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 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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