A vivid, entertaining tale of middle-class malaise and working-class rebellion.
In Sweeney’s novel, a man struggling in the wage-slavery grind considers revolution.
Edwin’s dreams were once pinned on the print-only, bi-weekly alternative paper Apathetic Objector, which gave him a voice to rally against the system—but it didn’t pay enough to cover the bills. After the paper folds, and their house goes into foreclosure, Edwin and his wife, Mallory, start over in Richmond, Virginia. Tired of the instability of pursuing ambitious, low-paying pet projects, Edwin lands a job at Tolleson & Birch, an insurance company, where he specializes in workers’ compensation. In his unglamorous cubicle, Edwin reviews field reports of client claims before passing them along to underwriters. It’s hardly taxing, and Edwin is competent enough that talk begins of his advancement in the company. The thorn in Edwin’s side is Anton, a rogue field representative whose incendiary reports increasingly see him side with workers suffering under unfair conditions and contracts that offer no protection. “If they get hurt, it’s their problem, according to The New Age of Labor,” Anton objects. Edwin covers up for Anton, half out of necessity and half out of unacknowledged sympathy. It all comes to a head when Anton puts Tolleson & Birch into an untenable position and pursues a righteous crusade, pulling Edwin into his violent orbit. Sweeney operates here in a finely tuned emotional register, capturing the quiet storm of a marriage under duress and getting inside the head of someone fighting the reflex to give up; he also writes with knowing, sardonic insight about the futility of trying to balance basic survival requirements with a personal code of ethics. The narrative vibrates with the authenticity of a dispatch from the corporate trenches and will ring all too true for anyone hanging on by their fingernails to a desk job. This tightly knit novel packs a darkly comic punch.
A vivid, entertaining tale of middle-class malaise and working-class rebellion.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2026
ISBN: 9781966369523
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Brandylane Publishers, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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