An impressively crafted set of short stories, thoughtful and poetic.
Sudhakar’s collection of short stories melancholically reflects on loneliness, loss, and cultural decay.
The author here assembles nine short stories that are largely set in India and united tonally by an atmosphere of elegiac forlornness, a painful sense of all that is lost in shifting time. In the lead story, “Come Tomorrow,” Diya struggles with the recent death of her grandmother and her abandonment as a child by her mother. Now a professional photographer, she must come to grips with her mother’s absence and with her strange connection to her—her mother ran away with an artist, she learns. In “Empires Have Been Destroyed,” Ana runs an illegal speakeasy in her apartment in Bandra during the prohibition years, a “place that was not supposed to exist.” After Ana dismisses her bouncer Dinesh for an impropriety while in the company of her daughter Mari, Dinesh becomes deathly ill, accuses Ana of witchcraft, and instigates a police raid of her home that doesn’t turn up a scintilla of credible evidence. In both stories, the historical context suggests a culture in disrepair, especially considering parental responsibility—Mari’s father was an incorrigible alcoholic. “Marigolds,” the most experimental and haunting tale in this affecting collection, is written in the second person and artfully creates the unsettling illusion that the reader is being treated to a story about themself. “So yes, you crave the company of others. For sounds beyond the drafts whistling and howling through the house, its foundations audibly sinking and creaking beneath you. For a house made of something other than wind, which carries nothing you can hold.” The unnamed protagonist lives with her mother Gita “alone at the edge of the world” in a quiet redoubt by the sea. The protagonist finds a portal to another city by a different sea, and when she returns, she is all but unrecognizable to her mother. Sudhakar masterfully creates a mood in which anything feels possible, where magic lurks behind the quotidian. This assemblage of short fiction is emotionally enthralling and literarily inventive.
An impressively crafted set of short stories, thoughtful and poetic.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781574419498
Page Count: 224
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2024
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
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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