A strange, dramatic novel where all’s well, or not well, or perhaps both.
A chronically ill theater professor upends her life when she stages Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.
After a freak accident, Miranda Fitch—who was a dazzling, up-and-coming stage actress—loses her acting career, her marriage, and her formerly pain-free life. Working at a university’s “once flourishing, now decrepit Theater Studies program,” Miranda is spiraling out of control. Her days pass in a flurry of pills, doctor appointments, and dissociative conversations; she struggles to manage her chronic pain and to make others believe the extent of her suffering: “On vague fire in various places, all over, all over. Burning too with humiliation and rage.” Awad is particularly deft in describing the hellish nature of pain and the ways those living with chronic pain are often misled, dismissed, or derided. During a particularly tumultuous appointment with one of her doctors, Miranda says she knows what he thinks of her: “One of those patients. One of those sad cartoon brains who wants to live under a smudgy sky of her own making.” For the student production, Miranda wants to stage the “problem play” that took everything from her: Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. But her students—her lively, limber, and treacherous students—want to put on Macbeth, and it looks like they will get their way until Miranda meets three strange men in a bar. In exchange for “a good show,” the men offer her what she’s always wanted: no more pain. Once Miranda realizes how to transpose her pain to others, her luck begins to change—or does it? As her physical aching dissipates, almost everything else in her life becomes more vibrant. However, when no longer tethered to her pain, Miranda becomes unmoored from reality in increasingly dangerous and deranged ways. Imbued with magic and Shakespearean themes, the novel swings wildly between tragedy and comedy and reality and unreality. Although the novel sometimes struggles under the weight of its own surreality, Awad artfully and acutely explores suffering, artistry, and the limitations of empathy.
A strange, dramatic novel where all’s well, or not well, or perhaps both.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982169-66-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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