Quietly yet powerfully affecting.
A random act of violence opens vistas into the vagaries of fate and the complexity of human experience for three teenagers.
Walking home from school in a town near Oxford, Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang spot a boy lying in an adjacent field, wearing “what appeared to be long red socks.” This is a characteristic Livesey description, subtle, with a lurking sting: The socks are trails of blood. Karel Lustig, the siblings learn later, has been stabbed and left there by a stranger who picked him up hitchhiking home from work. Each of the trio deals with this unsettling event differently. Eldest Matthew, haunted by memories of a childhood friend abused by her father, avidly follows the police investigation, but a meeting with Karel’s older brother shows him the case also involves a complicated family dynamic. Middle child Zoe learns that their father is having an affair and starts one of her own with an American Ph.D. student; unpredictably (as plot twists often are in Livesey’s work), this proves to be a good thing. Thirteen-year-old Duncan, adopted as an infant, decides he needs to find his birth mother—“first mother” he is careful to call her when broaching the subject with his adoptive mother, whom he loves greatly. Family bonds are fraught, fragile, yet ultimately enduring in Livesey’s nuanced account of the siblings’ separate but conjoined odysseys, counterpointed by piercing glimpses of Karel, who confesses to Duncan that sometimes he wishes they hadn’t rescued him. The reasons for his wish are among the many motives that simmer beneath the text without rising to the surface; Livesey demonstrates the same respect for the mysteries of the human heart that enriched such previous novels as Eva Moves the Furniture (2001) and Banishing Verona (2004). (The discovery of Karel’s assailant, for example, explains almost nothing.) We can discern her literary credo in a discovery she gives to Duncan, a talented artist who realizes that the only way to truly draw anything or anyone is to simply look rather than imposing meaning.
Quietly yet powerfully affecting.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294639-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
With comic energy and wild plot twists to spare, a thoroughly charming debut.
The problems of a very modern family in a slightly surreal world.
Meet the Flynns. With their marriage on the rocks, Catherine and Bud don’t have much time or energy to supervise their three daughters: beautiful, uncooperative Abigail, in love with a young man known as War Crimes Wes; brilliant, deranged Harper, who speaks seven languages but is suspended from school more often than not; between them, Louise, a classic middle child, to whom nobody is paying attention as she gets herself in serious trouble in an online chat room. Cash’s debut novel has fun with everything it touches, rocketing through the points of view of the family members and other townspeople, delighting in wordplay and absurd details. Introduced early on is a gnat problem—gnats have infested the church of Our Lady of Suffering as well as a sculpture on the town green, and they have also infested every word in the text that has the syllable “nat”—extermignate, gnatural, dognate, siggnature, and so forth. Though the town itself is never named, its principal feature, Alabaster Harbor™, is always trademarked: “Bud was the accounts and systems manager at Alabaster Harbor™—not some backwater artery of commerce but the primary port for the entire western coastline, the premier gateway for domestic and intergnational trade.” Corruption at the harbor is one of many storylines; another follows Bud’s attempt to find solace for his wife’s disdain by joining a support group called Lost Lambs, based at Our Lady of Suffering and run by the cheerful Miss Winkle. Also based at the church is Father Andrew, whose background is not in theology but in French cinema: “Father Andrew loved the world of French film, where a girl’s sexuality gave her agency, where there were fewer restrictions and more topless chain-smoking on the beach.” Between the crowd of quirky characters and drastic situations, the high-flying sentences and prose style, and Cash’s relentless joke-cracking, the novel is, like Harper, almost too clever for its own good—but the Flynns stay just real enough to win our hearts.
With comic energy and wild plot twists to spare, a thoroughly charming debut.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780374619237
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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