A literary tour de force from beginning to end.
Guilt overwhelms innocence in McGuigan’s collection of short stories.
It seems downright perverse to find so much sublime beauty in these painstaking portraits of shattered lives, but it’s there, lurking within every line the author composes. Peggy is an elderly dementia patient quickly running out of time in “Because Her Hour Is Come.” Describing Peggy’s dreamed visits from her reproachful siblings, McGuigan writes, “Sometimes they appear in strong bodies, hair thick and dark and braided, shoes shined for a Sunday. Other nights they come in pain, skin loose and crepey on the arms, eyes filmy and defeated.” Each of the collection’s characters seems to be dealing with some sort of unassuageable regret that’s either slowly killing them or the people closest to them. (Most of the time, it’s both.) Seosaimhin, the teenage protagonist providing the staggering first-person narrative of “Everything Nice,” is unforgettable, exemplifying the human heart’s profound capacity for allowing fear and bravery to coexist. “The Last of the Darlin’ Boys” encapsulates generational trauma more effectively and lyrically than anything readers are likely to come across this year. Each entry is more gut-wrenchingly tragic than the last, but the subtle, power-packed prose couldn’t be more transcendent. While McGuigan clearly knows how to write, she demonstrates that she understands real life, too; with keen sensitivity, she fills in the emotional truths breathing inside the things left unsaid. After Maria tells Raoul she loves him in “Beloved,” the author exposes the cold, hard truth: “‘I know,’ he whispered, his tongue thick with sleep. ‘I know.’ She didn’t realize then what he meant, that love was a loose end he’d have to find a way to tie up.” McGuigan’s stories will haunt readers with the depths of their strange tragedy. There seems to be little in the human soul that escapes her eye.
A literary tour de force from beginning to end.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781963115468
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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