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 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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