A bold dystopian tale that predicts a chilling entry for 2020 in the history books.
This dystopian thriller follows a scrappy group of survivors during a Pandemic Era.
In the year 2090, a series of viral plagues has nearly dismantled civilization. People no longer work, living on government rations in semipermanent lockdown. Lily Brayburn is the hopeful center of her community, comprising about 20 people who live in an apartment building. She copes with a dreary life in the Pandemic Era, filled with a Cannibal Gang and victim-snatching “cure crews,” by believing she’ll see her parents again. Most residents respect her leadership. An over-the-hill military veteran named Faulkner is the exception. Though valuable for his sharpshooting skills, he’s a misogynist who loathes women in command. After prisoners escape from the Novel Corporation’s Homeless Detention Center No. 10, Lily finds a teenager hiding in her building. This is 17-year-old Mabel, who is six months pregnant. Though Lily tries to secure Mabel in her room, Faulkner is canny and finds out about her. He has failed to turn any residents against Lily in favor of his own leadership, but he plans to use Mabel’s presence during a routine head count by government officials to his advantage. Meanwhile, Mabel’s lover, Ben, remains at large, trying to avoid the Novel Corporation’s undercover agents, who always want fresh victims on whom to test vaccines. Tameem uses a touch of black humor to follow humanity’s downward spiral in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. A succession of increasingly horrid coronaviruses damages society until the Great Plague of 2082 kills almost everyone. The wealthy, including the racist Gloria Van Leuven, create Environmental Zones to enjoy. Medical specialists like Victor Stark search for cures in a morally bankrupt system that disenfranchises people and then uses their bodies. Faulkner, standing in for the 45th president of the United States, is the author’s “stable genius” who uses misplaced swagger to bully everyone. Some readers may be put off by a pulpy thriller set against the backdrop of a real-world health crisis, but others will find it cathartic. Solid worldbuilding allows the finale to boil over into a potential sequel.
A bold dystopian tale that predicts a chilling entry for 2020 in the history books.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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