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
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 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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