The novel fires on all senses with an earthy, frank heroine who’s riveting to know and impossible to forget.
A reissued novel from a wildly original writer explodes the form with a sensual exposé of midlife.
Lavinia is 36, restless and judgmental in London or Venice but truly herself in woods and fields with the animals she loves. She is somewhat feral, in fact, and that is one of the charms of this spellbinding novel, first published in 1979. While modern life has changed radically since then, perhaps especially for women, Belben is still walloping readers with visceral vignettes. The novel arranges facets of Lavinia’s life and mind through six thematic sections: on sex and celibacy, Robin Hood (yes, from the 14th century), childhood, travel, loneliness (“In every patch a papa, a mama, and their heart-shaped-faced children, a family circle, complete, into which I intrude….I am a moth”), and the end of life for various creatures, including a beloved dog. Belben sketches scenes with a calligraphy brush and quick washes of color. Her renegade heroine recalls a solo traveler from Jean Rhys or Renata Adler, guzzling the world in elegant decrepitude. An imaginary daughter named Jessie sometimes accompanies her. Her parents haunt her, too, but the lost people she dwells on include versions of herself. Every creature and object is charged and embodied: “The dwellings had their eyelids down.” She sees herself in everything and everyone, living in layers of history and literature. Accordingly, Belben’s language is exciting, mined from biblical and Shakespearean cadences: “I am aware of isolated parts of my body which have no feeling; they feel and feel not; such as the hair on my skin.” She is unafraid of gore and puns. As singular as Belben is, she shares a juicy terrain with lusty intellects (Harold Brodkey, Jeannette Winterson); tender, rooted poets (D.H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas); rhapsodic magpies (Gertrude Stein, James Joyce); fantastical artists (Hieronymus Bosch); and playfully morbid filmmakers (Yorgos Lanthimos, Daina Oniunas-Pusić). Belben collages a primal, dreamlike landscape that is a thrilling privilege to visit. This is social history, too, a takedown of the “old maid” as cautionary tale. It is remarkable how much younger 36 seems now than in Belben’s telling, and what Lavinia calls “the glow of celibacy” is all the rage. Readers who delight in women’s radical fantasies will also be rewarded by the wicked visions from a time when finding erotic freedom with a self-celebrated female body was revolutionary.
The novel fires on all senses with an earthy, frank heroine who’s riveting to know and impossible to forget.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781916751316
Page Count: 144
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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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