Hugely ambitious and with rewards for those with ample time to spare.
A massive, highly demanding novel of history and ideas.
Vollmann’s latest has 9/11 at its core. His principal protagonist for roughly half of this 3,100-page novel (about half the size of the U.S. tax code, granted) is CIA agent DAVE, always capitalized, code name for one Elliott Stevens. DAVE has come in from the field to live a safe suburban existence in a place his wife, Sally, detests: “Fortune had imprisoned her for life in McLean.” DAVE, though, is content at CIA HQ, working his secret magic on world politics: Angola, Yemen, Iraq, Grenada, the Eastern Bloc. “We hired you because you were Crazy Elliott,” cajoles a station chief, trying to lure DAVE back into the action, but Sally notwithstanding, he’s outwardly content with his present life. His neurodivergent son, Matthew, is endlessly inquisitive but never receives a straight answer: “Dad, is it, is it true that two days after September eleventh, the only passenger plane that was allowed to take off carried Saudis back to, to Arabia?” he asks, and is answered with a “not my department” shrug. DAVE sometimes wonders where his youthful bravery has gone, while a teenage Matthew takes to the road in a quest for the real America, which he’s sure exists somewhere beyond the Beltway, “beautiful, foul, filthy, infinite and noble.” For all DAVE’s intrigues, messy personal life, and emphatically different ideas of America, Matthew is by far the more interesting character. Vollmann’s novel, with its insistently odd typography and pages-long paragraphs, is an impeccably researched catalog of world history from the 1960s to the present. But negotiating its logorrheic obsessiveness is like listening to Mozart through heavy static, with occasional perfect moments coming through the crackle: “Compared to the jihadists, we’d barely begun to suffer. How many September elevenths would break us?…Probably not even the generals knew.”
Hugely ambitious and with rewards for those with ample time to spare.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781648211881
Page Count: 3096
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
