Stewart O’Nan reliably delivers a good human interest story including both the foibles and the quiet heroism in his characters. He is particularly talented at life reviews for those of a certain age.

This is the story of a group of church friends who call the folks they take on to support in illness and decline the Humpty Dumptys (HDs). They are bonded by their church and their friendship and the care they provide to others. They differ politically but agree to disagree in a way that I think many of us are doing right now in 2025.

The first third of the book meanders a bit and I was a bit confused about some of the relationships between the characters - sister in law, ex-husband, deceased husband, adult child, grandchildren, etc. I had to go back and re-read some parts.

I particularly enjoyed the last third which involved discerning just how much we can do for others who don’t seem to be able to help themselves or be responsible for the choices they make. There is one rather concerning “HD project” that isn’t resolved at the end, and that seemed a weakness of the book for me. Not that we need everything tied up in a bow, but what happens to the cats and their human takes up a lot of the middle of the book.

This book found me at a time when I’m considering my own involvement in caring for others - how much is too much and how much is just what we ought to do as “Christians” or simply as decent human beings - so I appreciated those themes.

I also wonder about the decline in church attendance and how that will impact aging and community. It seems we throw the baby out with the bath water when we lose our faith communities.

This is a 3.5 rounded up to 4 stars for me.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

How does Stewart O'Nan continue to tell such realistic stories of ordinary American women of a certain age? And make them your friends and neighbors? The Humpty Dumpty Club keep busy and useful attending choir practice, baking cookies, caring for pets, and picking up prescriptions - anything to help each other with everyday life. We follow the four primary members as they pick up the slack for each other and interact daily sharing opinions, giving advice and helping - always helping. The author revisits beloved characters from his past work - over a dozen books. Sit back and join the club!

There was so much I enjoyed about this book, that I’m not sure where to begin.
I guess first off, although it’s set in the US, it felt relatable to me as a UK reader. Probably because of the backdrop of a faith community which very much mirrors some of my own church experiences.
What else? Well, whilst I did struggle initially with getting my head round who was who (it took me a few chapters to realise that Emily and Arlene are sisters-in-law for example), once the characters were fixed in my brain I very much enjoyed their relationships with one another (Arlene’s attitude to Emily’s dog Angus, Susie’s gradual warming to Joan’s cat Oscar.)
The themes of living, ageing, dying, family relationships, dementia, illness, politics, love, loss, are woven together with a light touch but at the same time felt very real.
There were no massive ‘aha’ or shock moments, just the passing of time, of a bringing to the fore of four women’s experiences (impacting upon and impacted by those around them) as they navigate the later years of their lives.
And though I’m not at even Susie’s age yet, I am only too aware of how quickly time passes. This book will be one that I’m sure I will return to as my own story unfolds, and as some of their experiences become some of mine.
A comforting, gentle, truthful read.

My sincere gratitude to #netgalley #atlanticmonthly.press #groveatlantic and to #stewartonan for the opportunity to read and review EVENSONG - O'Nan's newest novel, written in tightly interconnected/linked short stories, This has been my favorite genre to read for decades -- introduced to me by writers like Liz Strout and Melissa Bank -- and it proved to be the perfect mechanism for moving the plot lines of the primary characters forward covering a larger swath of space and time.

This format best reflects the nature of our day-to-day life in its quietest and most relatable ways; the interconnectedness of everything. And I'm grateful that this style of storytelling seems to be growing in popularity.

I've read most of Stewart O'Nan's work and he is a powerful storyteller -- a creator of enduring and memorable characters and compelling plots. A few of these novels have been turned into marvelous motion pictures and I believe this newest collection has the same big screen potential.

#Evensong is a magnificent tribute to growing older with the people who know and love us best - our friends! It is a love letter to enduring (and new!) friendships and to O'Nan's native Pittsburgh (especially the East End) not far from where I currently live. His depiction of people, places, and events (including fairly recent current events) in and around Pittsburgh are spot-on -- an added bonus if you are familiar with them..

O'Nan's attention to detail is outstanding. There are, for example, multiple stories and plot lines in which dogs or cats play a large role and the author's use of language to describe the mannerisms and behaviors of pets is perfect. I guarantee there will not be a pet-loving reader who isn't left nodding and smiling in complicit understanding. This is a gift of Stewart O'Nan's (and the pinnacle of great writing): the ability to bring the most mundane and seemingly simple things to life in ways that -- weeks, months, and years later -- they are still written in my mind.

