A contemplative study of colonialism’s collapse, and its enduring legacy.
A writer returns to his native Mozambique to reckon with his father’s history there.
The latest novel by veteran Mozambican author Couto is inspired by his own father, a journalist and poet who witnessed the abuses of Portugal’s colonial regime before the country gained independence in 1975. Here, the lead narrator is Diogo, who in 2019 is visiting the country as an honored poet. The host, Liana, takes the opportunity to share with him a cache of files belonging to her grandfather Óscar, an agent of the colonial state police. Óscar detailed Diogo’s father, Adriano, under the pretext of collaborating with the anticolonial movement. But the story Couto unspools is more complicated than trumped-up accusations of plotting against the state. It is a story of racist state violence, centered on the 1973 massacre of Blacks in the town of Inhaminga by security forces. It is a story of the event’s consequences, particularly the death of Liana’s mother, alternately deemed a murder or suicide. It’s a story of Diogo sorting through the complexities of his father’s history, from poorly disclosed infidelities to attempts to counter the racist colonial forces. And as Liana and Diogo find their own relationship deepening, it’s an exploration of the possibilities for reconciliation. Couto’s narrative alternates between scenes in 2019, as Diogo revisits locations of his family’s past, and documents from Óscar’s archives that slowly reveal the truth about Inhaminga, Liana’s background, and his own conflicted feelings about state power. The formality of the documentation gives the novel a certain stiffness, and an approaching cyclone is a heavy-handed metaphor. But Couto’s storytelling is rich, while delivering a straightforward message: “When a regime starts arresting poets it is because that regime has lost its way.”
A contemplative study of colonialism’s collapse, and its enduring legacy.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9780374616311
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
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