A heartbreaking but redemptive story about an unlikely friendship.
An elderly woman finds a serendipitous connection with a soldier in post–World War II Cornwall, England.
The 89-year-old Marvelous Ways is waiting for something, but she doesn’t know what. A woman guided by visions and dreams, she lives in the village of St. Ophere, where people have names like “Peace” and “Gladly” (and “Marvelous”). It’s 1947 and the village is slowly dying as people move away, but Marvelous remains, waiting. Francis Drake is a young solider who’s been traumatized by his experiences fighting in the war. He promised a dying comrade that he’d hand-deliver a letter to the man’s father in Cornwall, but it’s taken him nearly three years to find his way there. When Drake finally arrives, he’s almost immediately taken in by Marvelous Ways, who nurses him back to health after his long journey. Although Marvelous and Drake don’t have much in common on the surface, they develop a sweet friendship that’s largely based on Marvelous sharing stories from her eventful life. In her first novel since the bestselling Still Life (2021), Winman creates a magical world where Marvelous relies on intuition to guide her. The village of St. Ophere is beautifully described—readers can almost hear the waves and smell the mud and foliage that Marvelous frequently describes. While Marvelous’ life is full of heartbreaking beauty, Drake’s has more violence. The horrors he experienced in WWII leap off the page in their brutality. Winman’s prose is descriptive in a way that often feels lush, but can also be frustratingly opaque—at times, it’s difficult to understand what’s happening (the lack of quotation marks doesn’t help). But for readers who crave poetic language and plenty of metaphors, this dreamlike story may be just what they’re looking for.
A heartbreaking but redemptive story about an unlikely friendship.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9798217181117
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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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