Bruising, interesting, occasionally sublime.
A quietly restless coming-of-age at a British boarding school for wayward boys in the summer of 1976.
We meet 17-year-old Jean, “Lord of Unluck,” as he receives a warning in the headmaster’s office of Compton Manor, the “House of Nutters,” his mother, Rosa, has sent him to after years of misadventures and expulsions. At Compton, Jean is an outsider among outsiders, his Jewish heritage and scholarship status ensuring his hackles stay up around the “the boys who are good at sport and who speak in loud, posh voices.” Among these lucky few is Tom, a popular boy who, in the final months of school, begins to seek Jean out for shared joints and other illicit intimacies. Their relationship is fenced in by secrecy—there are rumors, of course, about what an upper year boy might solicit from a younger student in the back toilets, but “none of this would be said aloud. No one is, nor ever will be, a faggot”—and time, as their final school year speeds to an end. Tom remains indistinct, to the reader as well as to Jean, which is part of the point; the novel, true to its title, is a meditation on Jean and the particular clockwork of his adolescent agony. The voice is a restrained third-person present-tense, its dialogue rendered without quotation marks. Dunnigan’s prose is carefully simple, and while some passages shimmer with piercing insight, the story can feel constrained by its own dedication to subtlety. The commitment to this austere mode makes the odd moments of clunky disclosure all the more jarring: metaphors made literal, realizations spelled out, pinches of traumatic memory reemerging just in time to contextualize destructive behavior. Even so, Jean is a compelling protagonist, his split-knuckled pursuit of a place in the world convincing in its sheer rawness.
Bruising, interesting, occasionally sublime.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781324105640
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
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
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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