The lack of palpable drama makes this multigenerational saga a disappointment.
Sixty years in the lives of two British families.
In Evers’ deliberately paced novel, two young British soldiers separated by social class become close friends in 1959 at a military base that features an installation known as Doom Town, a graphic simulation of the devastation wrought by a nuclear war. There, we follow the lives of James Carter and Drummond Moore through two generations as they marry, raise children, and deal with the complications that arise in their relationship when Carter, a privileged civil servant, persuades his working-class friend to leave his job at a suburban London Ford factory to purchase (as a front for Carter) and work the farm adjacent to Carter’s estate in northwest England. Throughout their adulthood, the two men are haunted by the specter of nuclear holocaust, a fear that provokes a crisis for the Moores when a frighteningly realistic nuclear-attack drill brings their families together in the Carters’ bunker in 1980. From the cultural upheaval of the 1960s through Thatcher-era austerity to the disruption of Brexit, Britain undergoes wrenching economic, political, and social change, but little of that appears to touch the lives of these characters in any significant way. The sole exceptions are the terrorist bombings in London on July 7, 2005, events that intrude on the story only obliquely because of the presence of a couple of the characters in the city when they occur. Instead, as he revisits his characters at gradually lengthening intervals, Evers is preoccupied with familial tension, mostly involving the Moores, including the estrangement of their daughter, Anneka, and Drummond’s wife Gwen’s protracted agonizing over whether to embark on an affair with a travel writer whose exotic life contrasts sharply with that of her stolid farmer husband’s. Despite a handful of emotionally affecting scenes and some well-drawn characters, the novel feels overlong given its dearth of narrative momentum.
The lack of palpable drama makes this multigenerational saga a disappointment.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00625-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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