Come for the riveting father-son mystery, stay for the most beautiful and moving mother-son story in recent memory.
Losing Mom: heartfelt autofiction from a man who just may be Bob Dylan’s son.
“‘Uncanny, the way you look like him. Bob Dylan. You know his music?’” As soon as you encounter the premise of Sussman’s debut novel, you will surely Google him, and see that his resemblance to the man who wrote “Girl From the North Country” is somewhere beyond uncanny. Sussman has also published an article in Harper’s Magazine that explains the real-life basis of the novel—his mother’s year-long relationship with Dylan and a later meeting nine months before he was born. He magicks this material into a gorgeous, emotionally thrilling first-person novel chronicling the death of the narrator Evan’s mother from cancer, a period during which she finally shares more of the truth about her connection with Dylan, as well as other stories of her life, some terrible and some amazing. All of this has been completely hidden from Evan till now, despite the fact that he and June were very close in his childhood. Their emotional intimacy was built on play-acting and storytelling, on King Arthur and Harry Potter (the Potter saga is a surprising and important touchstone throughout), and also fraught due to her stormy relationships with his stepfather and other men. Despite these romantic disappointments, and things far worse than disappointment, June persists in believing, and wanting her son to believe, that there is nothing holier than love. As the novel opens, she has called him in London—Evan has lived abroad since college—to tell him she has cancer, though she withholds the seriousness of her condition for most of the book, continuing to pursue both holistic and Western treatment. The night he arrives, she serves him an alfresco dinner of homegrown vegetables: “The eggplant lay gleaming on its browned back. Beets glowed blood red. Crisped collard and kale lay entangled in the baking tray. In the pan the bloomed popcorn was spiced and golden.” They recite poetry to each other to bless the meal. The love that swells beneath this scene, and every scene, will just about knock you over.
Come for the riveting father-son mystery, stay for the most beautiful and moving mother-son story in recent memory.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780593835050
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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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