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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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