A somewhat repetitive yarn brimming with theological musings for readers with an interest in Christian philosophy.
In Kelley's novel, a Catholic priest analyzes a potentially historically significant manuscript about a post-crucifixion manhunt for Jesus Christ.
Father Thomas Mann teaches Christian history at Columbia University in 2029. His quiet life is upended when he gets a middle-of-the-night phone call from his friend Miles, a prestigious archaeologist. Miles has discovered an astoundingly intact trove of scrolls in a tomb in Kashmir and has already authenticated them; however, he doesn’t have the skills necessary to translate the Latin contained within, which is where Father Mann comes in. Although initially reluctant, Mann agrees to fly to Kashmir, where he will have three months at a secluded monastery to translate the scrolls before the state destroys them as “blasphemy.” Upon setting to work, Mann discovers that the scrolls follow Marcus Decia, a disgraced tribune, and his companions Poet and Boy as they search for Jesus after he has reportedly risen from the dead. They are hounded by another, much less honorable pair of bounty hunters, and their clashes provide much of the novel’s action. The trio eventually intersects with Bhagawati Ma, a “blissful spiritual woman” from India who helps guide them not only to the man they’re seeking but also to inner peace and religious belief. Aside from the clashes with the rival bounty hunters, the majority of the narrative focuses on ethical and religious deliberations. While Boy was enslaved by Marcus after his village fell to the Romans in battle, the text is primarily concerned with maintaining Marcus’ honorable and irreproachable character—rather than honestly interrogating the undeniable contradictions this entails, the story goes to great pains to affirm that Boy actually wants to be and continues to benefit from being enslaved. Poet, as the name suggests, is the chronicler of the group; he is immediately invested in the chase as a storyteller, providing much of the novel’s perspective. Interludes in which Mann reflects with a friendly monk, Lama Chinchinanaga, break up the narrative as Mann drily muses about the implications of the text and whether the pope will want it to see the light of day.
A somewhat repetitive yarn brimming with theological musings for readers with an interest in Christian philosophy.Pub Date: April 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781964251561
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Illumify Media Global
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
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