A richly detailed evocation of a grim future that is, sadly, absolutely believable.
Roll over, George Orwell: This post-apocalyptic dystopia makes Airstrip One look like a summer camp.
Nayler’s sophomore novel is set in a familiar future world in which totalitarian orders rule, with recognizably Putinesque touches in what’s called the (né Russian) Federation, not least an autocratic ruler who’s been running the show for decades. One of his victims is an author named Zoya Alekseyevna Velikanova, exiled to the Siberian taiga after having lost an eye to the security police’s rubber bullets. “Just like in Byzantium,” she says matter-of-factly, recalling that once deposed, rulers were routinely blinded. Yet she can see well enough to sense what she thinks might be a ghost—and is, in a way, a dead woman walking: Lilia Vitalyevna Rybakova, who’s got revolution on her mind. The twist in Nayler’s neo-Orwellian world is that the rulers are now AI, part of a process called “rationalization,” and the AIs that run the (né European) Union are going haywire, raising energy prices to unaffordable levels and courting rebellion in the streets, including a Guy Fawkesian burning of Parliament: “Across Europe, power systems were failing. There had been massive data losses. No transport moved.” (We don’t hear much about the North American Union, but its tyrant has imposed a full communications quarantine: “They were intending to cut themselves off from the rest of the world.”) Lilia is in the thick of things, in trouble with the authorities everywhere but able to move around undetected, thanks to a gizmo that, she tells Zoya, “replaces you with what would be there if you were not.” All Nayler’s characters are well rounded, but the most interesting, apart from Lilia and Zoya, is the Russian bot-in-chief, Krotov—the power behind the president—who, with his algorithms constantly remade, seems destined to rule forever, forgetting, perhaps, that even Stalin couldn’t pull that off. And therein lies a twist…
A richly detailed evocation of a grim future that is, sadly, absolutely believable.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780374615369
Page Count: 336
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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