An enthralling story of nationalism filled with historical touches and lush details.
In this debut historical novel, the residents of an 18th-century Indian province fight a British company to protect their domestic commodities.
Bengal is India’s richest province in 1756 and the place for highly sought-after materials like silks and muslin. It attracts traders from around the world and such concerns as the British East India Company. But trouble begins with Bengal’s “shifting political landscape.” The province’s beloved ruler (or Nawab), Alivardi Khan, dies, and his grandson, Siraj ud-Daulah, is his heir apparent. Officials belonging to the Nawab’s court fear Siraj is too unpredictable while the leaders of the East India Company worry he’s aligned with their French trading rivals. Sure enough, newly minted Nawab Siraj sets his sights on Fort William, the company’s principal settlement in Bengal, which the British had begun fortifying even before Alivardi’s death. Despite this, Siraj’s army seizes the fort. Meanwhile, British warships had recently docked in India to confront French forces. But Robert Clive, governor of another British fort in India, uses that extra muscle to retake Fort William. He has Bengali allies, too, including Mir Jafar, a senior commander of the Bengal army who’s upset he was passed over as Calcutta’s governor, and Mehtab Rai, a financier whom Siraj senselessly humiliated not long ago. Bengali officials who help the other side may soon regret their decision, as the British, if they gain the upper hand, will be in a perfect position to exert their dominance in India—gradually taking away the country’s commodities as well as its identity.
In this tale, Roy smoothly mingles historical figures with fictional characters. For example, real-life Alivardi Khan and Siraj ud-Daulah are just as integral to the story as the fictional nobleman Javed Hussain and his assertive son, Sarfaraz. The spotlight actually hits quite a few well-developed characters, such that it’s truly shocking when someone dies or finds himself arrested for treason. At the same time, there’s a balanced mix of conflicts (“The gates of the fort groaned under the relentless blows of a battering ram, wood splintering with each strike”) and characters’ discussions of events that either have happened or most assuredly will. Readers unfamiliar with the history of Bengal will have much to take in, from India’s culture and local foods to the country’s political climate. But the author also dives deep into the story’s cast, as some individuals prove tirelessly greedy and others ultimately lament the choices they’ve made. One remorseful man even has an enlightening conversation with his reflection in a mirror and, later, an elaborate, ominous dream. Despite the book’s relatively short length, it scrupulously covers several years in the mid-1700s and wisely keeps the action in Bengal (regardless of where each character hails from). Roy’s lyrical prose makes reading this novel a breeze: “Reclining on a pile of silk cushions, his fingers trembled as he cradled the slender pipe…Outside, the faint sounds of the Nawab’s camp filtered through the tent—soldiers’ murmurs, the occasional neigh of restless horses, and the distant beat of war drums meant to rally courage.”
An enthralling story of nationalism filled with historical touches and lush details.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781764129909
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Emberline Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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