An elegantly spun tale that punctures holes in our every expectation of life in an authoritarian state.
A gently satirical novel of tangled lives in 1970s Pakistan.
Hanif’s narrative opens with the hanging of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979. The execution sends shock waves through the nation, not least in a provincial town where a former revolutionary, Sir Baghi, has founded an English-language school to teach the “sons and daughters of peasants and shopkeepers” a skill essential to advancing in Pakistani society long after independence from Britain. Baghi uses an idiosyncratic method, teaching single words, on the theory that these are enough to get most things done. Baghi is at pains from time to time to explain that he has no interest in women, quite unlike his friend Molly, the keeper of the town’s mosque: “For a man of Allah, Molly seems to have a slightly frisky relationship with his maker. Within the premises of the House of Allah and barely fifty metres away from his loving and waiting wife, his hanged hero still warm in his grave, Molly is busy testing his faith with a runaway woman.” Another runaway enters the scene in the form of a former student who takes lessons from Baghi while avoiding inquisitive government agents. Her homework assignments yield often hilarious, sharp-witted results; instructed to write an essay on bovines, she responds, “I can’t write that the cow is Allah’s splendorous creation because Sir doesn’t believe in the existence of Almighty and His numerous manifestations.” One such agent, the villain of the piece, resents being posted to a backwater, but he’s diligent in pursuing enemies of the state: “He knows this much about civilians: they bullshit before they get to the point.” So they do, and Hanif’s novel takes increasingly picaresque turns, with a cameo appearance by the likes of boxing great Muhammad Ali, even as local politics grow ever more violent.
An elegantly spun tale that punctures holes in our every expectation of life in an authoritarian state.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780802165985
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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