A historically exacting and dramatically arresting novel.
In Sullivan’s historical novel, a young Irishman flees the violence of his native land for America but returns years later to see his dying mother on a trip fraught with danger.
Brendan Kinsella grows up in Derry, Ireland, during the tumultuous years of the Troubles and does his best to avoid the acrimonious partisanship despite his mother’s rabid nationalism and his father’s likely ties to the IRA. Nevertheless, he is drawn into the fray, and after he is involved in a bombing gone wrong that nearly kills him, he escapes to Houston, Texas, to begin a new life under the assumed name Brennan McGabbhinn. When he discovers that his mother is soon to die from cancer, he comes home to see her, traveling under yet another alias borrowed from a friend—Jeremy Landau, a Jewish American conducting academic research. Brendan, who was 16 years old when he left, now returns to a “city of ghosts” eight years later—“eight bloody fucking years of death and destruction”—in a grim homecoming powerfully described by the author in this emotionally piercing novel. Brendan’s siblings don’t even know he’s alive (his bother Eamonn is in prison for his work against the British), and his mother receives him with an icy coldness, still embittered because he never wholeheartedly joined the cause (a reluctance she interprets as “superior and condescendin’”). Sullivan poignantly depicts Brennan’s immense psychic struggle—he is torn apart by the discovery that his murdered father might not have been who he believed him to be, and that the girl he loved and presumed dead might still be alive. Moreover, he is still a hunted man in Derry, by both the Irish and the British. The author brings the crackling volatility of the times to vivid life, especially the infamous hunger strikes. Unfortunately, Sullivan’s prose can lose its luster when he turns, somewhat ponderously, philosophical: “We are born. We live an existence of meaning to ourselves, alone. We die. All else is illusion.” Still, this is a moving portrait of a tragic cycle of violence and the lives it consumes.
A historically exacting and dramatically arresting novel.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9798992317701
Page Count: 394
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An enjoyable visit with an old character, but not one of Ware’s strongest.
Travel writer Lo Blacklock is back. Ten years after the events of The Woman in Cabin 10 (2016), she's attending the opening of a lavish Swiss hotel when, once again, a mystery intervenes.
A decade after she almost died on a luxury cruise and ended up exposing a murder plot, travel journalist Laura “Lo” Blacklock is trying to get back into the business post-Covid-19 and post–maternity leave. When she's invited to an exclusive hotel launch by the Leidmann Group on the shores of Switzerland’s gorgeous Lake Geneva, her supportive husband, Judah, insists that she should go, and her old boss, Rowan, says that if Lo can score an interview with the reclusive Marcus Leidmann, she’ll publish it in the Financial Times. Leaving Judah and the kids at home in New York, Lo is surprised by a last-minute upgrade to first class, which kicks off her trip in style. The hotel is appropriately awe-inspiring in both scenic location and effortless luxury, and Lo starts to put the memories of last trip’s trauma behind her, thinking that maybe she can just enjoy the experience this time. But then, at dinner, she's surprised to see at least three guests who were also on that original cruise, and when she finds a mysterious note in her room saying "Please come to suite 11 as soon as possible," she gets another shock. To quote William Faulkner, she realizes that “the past is never dead,” and soon Lo is careening across Europe on her way to England, only to find herself embroiled in another murder. The back half of the novel offers her the opportunity to continue her amateur sleuthing, and while she avoids much of the physical danger that plagued her on the cruise a decade ago, she is in very real legal trouble. This is the prolific Ware’s first sequel, and it's fun to spend time with Lo again, as she's both savvy and kindhearted. Unfortunately, the mystery is not as atmospheric and gripping as usual for Ware, though even a lesser Ruth Ware thriller is still worth reading.
An enjoyable visit with an old character, but not one of Ware’s strongest.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781668025628
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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