Well-developed characters energize this story of camaraderie.
An England-born Scot lives a life in the 1980s that teems with eclectic acquaintances in this debut novel.
Archie Henderson sees attending university as an escape from life with his unpleasant mother. He studies history and becomes particularly fond of stories of the United States’ past, so he and his best friend, Tommy, obtain student work visas and travel around America. As the young men make their way south, Archie learns about the country’s history of slavery, the Civil War, and current racism. Along the way, he meets remarkable people, including the amicable New Orleans local Willie B. Back in the U.K., Archie gets a job working the Asian equities desk at an investment firm, which finds him mingling with colorful clients and colleagues. He reunites with someone he once rescued from a bully at their all-boys school; now she goes by Vincenza and waits tables at a drag club in Soho. Archie later focuses on his own life, including a possible romance and a family secret. Davies’ appealing, selfless protagonist often puts himself at risk to help both friends and strangers. However, he frequently comes across as a tourist in supporting characters’ more compelling stories. Willie B, for example, is a Black man who’s victimized by a justice system that doesn’t do much harm to Archie, who’s White. At another point, Archie witnesses someone else jump into a raging river to save a young girl, and he spectates during a character’s entanglement in an attempted murder trial. Still, the cast is superb, including a surprisingly charming undertaker and a former Royal Marine who’s the son of a British noble and a stage performer. Sharply written prose maintains a steady narrative momentum, as when Archie and Tommy travel through Texas: “Discovering the delights of Tex Mex cuisine they headed for a bar where they found a crowd of students enjoying Freshers Week….Being back among their own kind Archie and Tommy soon got into the swing of it with plenty of stories and plenty of nonsense.” The marvelous opening and closing scenes also enrich the novel.
Well-developed characters energize this story of camaraderie.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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