A clever, though at times predictable, analysis of modern-day British politics.
A young journalist’s searing feature about a near-death attack at a rave on a Yorkshire farm at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic exposes the sociopolitical undercurrents of contemporary Britain.
Hannah, a struggling freelance journalist, is catapulted into quasi-fame after writing a buzzy exposé. The article seeks to understand the motive behind the violent attack with a gold bar—and discovers a tangled web involving an unprincipled banker, a controversial conservative writer, and an anarchist movement. The first third of the novel is relayed via the article itself, a form which is engaging but feels, at times, somewhat basic. The rest of the book explores the fallout from the article. With the money from its success, Hannah’s been able to buy a flat, but has drifted from her university friends, who don’t respect her work or her politics. Lenny, the provocative columnist somewhat responsible for the article’s nascence, experiences a sudden mainstream popularity different from her previous position on the fringe. Brown’s novel is strongest and most compelling in its sharp analysis of social relationships, of the ways in which we understand and fail to understand one another: Hannah’s friend Martin thinks, “That was the problem with Hannah, and the thing he couldn’t reconcile in all this. She was culturally clueless, practically allergic to the zeitgeist. How had she pulled it off?” Or when Lenny, interviewed by Martin, lashes out in a moment of viciousness: “I find that I’m leaning over to him, jeering: ‘Er, er, er...um, um, um...’ My voice is high-pitched and throaty, a cruel imitation of his stammer.” She recognizes, as soon as she’s done it, that “it was too far, too nasty.” At times, Brown’s political analysis is acute, although her characters are in danger of presenting as caricatures; Lenny, in particular, who fuels much of the antiwoke commentary, can appear a little two-dimensionally predictable, despite the book’s insistence that she defies labels constituting its own strategic predictability (“Yes to Europe, no to multiculturalism, maybe a yes to feminism? Pro-regulation, anti-affirmative action, pro-leveling up...It all comes off a little, hm, a little muddled,” the interviewer remarks).
A clever, though at times predictable, analysis of modern-day British politics.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593977309
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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
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