A bleak but psychologically insightful portrait of family dynamics.
These people are related—but can they relate?
Berne, who won the Orange Prize for A Crime in the Neighborhood, her 1997 debut, and more recently charmed readers with the social satire The Dogs of Littlefield (2016), chooses a tight focus for her latest: the tense dynamics of three troubled individuals as they play out over a few days in rural Vermont. Marika is a Dutch survivor of the Nazi occupation; she lives alone in a run-down cottage by a lake, where the action occurs. Marika has been only barely in touch with her daughter, Lorna, whom she abandoned along with her husband and son when the children were young, resurfacing more than 30 years later, after the birth of Lorna's son. Lorna is a therapist whose husband has recently left her for another woman and moved to the West Coast; she is dealing with the return from college of her 19-year-old, Adam, after a traumatic experience he will not share—nor has she ever told him about her mother's abandonment. Following his mysterious humiliation, Adam has embarked on what he thinks of as a "scourge" that involves, among other things, rejecting the first-person pronoun and proper names. He is A, his parents are X and Y, and this makes the first chapter, written from his perspective, a tough read. "A did away with I. I=Death." When Lorna learns that Marika has sprained her ankle and needs family assistance, she asks Adam to accompany her on the road trip. He agrees only as part of his self-abnegation project but then finds he has a more positive response to his gruff, unappealing grandmother than to what he sees as his pathetic, approval-seeking mom. Lorna, though miserable, is smart enough to see what's going on. "People who suffered a trauma often felt that if it went unmentioned it was containable, which led to intimacy issues." So Marika's not talking about her very dark war experience, Lorna's not talking about her childhood, and Adam sure as hell isn't telling what happened at college. Until they all do.
A bleak but psychologically insightful portrait of family dynamics.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-476-79426-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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