A stunning book—a balm for our times—containing the incredible gift of the everyday.
A woman weathering quarantine isolation in her urban home reinhabits a childhood spent in the fields and woods of North Yorkshire.
This unusual novel of minute, lush observation opens on a spring day in the narrator’s distant childhood. Looking down into the quarry at the edge of her small village, the narrator sees a sheet of the clay wall drop away and expose the interior of a vole’s burrow to a kestrel floating on an air current high above the quarry’s flooded floor. As the narrator follows, the vole flees from its ruined home and out into the open, where it freezes in full view of the now interested kestrel, who tilts in her flight to hover above the creature, ready to drop. The narrator’s attention to the two animals—meticulous, alert, and mature—“draw[s] a direct line between them, like a lift between two floors of a building,” and she feels “a sense of love arise inside me, as huge and widespread as the vole was small and specific, and it occurred to me that I could rescue him.” This small emergency tilts the narrator into a spill of memories that flow from the intimate and particular character of the space and time she has inhabited—the fields, tamed forests, pastures, paddocks, and quiet, seemingly eternal springs of the North Yorkshire countryside. However, as the title suggests, this is not a novel of rugged, wild individualism but rather a pastoral in which the landscape reflects at every turn the imprint of the human world in its management, exploitation, or collaborative reimagining. As an unnamed, but familiar, pandemic rages through the city outside her window, the adult author of these childhood remembrances ponders the interconnectedness of all worlds, from the minute wisps of spiders’ webs that break as she passes to the line of ancient hollies planted to mark out a path for winter travelers in the century past to the bundle of wires that dangle exposed on the wall outside her window that form literal lines of connection between all the isolated boxes of her neighbors’ own pandemic-stunted lives. The world that is crafted in this novel is like our own world: filled with joys and sorrows, death and renewal, the sublime and the literal filth that turns to soil beneath our feet. Stunning in its intimacy and the precise quality of its recall, the book nevertheless manages to make its primary business the act of inclusion, bringing us into the sense of our separate lives as being “formed and renewed by many minds and mindless forces…the space itself degraded and vanished when these connections failed.”
A stunning book—a balm for our times—containing the incredible gift of the everyday.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66260-147-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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
SEEN & HEARD
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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