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
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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 evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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