Stott fills holes in written history with magic, mythic resonance, and 21st-century wish fulfillment.
The author of In the Days of Rain (2017) and Darwin’s Ghosts (2012) returns to fiction with a mix of history and fantasy.
“Dark earth” is the name geologists give to the layer of dirt—rich in organic matter, sometimes flecked with artifacts—that indicates a long period of human settlement. The narrative that Stott constructs here is built from an actual archaeological find—a Saxon brooch unearthed in the ruins of a bathhouse—and the figurative dark earth of the city once called Londinium. Beginning in the first century B.C.E., Britain was a Roman province for almost 400 years, and the historical record for the 500-year period after the occupiers withdrew is scant. Stott builds a rich world from fragments of fact and mythic imagining. Her central character, Isla, lives with her sister, Blue, and their father on an island in the Thames. A smith with the rare gift of making “firetongued” swords, Isla’s father is captive to Osric, Seax Lord of the South Lands; when he dies, Isla must deliver a sword to Osric without revealing that her father broke the taboo against teaching a woman his craft. Once she and Blue arrive at Osric’s court, they have to navigate complex politics after having been raised in isolation. Ultimately, they will have to flee for their lives into the “Ghost City” that has fallen into ruin since the “Sun Kings” disappeared. Stott presents a diverse Dark Ages. Isla and Blue are friends with—and protected by—Caius, descended from a line of African soldiers recruited by the Romans and now working for the Saxons who rule the south of Britain. There are Christian priests and Wiccans and a woman named Crowther who is a priest to Isis. In the Ghost City, Isla and Blue meet runaways from many lands. Most of them are women, and Isla falls in love with one of them. The conflict at the climax of this novel is not a clash of arms but a battle between brute power and cunning, between selfish greed and communal strength.
Stott fills holes in written history with magic, mythic resonance, and 21st-century wish fulfillment.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8911-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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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