An imaginative tale of penitence, bravery, and blood.
A man who has lived many lives appears in tumultuous 16th-century Spain.
During the reign of King Ferdinand of Aragon, an itinerant iron man—a sharpener of tools—arrives at the girl Mariah’s farm. He is Telamon, of the Greek province of Arcadia, and he has an X tattooed on his arm. But Mariah senses much more in the man. “You pretend to be a simple tinker, but you carry secrets,” she tells him, believing he carries devils. She is right. In fact, he is a penitente who had been a Roman soldier and a grievous sinner in previous lives and is condemned to continue living miserable lives forever. The only thing that can release him and let him finally die once and for all is a curious, improbable set of conditions set, apparently, by the Almighty. One reader might exclaim that the Lord works in mysterious ways while others might just see a contrived plot device. Either way, it serves well to deliver a dramatic finale. Early in the story, Mariah’s farm is pillaged by marauding Portuguese invaders led by Severiano—the Severe One—whose primary task is to find and confiscate hundreds of tons of black powder. For his own reasons, he also wants the iron man, his horse, and Mariah. Speaking of equines, Telamon’s horse is a noble, unnamed animal, and the two have a deep emotional connection. Severiano’s magnificent steed is named La Mano Derecha de Dios, or The Right Hand of God, and both animals figure significantly in the story. Meanwhile, Telamon is an army deserter and vows to “never again harm another human being. I will never bear arms again in war.” Instead, he commits himself to protecting Mariah and his horse, also branded with an X. Mariah has hallucinations that open up Telamon’s past as a Roman legionnaire centuries before. The tale’s dramatic set piece is the siege of a citadel, portrayed in wrenching detail. The literary style is replete with rhetorical flourishes such as “A cry of joy sprang from twice a hundred townsmen’s throats.”
An imaginative tale of penitence, bravery, and blood.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781324124252
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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 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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