Flinty and sharp-edged, these stories show no sign that the octogenarian McGuane is softening up.
Nine stories of dead-end lives and wide-open spaces, set mainly in the American West.
This slim collection from the Montana master seems like kind of a coda to his prolific career. It provides plenty of bleak comedy, as morally compromised characters face mortality and determine that their lives haven’t amounted to much of anything, their existence seems as barren as the landscape surrounding it. In the opening “Wide Spot,” a cynical politician offers a first-person narrative in which a reunion leads to an inappropriate seduction attempt. In “Balloons,” a physician with a dying patient offers another first-person narrative about the surprising retribution he faces for an affair that ended long before. From there, the perspective in these stories generally shifts to third person, but there’s nothing approaching omniscience. The protagonists, usually male, on the downside of middle age, are typically careless and often clueless. The natural splendor of their American West has been undermined by grifters: “Life in the West was a beautiful idea, best left in that state, a conviction not easily conveyed.…The place was infested with land speculators: house flippers, ranch flippers, and river flippers.” Two of the stories feature protagonists who have achieved some financial success, a good distance from Montana, and both are as miserable as the drifters and losers in the rest. In “Thataway,” a chain-store furniture magnate living in Palm Springs returns home for the funeral of one of his all-but-estranged sisters. The disastrous visit makes him realize that he has no home, and on the return trip to California “he had a fleeting hope that the plane would stay up in the air.” The concluding title story is the longest and perhaps the darkest, as a river trip fraught with tension and peril reveals the dysfunction of a tycoon’s family.
Flinty and sharp-edged, these stories show no sign that the octogenarian McGuane is softening up.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780385350235
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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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