An energetic international drama with an indefatigable heroine.
A Cold War novel that features two accidental spies on a daring mission to change the Soviet government.
Set in Northern Europe in 1971, Baker’s epic international spy thriller chronicles the lives of Lena Kristoff, a Soviet academic economist, and Eric Barrenger, an American paleontology student in Sweden. Each ends up embroiled in the Cold War espionage that’s a perfect fit for the setting. Lena dreams of changing her government’s totalitarian system, while younger, more impressionable grad student Eric imagines the life of a spy to be lucrative and thrilling, so he accepts jobs to discreetly courier packages to remote locations. The characters’ paths converge in Leningrad, and they begin a steamy love affair, although the danger increases as the courier jobs become more complex. When a delivery goes wrong, Eric is shot and Lena barely escapes with her life, and as the couple are separated, Lena fears the worst. Before long, she’s surprised by an unexpected pregnancy, and raises Eric’s child with her sister, Katya, and her friends. In 1978, she takes a new secret assignment, assessing a computer model of the Soviet economic structure and smuggling documents for the CIA, which could make her aspirations for a Soviet “turnover to a Western-style economy and democracy” come true. Lena’s mission soon puts her on the run with her young son in tow, and in the novel’s gripping second half, she attempts to outsmart angry Soviet military colonels in a chase across Eastern Europe. Over the course of this book, Baker expertly sets scenes of betrayal, sabotage, and surveillance, all energized by Lena’s steely determination to bring down the Soviet government. The scenes between her and Eric effectively leaven the espionage excitement with passionate romance, but after a showdown at the Austrian border nearly kills Lena, it leads to characters reconsidering their lives. Baker once again shows himself to be a skillful, seasoned writer, as he adroitly demonstrated in his past historical biographies, detective series, and espionage novels.Throughout, he delivers captivating action as the gently simmering plot rolls along, with exacting, atmospheric period details, and crisp character development.
An energetic international drama with an indefatigable heroine.Pub Date: May 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-94-933622-1
Page Count: 511
Publisher: Other Voices Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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