A penetrating novel that suggests lives are shaped less by events than by what remains after them.
Murphy’s novel offers a reflective, cleareyed reckoning with memory, war, and the fragile mechanics of love.
Leo Mulcahy, a recently retired physician and former combat medic, sets out on a long-anticipated trip to Vietnam with his wife, Claire, hoping to revisit the places that shaped his youth and to confront—carefully, deliberately—a war he has spent decades keeping at arm’s length. As they move from contemporary Saigon toward the rural interior, guided by a local interpreter with his own wartime history, Leo searches for Quan Loi, the now-vanished base camp where he once served. The journey unfolds against the backdrop of Leo’s recent medical diagnosis, his uneasy transition into retirement, and the emotional weight Claire carries as the sister of a medic killed during the war. What begins as a pilgrimage rooted in curiosity and unfinished history gradually becomes a test of endurance, forcing Leo to navigate memory, grief, professional identity, and the unsettling realization that neither our bodies nor our pasts remain fully under our control. The narrative alternates between the present-day journey and layered recollections from Leo’s life—his years as a young medic in Vietnam, his long marriage, his medical career, and the ethical failures that continue to haunt him. Murphy renders Vietnam with careful specificity, not as a static site of trauma but as a living place. Saigon’s noise and density clash with Leo’s remembered silence, while the rediscovery of Quan Loi underscores how easily physical history can disappear. “With the jungle slowly taking over, Quan Loi would soon vanish,” Leo observes, a line that captures the book’s persistent tension between erasure and remembrance. Running parallel to the external journey is the portrait of Leo and Claire’s marriage. The author renders Claire with precision and warmth—she’s practical, impatient with wasted time, deeply empathetic, and quietly decisive. Their relationship gives the book much of its emotional ballast, grounding the historical material in domestic reality.
As the book progresses, the focus turns increasingly inward. Letters, dreams, and professional memories interrupt the forward motion, revealing how Leo’s medical training—his reliance on probabilities, diagnoses, and rational frameworks—has shaped his understanding of the world and its failures. The recurring metaphor of “hoofbeats,” a lesson from medical school about assuming common causes before rare ones, becomes a lens through which the author examines moral blindness and hindsight. Leo’s reflections on bad judgment, both personal and professional, are among the book’s most unsettling moments, precisely because they resist easy absolution. The prose remains measured and controlled throughout, favoring clarity over flourishes. Moments of humor surface unexpectedly, often through irony or understated observation, providing relief without diminishing the book’s gravity. The pacing is deliberate, which occasionally demands patience, but the accumulation of details will reward close attention. Rather than building toward a single revelatory moment, the narrative gains force through repetition and return, mirroring the way memory itself works. Attentive to time’s passage, to the body’s betrayals, and to the ethical residue of past decisions, Murphy prioritizes restraint over spectacle. He offers no simple reckonings and no false comforts, only the steady illumination of a life examined honestly.
A penetrating novel that suggests lives are shaped less by events than by what remains after them.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781663276070
Page Count: 334
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An existential crisis that steps on its own final moments.
With only a month left until the world ends due to a swiftly approaching black hole, Don and Rodney, a retired gay couple, road-trip from Maine to Washington to spend their final days with their son.
After reports that a planet-swallowing black hole is making its way toward Earth, Rodney and Don—who have been together for 40 years and survived everything from homophobia to the HIV crisis—decide to pack their belongings into an RV, say goodbye to their neighbors, and travel from Camden, Maine, to Washington to uphold a promise to spend their final days with their son. They can’t wait any longer, since there’s already chaos around the country: “Military vehicles in the streets of most cities and towns. Looting, rioting, the burning of cars and buildings and people, all of it had already happened.” As they make their way west across the country, they encounter fellow travelers ranging from close-knit families to free-spirited hippies, some of whom have come to terms with the impending end of the world and others who haven’t. While the story seems to be asking readers what they would do if they had 30 days left to live, and reflects on what different kinds of acceptance might look like in the face of unavoidable tragedy, it loses some of its poignancy in a series of thinly padded monologues about the meaning of life. Clearly intended to pack an emotional punch, it’s failed by an abrupt ending, and the way the journey’s mystery—which will be obvious to many readers—is revealed by an info dump in the last chapter.
An existential crisis that steps on its own final moments.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781250881236
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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