Nabokov’s classic reinvented as a 1970s moral fable, with brilliantly developed characters and period detail.
An accident at the golf course cuts short one life and totally upends another.
“At fifteen, I couldn’t outdrive the very best men’s players at the club, but I still beat all of them most of the time. My short game was as precise as a drone strike, and I was excellent on the greens.” Mira Winston is an unusually confident and self-aware teenager, and her voice on the page is irresistible. (As we will later learn, the narrator of Bohjalian’s 25th novel is herself the author of 25 novels, so perhaps it’s no surprise her storytelling skills are as impressive as her golfing.) Mira’s fictional memoir revolves around the events of Aug. 3, 1978, at a country club in New York’s Westchester County. It was her senior summer; she was 18 and on her way to Yale in a matter of weeks when a ball she smashed into the practice net went through the mesh and out the other side, hitting and instantly killing a young caddie named Kenny Foster as he was waiting to be called to carry bags. The accident has dramatic results, both immediately and over the next few years: Mira doesn’t matriculate at Yale, she never plays golf again, and in an unexpected twist, it’s revealed to one and all that she’s been having an affair with a man named Theo Catton, who’s her father’s age, and with whom she’s been involved since she was 15. Mira is well aware of the resemblance between her story and Lolita’s—she will later get a line from the novel tattooed on her forearm—but she also now understands that the younger her was sorely misled about her own agency and motivations. As the small-town drama simmers, as Mira and her parents self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, as Mira eventually comes to trial—the story is spun by then as “privileged rich girl with too much attitude recklessly kills a poor student with so much promise”—a marvelous 11th-hour twist and a satisfying denouement lie ahead. It’s hard to think of any reason not to call this a perfect novel: a hole in one.
Nabokov’s classic reinvented as a 1970s moral fable, with brilliantly developed characters and period detail.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9780385551298
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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