárbara sang Beatles songs, smirked at Garfield the Cat, trekked up granite peaks, and milked cows. Nina plunges back into their shared history and the conundrum of communities who both know and don’t know what befell them. The first murder—of Bernarda’s 28-year-old husband—arrives quickly, and at first feels apart from the forces that later ensnare his widow and granddaughter. As Nina hunts the truth, she travels folkways, carefully collects the testimony of neighbors, and, yes, dives into human rights archives, giving the book a whiff of autofiction. She also traces her nightmares and dreamscapes in a story that shape-shifts time. The prose is occasionally awkward, the doubling-back can be confusing. But as the current political violence—in Sudan, Haiti, Gaza—and its creeping assertion in North America both attest, people will “ask what we’ve done to deserve this.” Then, chillingly, “the news in our country was horrific, but we got used to it.”
A timely callback to Peruvian political bloodletting that blurs the line between victims and perpetrators.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781644453650
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
