A richly drawn collection of tales about exiles caught between eras of their lives.
Women and men search for purpose in Sabino’s globe-spanning debut fiction collection.
A Czech woman returns to a seaside Brazilian village following the death of her husband, a wealthy eccentric known for building the town’s strangest house. Despite a less-than-warm welcome from the locals, she begins to fix up the house—but it takes a major change in her circumstances to win the townsfolk over. In a parallel story, the same woman returns to Prague after years in Brazil to an apartment in her grandmother’s building and her old job at the National Film Archive. “I’d always been drawn by unknown places and people presented to me through photographs, films, and documentaries,” she muses, wondering if she’s made a mistake coming back after the death of her husband. “At home, I tended to feel like part of the furniture.” In these 11 stories, time and distance conspire to erode people’s sense of belonging—in their jobs and relationships, in whatever country they happen to be living in. A woman about to be married on a Greek island in “Carol’s Mole” has second thoughts—inspired, in part, by her absent mother’s odd warning about the mole the woman has always borne on her shoulder. In the aptly named story “In Between,” an American woman who recently left her marriage in Hungary finds herself living in a San Francisco hotel with no plan, seeing her dislocation mirrored in the unhoused people she meets on the street. Sabino masterfully finds tension in her characters’ intolerable stasis. “She’s usually someone’s assistant, collaborator, go-to person, but suddenly there was nothing to do in Buda but watch her marriage hold its breath,” she writes of the San Francisco woman. “A tense pause with no end in sight.” Sabino excels at evoking place—not only its physicality, but the psychology of a place—though she doesn’t always force her characters toward a point of crisis. As a result, these pieces often feel more like vignettes than full stories, memorable as they are.
A richly drawn collection of tales about exiles caught between eras of their lives.Pub Date: May 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781735934624
Page Count: 212
Publisher: K + P Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
