A compelling story of entrapment and survival.
A Paris bartender tries to survive the Nazi occupation.
In 1940, as German forces occupy France, 55-year-old Frank Meier tends bar at the Ritz in Paris and is renowned for his drink-mixing skills. He has devoted his life to his bar and will protect it at all costs while carefully concealing that he was born Jewish. The hotel’s owner is Marie-Louise Ritz, “the Widow,” who orders Frank to bring the elite clientele back to the Ritz, including artists and writers. Indeed, the bar lures luminaries such as Barbara Hutton and Coco Chanel. But Claude and Blanche Auzello, who hides that she was born Blanche Rubinstein, are more crucial to the story. When the Germans flock to the bar, Meier acts with unflagging politeness and professionalism. “I am surrounded by murderers and every day I have to serve them drinks,” he muses. Meanwhile, he and Blanche become trusted friends. Enamored of the married woman, he can’t refuse her anything. Skimming from the cash register, he “became the exclusive supplier of morphine to the woman who now haunted [his] every thought.” And he has connections with forgers who produce fake passports and birth certificates that he passes along to Blanche. He writes in his diary, “In order to impress Blanche, I had become what I most despised: a liar, a thief, a man with no values.” The contrast inside and outside the Ritz is stark. All Jews must register, and Germans begin arresting them by the thousands and plundering their homes. Paris sinks into cold and hunger while business is booming at the Ritz bar. A vast panoply of vice and corruption, the Third Reich at the height of its power is being celebrated at the Ritz. Translated from French, the novel is about real people, the trapped and the trappers. The deeply sympathetic Meier is a better man than he thinks; he risks his life for others while the Nazis try to sap his soul.
A compelling story of entrapment and survival.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781668097199
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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