A deftly rendered meditation on trauma, madness, and art.
A guilty man finds himself at the center of Paris’ artistic community in Personne’s debut literary novel, the first in a planned series.
In 1926, Geoffrey Weidmann, a veteran of the Great War, flees his farm in Austria after waking up next to the body of a dead man. Rather than risk standing trial for murder, Geoff goes with his father to Paris, where his estranged brother, Franz, has already settled. Geoff is a mess, mentally and emotionally, haunted by his experiences in the war as well as by the body he left buried (in a very shallow grave) back in Spital. He soon acquires some drinking buddies who introduce him to the city’s artistic avant-garde, including two poets at the center of the burgeoning Surrealist movement: the visionary Antonin Artaud and the buoyant Robert Desnos. Their poetry describes existence in ways Geoff has never encountered before. Under their influence, Geoff begins to find the words to articulate the previously unspeakable tumult he experiences inside his head. “The dead part of oneself. Artaud’s words were still banging around inside of me the same way the West Indies music reverberated from down the street.” Geoff hopes he may finally banish the ghosts of his past…until he gets word that his old farm will soon be sold and the body he buried on it potentially discovered. Personne’s baroque prose captures the lyricism of the period, as here, when Geoff sees Artaud for the first time: “He had that chiseled, angular face…and a taut body like a flame. He resembled a desert-wandering fanatic, or a medieval angel trapped in stone in a cathedral.” The book is in a decidedly modernist tradition, with its nearly 400 pages dedicated primarily to drinks and aesthetic discussions of bohemians and writers. Fans of the Parisian scene in this era will marvel over the detail—Personne strives to depict the lives of Artaud and Desnos as accurately as possible—but those without a reference point may become lost and sometimes bored in these pages.
A deftly rendered meditation on trauma, madness, and art.Pub Date: June 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781977260826
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2023
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
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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