Elegant and unpredictable in the best possible way.
An inventive novel about family from a risk-taking writer.
Daley-Ward memorably played with structure in her memoir, The Terrible (2018), which combined prose and poetry to tell the story of her fraught childhood and young adulthood. Her debut novel finds her using a similar toolbox, but in a very new way. The book follows 30-year-old twin sisters Clara, a writer whose debut novel is making literary waves, and Dempsey, who works an uninspiring administrative job. The two aren’t close, and haven’t been since they were adopted into different families as children after their mother was found dead on the bank of the Thames. Clara was “the chosen one,” welcomed into a wealthy family, while Dempsey was adopted by a single man, a member of the local council—the twins are, as Clara says, “opposite halves of a strange truth, both born from a force unknown.” Clara is shocked when she sees a woman shoplifting at a department store and believes it’s her long-dead mother, Serene, somehow brought back as a 30-year-old with no children. Clara stalks the woman, and they eventually become friends, to the horror of Dempsey, who thinks her sister—a prolific drinker—is losing her mind. The novel switches perspectives between Clara, convinced that she's found her mother, and Dempsey, just trying to live her life, as Clara and the mystery woman enter into a bizarre and intense relationship. Daley-Ward explores the tension between the twins beautifully, with Dempsey struggling to pull her sister from the brink; both harbor barely concealed grudges against the other. (“Sometimes, I could happily decapitate my sister,” muses Dempsey at one point; not long after, Clara thinks, “Sometimes, I could happily strangle Dempsey.”) The novel ends with a genuine shock, but it’s earned—it’s a surprising conclusion to a beautifully written and structured book.
Elegant and unpredictable in the best possible way.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781324092513
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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