Astoundingly, a fresh take on an extremely well-trodden legend.
King Arthur is dead—what happens now?
Collum of the Out Isles has stolen armor and a horse from his local lord, hoping to be accepted as a knight of the Round Table. But when he arrives at Camelot, the place is nearly deserted; King Arthur and a majority of his knights have died in the battle at Camlann, leaving no clear heir. With the few remaining knights and the sorceress Nimue, Collum travels across the disintegrating nation and even into the fairy Otherworld, searching for a successor to the dead Arthur and marshaling forces against the rivals who seek Britain’s throne for themselves—including Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s enchantress half-sister, who claims that she is the rightful heir, but mostly acts as a chaos agent throughout, helping or harming the questers as seems best to her in the moment. As the book progresses, we learn the secret backstory of each of the surviving knights as well as the nature of the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere, the apparent spark for the civil conflict (the truth, intriguingly, is not what you think). The story of King Arthur has been told and substantially altered many times over the centuries, and explored by a multitude of contemporary novelists, but the author of the Magicians trilogy makes room for himself here. The purposeful inclusion of anachronisms recalls T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and the conflict between Christianity and pagan traditions is strongly reminiscent of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. However, very few writers have explored post-Arthurian Britain or focused quite so much on developing the stories of the minor characters in the saga—the transgender man Sir Dinadan; Arthur’s bodyguard, Sir Bedivere, secretly in love with his liege; Sir Dagonet the Fool, suffering from severe bipolar disorder; Sir Palomides, a highly educated prince of Baghdad whose not-so-secret passion for the lady Isolde keeps him in a primitive land that looks down on him for the color of his skin; and so on. This is not a realistic conjecture of how Britain would continue after the death of a charismatic leader who tried to institute new policies of standard law and justice. It’s a metafiction in which the survivors of a myth attempt to extend that myth as they contend with the inner demons of their pasts.
Astoundingly, a fresh take on an extremely well-trodden legend.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780735224049
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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 evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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