A rich historical thriller that makes chemistry as exciting as espionage.
Two intrepid spies navigate the early years of Nazi aggression and the looming threat of the atomic bomb.
While Polostan (2024), the first book in Stephenson’s Bomb Light series, followed Dawn Rae Bjornberg/Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva, an American cowgirl turned Soviet spy, the second installment follows Owen Crisp-Upjohn, the British journalist she meets playing polo in Russia. When Aurora reveals to Owen that Russia has assigned her to seduce him, and asks him to help her escape the country by appearing to fall in love with her so the spy agency will send her out after him, he’s only too happy to oblige. After he leaves the USSR, he embarks on his own wild adventure on assignment to find a wayward earl in Australia, and doesn’t meet up with Aurora again until they both arrive in Barcelona just in time to be swept up in the Spanish Civil War. After managing to survive Spain, they meet back up with the Earl of Suffolk in Paris, and quickly dive into the efforts of the French and the British to obtain precious “heavy water”: a strange new invention that has something to do with nuclear “fission,” which the scientific community seems to think will change everything about modern warfare and world politics. Owen and Aurora are fictional characters, but they interact with many real-world figures—like the rather incredible Earl of Suffolk, who made enormous contributions to the early efforts to prevent the Nazis from obtaining nuclear capabilities, which are little-enough known that the average reader will be on the edge of their seats. There is plenty of history and science to be learned in these pages, and Owen’s lack of technical knowledge makes him the perfect point-of-view character to make the chemistry lessons serve the story and keep the plot moving. Stephenson gives his readers credit for being smart enough to follow his robust prose style and, as always, those readers are in for something truly remarkable.
A rich historical thriller that makes chemistry as exciting as espionage.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780062839732
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
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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