Deeply unsettling, profound, and utterly unique stories.
A masterful collection by a 20th-century Portuguese writer whose work feels more relevant than ever.
Carvalho’s stories are a study in contradiction: At once deceptively mundane and deeply profound, witty and deadpan, they contend with urgent questions about what it might mean to live a meaningful life—but also the many, petty ways we annoy or disappoint or betray one another. This is especially evident in a new collection of stories translated into English for the first time by Jull Costa. A journalist and editor as well as a fiction writer, Carvalho’s publishing output was especially heavy in the 1960s and '70s (she died in 1998). In certain ways, her stories reflect the concerns of her time: The prospect of space travel, for example, prompts questions about what it means to be human, to live on Earth, and ultimately to die. But what’s especially striking is how modern Carvalho’s work feels, even—or especially—now. That freshness comes less from her subject matter or her blending of genres—she sometimes incorporates SF elements in a manner entirely her own—and more from the moral ambiguity, or even opacity, that her characters face. Mothers leave behind their children; husbands and wives leave behind their spouses, or cheat, or just spend their lives in a kind of impenetrable fog. Motivations are vague, or mixed, or lost in endless series of deflection. At the same time—another contradiction—Carvalho’s prose never overheats. In fact, there’s a casual intimacy to her stories that belies their very profundity. Her sentences seem to chat with each other, to try out new phrasings like a woman trying on gloves. “He had again headed south, or, rather, he was again in the south, but alone this time. Sort of alone,” she writes in one story. In another, a woman visits a friend, who she tends to “drag” out of the house, “to a kind of reunion of the sad and lonely. Of whom Tito was one. As was she, although hers was a rather striking sadness, awkward too…” It’s the kind of collection you return to again and again, finding something striking and new each time.
Deeply unsettling, profound, and utterly unique stories.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781949641943
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
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
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