A debut novel that explores the contours of grief and globalization with conviction.
In the aftermath of her only sibling’s death, an Indian woman builds a life of purpose and connection.
Vega Gopalan was just a teenager when her younger sister succumbed to an illness their family was assured she would overcome. Somehow Vega’s life continues even as her sister’s has ended. She finishes college and pursues graduate work first in her native South India, then in New York. What becomes clear as she moves through her studies and finds friends and lovers is that the grief she carries impacts her ability to form relationships and engage with the world around her. It’s not as simple as grief imbuing her with a fear of abandonment. The loss acts as a film, a barrier between her and the people who wish to know her fully, even as she too longs for life’s intimacies. Over the next decade, she achieves professional success, marries, has a child, divorces, all the while excavating a yearning for kinship that too often eludes her. The story unfolds episodically, in a good way; in Sundar’s hands, the scenes tumble together hypnotically. The book captures a moment in time—before smartphones and social media as we know them today—among a particular set of people who cross international borders for higher education and enticing opportunities. The catch is that their lives can be as circumscribed by capricious visa policies and systemic prejudices as by any personal limitations. This yields a sense of transience; Sundar captures the cascades of smaller griefs as Vega and the people in her universe develop close ties when they overlap in cities and on campuses, then move on for coursework, jobs, fellowships, and family. Several stirring stretches of the novel eclipse the few plodding ones. As the book illustrates, there are always trade-offs.
A debut novel that explores the contours of grief and globalization with conviction.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668016107
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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