A riveting, vividly realized character study of obsession, addiction, and psychosis.
A history-spanning novel chronicles the life of a disturbed British man with a sordid familial past.
Prolific European author Tree’s tale begins in the 1930s as young Malcolm Lowry is being hurriedly sent abroad from Liverpool aboard a ship based on orders from his father, cotton broker A.O. Lowry. The directives are being carried out by A.O.’s accountant, Mr. Patrick. Malcolm has been an alcoholic since his teen years, exhibiting violent tendencies against himself and his relatives. Fearing for his family’s safety, A.O. ships his son off to far-flung points throughout Europe, America, Mexico, and Canada with instructions for Mr. Patrick to send a monthly stipend and a brief correspondence to Malcolm. This missive exchange evolves into a regular conversation between the two as they trade opinions and perspectives. But it also slowly reveals the depths of Malcolm’s mental illness and the extremes of his addiction. Fast-forward decades: Mr. Patrick’s grandson, a feisty, increasingly shifty lad, is apprehended by police in a London park with a satchel of explosives and a fistful of paper. He is also carrying 10 letters exchanged between Malcolm, who would become a notable English novelist and poet, and Mr. Patrick. Through a masterfully clever construction, the plot incrementally reveals the nefarious motivations behind the grandson’s dangerous park journey. Police and psychiatric interrogations ensue as the letters are read and the intercourse between Malcolm, the self-described “perishing disappointment who has betrayed the trust placed in me by my family,” and Mr. Patrick charts the traveler’s trips across Europe, a spontaneous marriage, and a relocation to New York City and beyond. Tree’s narrative gains momentum as the personality of the mentally unstable would-be bomber unfolds as the letters are read. The author skillfully infuses his villain with deadly obsessions: pornography, the atrocities of World War II, and horrific fantasies of rape and serial murder. Inspired by actual events (Tree’s grandfather and Malcolm Lowry had actually exchanged correspondence), the author conjures graphic images from the extremist’s grisly imagination that aren’t for the faint of heart. Readers able to stomach the man’s psychotic killing fantasies will discover a story richly embedded with plot twists and, as evidenced in Tree’s previous novel, Snug (2013), crystal-clear, if unsettling, characterizations.
A riveting, vividly realized character study of obsession, addiction, and psychosis.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-84-09-29010-9
Page Count: 246
Publisher: England-Is-A-Bitch Productions
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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