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
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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