A strange, literate, and often darkly funny book with the air of a classic noir.
A return trip to postwar Germany results in love and disaster in Linden’s novel.
In the spring of 1958, Hugo Kaltenbrunner is accosted by Life magazine reporter Tova Shulman. She’s investigating the German’s prior association with a deceased man named Gustav Meier, and she displays a knowledge of the “disposition of Siberhaus,” which unsettles him deeply. After the war, Kaltenbrunner had moved to New York City, where he obtained a job writing a regular column for the Times under the name Harry Willis. He learns from his boss that Tova belongs to a delegation that includes famed Nazi hunter Saul Wiesenthal. Not long afterward, Hugo takes a sabbatical and leaves the U.S. aboard an ocean liner bound for Amsterdam; he plans to make his way into East Germany, now controlled by the Soviets. Aboard the SS Atlantic, he meets Helmut von Hoff, a fellow German who’s inherited a coal-mining fortune, and his adopted adult daughter Anna, with whom Hugo is instantly smitten. Sensing Hugo’s interest, Helmut warns him, “You mustn’t think too much about Anna. She is not for you, nor for anyone else for that matter.” Hugo surmises that there’s a secret about Anna that Helmut is keen to keep hidden; undeterred, he plots various ways of separating her from her father. After arriving in Germany, Hugo is given $10,000 to write a book about Helmut and his “illustrious family,” but he finds his homeland more foreign than he remembers, and he lands in a number of scrapes that start to make him fear that he’ll never see Anna again.
Linden’s book rings with echoes of midcentury noir, to which he adds a wry postmodern sense of whimsy. In an extended passage early on, Hugo meets an elderly woman and begins to fancy her; his recurring daydreams of kissing “her wrinkled mouth” are brilliantly effective, both in what they suggest about his character and in their unconventional but welcome insistence on the continuing erotic allure of the aged. The decision to let Hugo narrate is inspired, for the chief delight of the book is his skewed, slightly pompous, and reliably eccentric perspective; Helmut, he says, is “like a stone wall, cut from a mountainside and fitted together with such art and precision that no mortar or grout had been required.” Linden’s dialogue is likewise offbeat and frequently zigs in surprising directions: “Africa is full of death,” notes Anna, in the midst of a conversation about her stepmother. “Without the hyenas, the dead would soon cover the land.” As Hugo journeys deeper into the dark heart of postwar Europe, disturbing revelations about his associates pile up, and he comes to resemble Holly Martins in The Third Man (1949)—a naif at the mercy of inscrutable forces whose gaze into the abyss leaves him permanently changed. “I saw good and evil, plain as day,” he reflects near the end, “and between them a domain of moral ambiguity wherein the majority of humanity endured. I saw the world as it was, and not as it ought to be.”
A strange, literate, and often darkly funny book with the air of a classic noir.Pub Date: May 9, 2026
ISBN: 9798196184550
Page Count: 370
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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