A lyrical, sinuous exploration of queer love and diasporic grief.
Lovers in exile reckon with the weight of history over the course of one winter’s night in Berlin.
In Moskovich’s novel in verse, two women sit quietly beside one another in their bed in the dark. Both were displaced as children when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991; the narrator, like the author, was a Jewish refugee from Ukraine to the United States, and Nadezhda, her girlfriend, an emigre from Russia to Germany. With the narrator’s meandering reflections on an intricate tapestry of references—the poetry of Sophia Parnok and Ilya Kaminsky, short stories from O. Henry and Chekhov, Russian queer counterculture (“all that stuff that made it into the New York Times, / and all the stuff that didn’t”), Yiddish sayings, Soviet jokes, the list goes on—Moskovich illustrates the silence that stretches between the women throughout the long night. Acknowledged in the shadows is the most recent Russian invasion of Ukraine (“forbidden to refer to as a ‘war’ in Russia,” the narrator notes), and the long tradition of Soviet antisemitism. The novel engages frankly with these broader realities, but if there is a plot here, it’s the one that unfurls on a minute, human level through the slivers of personal history we glean about the pair and the trajectory of their relationship. The tension that thrums at the heart of the novel is their fervid, sometimes painful love for each other, laced through with unhealed wounds and an experience of post-Soviet splintering that is simultaneously shared and inevitably different for each woman. Moskovich etches the dynamic with elegant economy: “I like Jews, / Nadezhda said with such pride / that I couldn’t help but recognize / the generations of Soviets / who twirled upon their blind eye, she / didn’t have to understand, I decided, / but I wanted her to understand / that she didn’t understand.” Buoyed by nimble intertextuality and precisely observed emotional currents, this single-sentence novel in verse trips along with surprising ease.
A lyrical, sinuous exploration of queer love and diasporic grief.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781938603518
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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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