An elegantly arch but empathetic excursion into impending apocalypse, and some of St. Aubyn’s best work yet.
A hurtling ride through the world’s collapse.
Continuing a storyline begun in Double Blind (2021), St. Aubyn’s latest opens with a view through the window of an onrushing train—a metaphor that will appear frequently—where Sebastian, an eminently sensitive young man, feels “the gaping wounds” of the English countryside. Sebastian is being treated, without much success, for schizophrenia and is certainly not prepared for the surprise that his doctor will reveal about his past. Sebastian’s twin, Olivia, is busily married and mothering, having grown up as an adoptee apart from him. Olivia has found work writing radio scripts on the unfolding sixth extinction, with “artificial intelligence, pandemics, nuclear annihilation, global warming, asteroids and overpopulation” among her unhappy subjects. Olivia’s tale entwines with that of the mogul Hunter Sterling, now the partner of Lucy, the center of the previous novel, both of them having retreated from the world after Hunter’s sale of a startup to “a Silicon Valley amortality company, which exploited the fear of death by offering to download its customers’ consciousness onto a ‘non-biological substrate.’” St. Aubyn’s piece makes a neat companion to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in depicting harried people constantly on the run, on the make, and at the end of their tethers in a time of crumbling civilizations—in which, pointedly, the “current batch of the super-rich” who want to “piss off to Mars or swap Europe for Europa” are savaged as a class and a few world leaders (“I due amici, Putin and Trump”) are lampooned by name, all with great good slashingly sarcastic humor. St. Aubyn’s closing, which leaves room for another episode, is quite sincere, though, and even affecting in recounting Sebastian and Olivia’s tentative efforts to form not just a relationship but a family, the only bastion against doom.
An elegantly arch but empathetic excursion into impending apocalypse, and some of St. Aubyn’s best work yet.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593535349
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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