An elliptical and unsettling entry into the canon of contemporary dystopias.
A group of patients at an isolated rehabilitation center work to recover language and memory after having had them wiped out by a mysterious virus.
At the beginning of Greene’s slim novel, the nameless protagonist has passed through a required period of quarantine and is taking medications to counteract the effects of a virus that neurologically ravages its hosts. The narrator—telling events retrospectively from a future readers are eager to see arrive—is a resident of what is called only “the Center” and doesn’t remember anything about the past. The goal is that the residents will eventually, through a regime of instruction and socialization, “graduate” and re-acclimate to an outside world they are assured exists. Given names from “cartridges” they watch of old sitcoms (there are numerous patients called “Joey” and “Chandler”), the residents take courses like “Grammar,” “Politeness,” “The History of the Twenty-first Century: A Story of Progress,” and “Art.” But how can they relearn humanity and society without the benefit of a narrative on which to draw? It is this notion around which Greene forms the book’s core. “It had been explained to us in Orientation: the world was a hand and language was a glove,” notes the protagonist. But what happens when the glove does not fit—and when the world has shrunk to the size of a fenced-in facility? Greene’s novel belongs to a lyrical tradition in the vein of Never Let Me Go, but eschews typical worldbuilding or backstory. These gaps create an eerie effect, but they allow for characters who themselves are blank slates of identity and meaning, while focusing less on plot than on moments of symbolic power that show how language shapes us, our relationships, and our sense of the world.
An elliptical and unsettling entry into the canon of contemporary dystopias.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250399342
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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