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PERMAFROST

An intimate exploration of the unknown territory of desire, destruction, and whatever falls in between.

A young woman’s twin impulses toward sex and death merge into a duty to life in this lush English-translation debut.

The narrator of this lithe, prismatic book is unapologetic about her frank lesbian sexuality. She is a lover, an ardent explorer of the sensual, a student of bodies—including her own—who remains uninterested in the empty moralizing of middle-class values. Born in Barcelona to a family with a deeply neurotic mother, a distant father, and a younger sister interested in fulfilling all the gender norms of womanhood, the narrator struggles not with her sexual orientation but rather with the essential absurdity of a life lived in search of speciously defined material success. Convinced by her mother to get a degree in art history, rather than pursue the urge to create, the narrator spends her post-degree years immersed in books, which she understands as a sort of pleasurable abnegation of the self. She also travels, first leaving Barcelona for a stint as a Spanish tutor in Brussels, where she meets the incomparable Veronika, whose “thick, silken hair...remind[s her] of the surreal bundles of fiber optics that a technician had once threaded through the façade of [her] Barcelona apartment”; spending a brief time as an au pair in Scotland, where she feels that the “anomalous, flat and rich” green of the Scottish landscape “rises like a suffocating tide, floods every cavity, and colonizes the most fertile parts of my ego”; and returning home to Barcelona to eventually settle into work writing articles for a publication that makes her feel “colorless—a dreadful muddle of various hues, an unthinkably grim and grayish green.” Throughout, the narrator is obsessed not only with the physicality of her lovers and the pleasure she finds in their bodies, but also with the solace she perceives in thoughts of death. She has multiple near suicide attempts which are unconsummated not due to a lack of seriousness but rather due to external factors. The narrator seems likely to continue on this way, drifting between lovers and suicide attempts in a lucid swoon of sensation, were it not for the sudden illness of her 6-year old niece, Clàudia, which thrusts her into the unanticipated experience of wonder and reciprocal trust. Prior to this novel, Baltasar published 10 books of poetry in her native Catalan, and her poet’s sense of language as musculature—a body in its own right—flexes in every line of the carefully translated prose.

An intimate exploration of the unknown territory of desire, destruction, and whatever falls in between.

Pub Date: April 6, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-91150-875-5

Page Count: 128

Publisher: And Other Stories

Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021

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THE ACADEMY

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

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THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY

A masterpiece.

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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

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