A sly, unsettling hybrid of social satire and domestic thriller.
A brittle marriage and a too-perfect au pair upend a failed writer’s life in this clever, unsettling novel.
Wayne, author of six previous novels, returns with an ingenious dissection of marriage, masculinity, and privilege, propelled by a gimlet-eyed wit. The opening scene—a Manhattan fundraiser where tuxedoed men “like inflatable penguins” mingle over wagyu sliders with their “spectral, hollow-cheeked wives”—establishes both the novel’s milieu and the lopsided dynamic between Steven, a 45-year-old writer living off a long-ago bestseller, and his high-powered wife, Lucy, who bankrolls their life. His mortification is complete when he accidentally streams a phone notification to his writing class in which his wife confirms she’s paid his monthly stipend. Wayne excels at these micro-humiliations, exposing the psychic toll of dependency and artistic drift. But he also has fun sending up contemporary pieties, such as a school production of Hansel and Gretel retooled into a “generative dialogue” about loneliness. Instead of pushing the witch into the oven, Gretel asks her why she is “not practicing kindness.” After the sudden death of the family’s nanny, the novel’s tempo shifts into something more sinister and unnerving. Steven persuades his wife to recruit a young Norwegian au pair, Astrid, who exerts a Mary Poppins–like charm on the children, sidelining Lucy’s position in the household. Meanwhile, Steven’s creative paralysis gives way to an erotic fixation that Astrid reciprocates despite their 21-year age gap. Wayne is alert to cliche but complicates it by making Astrid less fantasy than catalyst, drawing out a buried childhood narrative that revives Steven’s writing even as it scrambles his judgment. The novel’s back half pivots into a thriller, culminating in a death and a trial that transforms private disgrace into public spectacle. If the resolution seems fanciful, it also sharpens Wayne’s point: In a culture hungry for confession, even failure can be repackaged as art.
A sly, unsettling hybrid of social satire and domestic thriller.Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9780063457232
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
