Seven compelling explorations of vacancy in another perfectly spare and atmospheric translation.
Empty homes, emptied lives, and emptying memories: Life's—particularly family life's—many emptinesses and emptyings abound in this ethereal collection.
Although its original Spanish publication preceded that of Little Eyes (2020), the author’s most recent translation into English, this collection may feel like a progression from McDowell's translations of Schweblin's other works, which dwell more squarely in the fantastic and the speculative, often pushing into nightmare territory, and into a quieter, more human-centered and realism-bound world—though one thrumming with just as much eerie tension, as Schweblin evokes the uncanny in the human rather than placing the human in the uncanny. In “None of That,” a woman finally discovers an appreciation for her mother's unusual pastime. In “My Parents and My Children,” a man confronts an uncomfortable situation he has been drawn into with his ex-wife and her new boyfriend when she asks him to bring his probably unsound and decidedly nudist parents to visit their children at a rented vacation home. A neighbor considers what might be driving a recurring cycle in “It Happens All the Time in This House,” where the woman next door throws her late son’s clothes over their fence and her husband comes, unfailingly, to retrieve them. “Breath From the Depths,” the collection's emotional pinnacle, introduces Lola, a paranoid and housebound elderly woman who's outlasted her will to live and her capacity to do anything about it, as her memory empties alongside the contents of her home. “Forty Centimeters Squared” finds an unnamed woman, after moving away to Spain, returned to Buenos Aires, her belongings packed in a storage unit and with no home to call her own. “An Unlucky Man” follows a girl whose younger sister’s antics have resulted in a trip to the hospital, where she is forgotten and ignored until she meets the unluckiest man in the world in the waiting room, who takes her on a birthday adventure that ends badly but might easily have ended even worse. And, finally, in “Out,” a woman steps out of the morass of what appears to be a failing relationship and, for a moment, into new possibilities, guided by a mysterious maintenance man who claims to have been fixing her building's fire escape—a self-described escapist.
Seven compelling explorations of vacancy in another perfectly spare and atmospheric translation.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-54139-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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
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
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