With an alchemy like Douglas Stuart’s, Hughes transforms the dross of Steffie’s life into literary gold.
When her father dies, a scrappy, downtrodden dry-cleaning clerk in the English Midlands wonders if the time has come to solve some painful mysteries.
“It’s hard to explain. Imagine someone suddenly starts saying Tuesday comes straight after Sunday. There’s no such thing as Monday. You learn not to mention Monday. Monday is not a thing in your house. At school you might write Monday on your page, but you’d never make that mistake at home.” When Steffie Cartwright’s older sister, Caroline, disappeared at age 16, she knew better than to say a word. The rule of silence was already well established regarding the terrible difference between the way Stan Cartwright treated his two daughters, though Steffie never really understood what went on, or why. For sure she can’t forget her father retrieving two eggs from the coop, then throwing the rest in the hedge to ensure that only the two of them would have any. With her gentle mother long dead, Steffie’s adult life has revolved around caring for her father and her job at the dry cleaner’s. Laundry plays a profound role in this second novel from Hughes, which she explains in an author’s note was inspired by a 14th-century poem known as “Purity” or “Cleanness” in which dirty, tattered clothes are a spiritual metaphor. As much as Steffie takes pride in her work, she gets herself fired by borrowing a customer’s clothes to wear to her father’s funeral, then slapping her boss in the face after she’s caught. Losing this job sends her into a long period of free fall, desperation, drug and alcohol abuse, promiscuity, evictions, and criminality, throughout which she keeps wondering whether she should try to find Caroline and tell her their father is dead. Despite her bullheaded self-destructiveness, violence, and mistaken loyalty to her father, Steffie’s sardonic, never self-pitying voice is impossible not to fall for, as is the part of her personality that prizes fabric and is obsessed with preserving and cleaning it. The last chapter of the book is unexpected and welcome, shedding clarity on all that comes before.
With an alchemy like Douglas Stuart’s, Hughes transforms the dross of Steffie’s life into literary gold.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781250459572
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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