Steeped in Irish history and folklore, alive with a sense of wonder.
A father and son stumble on an ancient Irish sacred site, with lasting consequences.
It’s 1865 when the normally taciturn Tomás reels out of a mysterious wooded copse in rural Ireland, babbling nonstop. He and his 10-year-old son, Liam, have been surveying for the hated British, who need native speakers to learn place names and boundaries from the locals, then render them into English. But now, as he tells his pregnant wife, Phina, and daughters, Enda and Rose, back in Dublin, he plans to give up that job to make “a map of how this land really is, of how it has always been, of what lies beneath whatever order or disorder others might impose upon it.” Oh, and he has taken their life savings to lease land near the copse from a local aristocrat; they will live in a ruined cottage, abandoned years ago during the Great Hunger that emptied the Irish landscape and sent Tomás and Phina as children to a grim workhouse. This is the dramatic premise of O’Farrell’s evocative and impassioned 10th novel. After Tomás’ baffling announcement, the narrative rewinds some millennia to reveal the copse as the source of a spring with magical powers, in which a young girl finds a ring that belonged to her vanished father, the last of Ireland’s original inhabitants. Back in the 19th century, baby Eugene, born in the family’s new home, “is not as other children”; he never speaks and appears to have mystical understanding. He and his siblings, each a skillfully drawn individual, forge separate destinies over the following decades, embodying O’Farrell’s key themes: the conflict between Catholicism and ancient ways, the subjugation of women, the brutality of the English ruling class, the people’s connection to the land. A gruesome exorcism is the first of many disasters that befall the family—so many that only O’Farrell’s pungent reminders of Ireland’s long and tragic history keep the litany of sorrows from seeming excessive. The radiant closing pages offer a measure of relief from the generally dark tone.
Steeped in Irish history and folklore, alive with a sense of wonder.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780593320648
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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