A tender, surprising excavation of minds meeting and hearts singing through disappointments to very human deaths.
Based on the true story of the author’s grandparents, this intimate look at the marriage between a defrocked priest and a theology teacher takes place in 1960s England and 21st-century France.
Vatican II, convened in 1962 as the first such gathering in nearly 100 years, electrified young Roman Catholics around the world—even in largely Protestant England, where Catholic enclaves in the north still sent young men like David Fletcher to the priesthood. Meanwhile, some young women, like Margaret Bendelow, were selected to study a sort of theology-light in Rome, to fit them for teaching college girls at St. Genevieve’s. Margaret and David meet when he is assigned as her diocesan advisor, and sparks fly quickly, though chastely. Neither intends to start a love affair, but once it happens, it blows the roof off their lives. The story proceeds haltingly yet meaningfully, moving from their grandson Adrian’s discovery of this family secret, back to David’s early exhilaration with his vocation, to Margaret’s scholarly brilliance, on to Adrian caring for her through her difficult old age. Sometimes Margaret is able to share memories; sometimes she is lost to the fog of dementia. Connecting the elderly Margaret to her dynamic 30-something self is particularly difficult, a distancing that feels right given how little material Adrian and his mother, Hilary, have to explain Margaret’s past. It’s enough for the reader to see inside the grandparents’ marriage and its many challenges, which include ostracization, a poor sexual fit, and Hilary’s too-quick arrival; David and Margaret scarcely have time to unwrap wedding gifts before she’s pregnant. Sy-Quia wisely avoids tying up all loose ends, creating a portrait rather than a complicated plot. Although it’s clear from early on that David makes an important late request, without the rest of this restrained narrative, the significance of that request would mean very little. Instead, it explains everything.
A tender, surprising excavation of minds meeting and hearts singing through disappointments to very human deaths.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780802166906
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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 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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