This impressive novel feels at once modern and eternal, like a perfectly balanced and freshly honed chef’s knife.
A deceptively simple recounting of a small European dinner party in which even tiny details reflect global truths.
Imagine a mashup of a Renaissance-era Bruegel canvas and a 21st-century Grayson Perry sculpture that somehow encompasses all that came between and you’ll approximate the feel of this at once heady and heavy narrative. A youngish Austrian couple, known only as the hostess and the hostess’ partner, invite another couple, known as the husband and the wife, along with a Swiss professor, to the hostess’ new apartment for dinner. Over several bottles of crémant, nibbles, then quiche and salad, their interactions reveal their personalities, histories, and vulnerabilities, from the partner’s embarrassing the hostess on to the academic’s callous disregard for the cigarette ashes he drops on the balcony of an immigrant neighbor. No neoliberal stone will be left unturned as alternate versions of the evening slide into each other—sometimes the quiche is carefully blind-baked, sometimes not—and contrasted with how different it all would have been in an earlier time: “The unfulfilled wishes of her mother’s, grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ generations.” The author, who won Germany’s prestigious Bremer Literaturpreis for this book, neither ignores nor dwells too long on what was, for that country, a decidedly “wrong” century, instead moving on to Angela Y. Davis’ Freedom Is a Constant Struggle and then to the astonishing ease with which these privileged characters can travel and buy goods from other countries, knowing about and able to make recipes with any ingredients without having to consider seasons and frugality, as their forbears did. At the same time, the author holds some issues up to the light: “the thing that re-formed itself as feminism every decade, behaving differently each time.” From there, it’s a short leap to the sensuality of food and sex, the academic licking a vinaigrette-stained finger, a long list of tempting food photos from Instagram intertwined like the conversations held between different groups (an American couple appears at one point, underscoring how confusing our country is right now for Europeans). In the end, the novel is not an indictment of privilege, but a greatly magnified and irony-laden slice of life.
This impressive novel feels at once modern and eternal, like a perfectly balanced and freshly honed chef’s knife.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9781805331780
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
BOOK REVIEW
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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