A rich, layered novel about political upheaval, family tragedy, and the hope for reconciliation and healing.
A young CIA operative engages in a love affair with an Iranian nurse during the turbulent early 1980s in Brown’s novel.
In the Shah’s Iran, Shideh Ghasemi lives in a safe world with a loving family. Her mother keeps a framed photo of Empress Farah, the queen; “it was a tacit understanding that we were modern, and now with the king and queen’s reforms in place, the world was ours.” Shideh’s mother is a devout Muslim, but her father is not religious—even so, they are a good match, but things become more complicated at the start of the Iranian revolution. In the United States, Richard Holmes attends high school in New Jersey, where he is a standout track star. He scores a scholarship to Villanova and seems well on his way to a bright future. In Iran, the situation grows more unstable, and Shideh suffers a horrifying family tragedy. Wracked with grief, she leaves Iran to enter a nursing program at Georgetown University. America is a foreign and sometimes-baffling place, but she finds the people to be kinder than she expected. She meets Richard when he drops his younger sister off at Georgetown, and the two begin a relationship. Richard has an uncle at the FBI who enlists him to help on a sting, but he settles on a job in banking and later pursues a career at the CIA; Shideh returns to Iran at a dangerous moment out of concern for her family and her country. Brown’s narrative offers remarkable insights into the many troubling occurrences in Iran in the 1970s and 1980s and highlights troubling connections to the American government. Shideh’s personal story effectively serves as both a history lesson and a plea for fairness while emphasizing the importance of family. Richard’s path to the CIA is also intriguing. However, the leads’ romance is stunted due to Shideh’s reticence, and the story doesn’t give them much room to grow as a couple.
A rich, layered novel about political upheaval, family tragedy, and the hope for reconciliation and healing.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9798891557482
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Austin Macauley
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.
A violent attack hijacks a woman’s memory in this novel of domestic suspense.
McFadden wastes no time pulling the trigger in this harrowing story that starts with gunfire then swiftly propels readers into a crack tale of secrets and misdirection. Originally self-published in 2016, the book carries the same formidable weight as McFadden’s later novels featuring unsuspecting women who lose their power then fight to recapture it—mostly from men who have betrayed them. That formula perfectly fits Dr. Charlotte McKenna, a 37-year-old dermatologist who isn’t looking for love until the most handsome man she’s ever seen begins to woo her. There are warning signs about Clark Douglas and Charlotte overlooks them to her detriment—but is he a killer? The novel has dual timelines split between events leading up to the day Charlotte barely survives a head wound meant to kill her and the months afterward, when she struggles to reclaim her memory and her mobility. In real life, McFadden is a physician trained to treat brain injuries. Her expertise gives Charlotte’s rehabilitation authenticity, and her writing talent makes it interesting and engaging. As good as that timeline is, readers will yearn to get back to the alternate timeline about who wants Charlotte dead. It’s only a matter of time before Charlotte starts to remember who tried to kill her, and the clock is ticking toward their next attempt. McFadden dishes up plenty of suspects: Charlotte’s secretive husband, Clark; a former patient turned stalker who confronts Charlotte on her honeymoon; and the angry husband of a patient who blames Charlotte for his wife leaving him. Though the story is delicious and dark, McFadden brightens things up with a possible love interest for Charlotte and a surprise ending sure to please the author’s many fans.
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249617
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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