A luminous imagining of a great musician’s inner struggles.
On a transatlantic voyage, Gustav Mahler looks back on his turbulent life.
Frail and sickly, wrapped in blankets, the celebrated conductor-composer tries to warm himself on the deck of the ocean liner Amerika, bound for Europe. An attentive cabin boy brings him hot tea and tries to raise his spirits. It’s the spring of 1910, and Mahler—not yet 50, but nearing the end of his days—is brooding about the past. Physical infirmities have dogged him from the start; born in Bohemia, he was one of 14 children, six dying in infancy. Yet he worked tirelessly and achieved great acclaim, initially as director of the Vienna Opera, though politics and antisemitism clouded his tenure. Further success would come in the U.S., at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. All along, he was composing, often in feverish outbursts. Many of Mahler’s remembrances revolve around his obsessive love for his wife Alma, “the most beautiful woman in Vienna.” They had two daughters, but lost the older to diphtheria. Alma, eventually bristling in her role as Mahler’s caretaker, begins an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius—and Mahler concludes she’s stayed with her husband only because his death is imminent. Numerous biographers have scrutinized Mahler, but in this slender, fictionalized account, Austrian author Seethaler seems mostly interested in the composer’s emotional path and creative impulses: In one passage, he vividly describes Mahler patterning a composition on a bird call. The composer isn’t idealized here, his tyrannical side apparent in the mildly amusing scene where he reluctantly poses for the sculptor Rodin. The book does neglect Alma’s professional achievements (she was a well-regarded composer in her own right); and the ending, focused on the cabin boy, seems forced. But the lyrical prose throughout more than makes up for any narrative flaws.
A luminous imagining of a great musician’s inner struggles.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798889661801
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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 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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