Wholly original, quietly disquieting short fiction.
The past is never far away in these debut stories about Irish intergenerational trauma.
Ní Chuinn (a pseudonym for a Northern Irish writer) takes up the inheritance of characters born after the Troubles, an ethnic and national conflict that took place in Northern Ireland from the 1960s to 1998. In “We All Go,” the narrator Jackie’s parents are carjacked, and his mother, too pregnant with him to spring from the passenger seat, goes into labor days later covered in cuts from the broken windshield. Named after his grandfather, who was interned by the British Army, Jackie longs to know more about his past, but his father is dead, and his family has no interest in reliving it, even though, the narrator explains, “they’re here, inside me…things unspoken as though that makes them unseen.” Elsewhere, in “Daisy Hill,” John, who has already lost so much, goes to visit his uncle, who’s in the process of trying to kill himself. John’s interest in the past drives his contemporaries crazy, but he understands that yet another member of his family has been broken by what he survived. Here, the unseen and unspoken become visible and loud in the story’s final section, which takes the form of a litany of violent acts committed by the British Army against Northern Irish children and adults. Calling these stories intricately woven doesn’t do them justice. In the ones set in Northern Ireland, complex extended family relationships sew together the fabric of the fiction in surprising ways; in the stories set elsewhere, Ní Chuinn gathers loosely connected narrative threads and perspectives, using juxtaposition to create unlikely connections. Both approaches suggest that pain and loss are sewn into the cloth of families and communities and that the cost of intimacy is too often suffering. “I missed my mother,” reflects the narrator of a story about named and unnamed generational violence. “Since I was a teenager, she’d broken in my shoes for me. She insisted. I had seen her feet bleed.”
Wholly original, quietly disquieting short fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780374620028
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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