These stories conjure the seasons, sentiments, landmarks, and lives of a special group of people — The Humpty Dumpty Club -- group of women who are navigating the challenges of their golden years, with and without partners, children, pets. In the company and service of one another and lived with a love and compassion we seldom get to witness in our current world.

This novel is a testament to the fact that, in the words of Ram Dass, we are ALL just “walking each other home.” That the traits we have from our youth tend to endure -- the caretaker, the risk-taker, the worrier, etc. -- they never go away. They come into play (for better or for worse -- but usually better!) well into our later years in the relationships we continue to navigate.

#EVENSONG is a marvelous collection of stories featuring a handful of the most vivid, vibrant, vulnerable, and resilient women I’ve ever read (set in Pittsburgh during this pivotal past decade. And as mentioned the timeliness of the stories is a tangible thread throughout. Emily Maxwell is a repeat character (another gem of a component in interconnected stories and novels). Like Strout's Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Dalton, the ladies of the Humpty Dumpty Club will nestle into your mind and heart and I hope to see some of them (in some iteration) again in the future. The love that the author has for these Pittsburgh-based characters shines through in every story. 🖤✨💛 I thoroughly recommend Evensong -- Pub date: 11/11/2025.

This story is primarily about a group of older women (ages 61-89) who have created the “Humpty Dumpty Club” to take care of each other and to take care of their church member friends who need assistance as they age. The story centers around several women: one who has the first signs of dementia, one who is hospitalized after a fall, one (the youngest) who is dating using a dating app, and one who is caring for her ill husband. While each of them has their own trials and tribulations, we also learn about the people who these women help. Throughout the story, there is also a focus on their church choir, which is important because that is how the group originally came together.
There isn't a lot that happens in this book, but it doesn't feel slow. I really enjoyed the theme of people taking care of each other in a community created just for that. The individual lives of each of the characters and those they helped were interesting (ex., a hoarder couple) and the reader is provided with interesting insights into the difficulties that come with aging at home.
However, there were central parts of the book that I didn't care for, mostly because I was unfamiliar with them: the references to their church and their choir. I felt like an observer without the proper training when the book delved into the choir themes. In addition to religious and organ references, which were foreign to me, the references to the musical scores and why they were relevant were inexplicable: Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Rather than being able to learn about a whole new world I was unfamiliar with, I felt completely left out. Even reading this on a Kindle, looking up terms like “kyrie” with ease, did little to bring me into the conversation.
Thank you NetGalley for an Advance Reader Copy.

<i>“they felt that urgency now, the need to finally make things right, or as right as they could be. They had only so much time.

Together they knelt and bowed their heads. Outside night had fallen. A fine snow was sifting down, silting the windshields, coating the roads.

They prayed for Pittsburgh . . .”</i>

Readers familiar with O’Nan’s Emily Maxwell series of novels will be pleased to see the now quite elderly Emily and her sister-in-law, Arlene, in this new character “ensemble” piece. <i><b>Evensong</i></b> opens with Joan, the president of the Humpty Dumpty Club—the “HDs”—having a catastrophic fall and ending up in the hospital with a life-changing lower-limb fracture. The Humpty Dumpties are a group of still able older women affiliated with Calvary, an Episcopalian/Anglican church in Pittsburgh, who help out congregation members in need. (They do this in part because they recognize that they themselves will require assistance soon enough.) With Joan now sidelined, her friend Kitzi takes the reins, assigning caregiving duties to the remaining mobile HDs. Among the services performed: ferrying people to medical appointments, collecting and delivering prescriptions, getting groceries, sitting with the dying, and even arranging funerals.

O’Nan presents chapters from the points of view of four women: Kitzi herself, who’s struggling to look after her husband, Martin, a man with a serious heart condition; Susie, the baby of the group, who, at 63 and relatively recently divorced, is trying to make a new life for herself; the conservative, no-nonsense Emily, Henry Maxwell’s widow, who continues to live in the home where the two raised their children; and, finally, the never-married Arlene, an extroverted former schoolteacher, who is struggling with incipient dementia.

Although Kitzi initially feels overwhelmed and even put-upon in the HD leadership role—assigning tasks mostly to Susie, Emily, and Arlene but also to unnamed others who don’t figure in the story—she is reluctant to delegate responsibility. This irks Emily, who is determined to be regarded as competent and to remain relevant, even if she’s not that keen on carrying out the duties themselves. Over the course of the novel, Arlene becomes increasingly unreliable: she requires reminders to take others to appointments she’s agreed to, misplaces her wallet when she goes grocery shopping for a shut-in, and eventually loses her bearings when driving through the city in which she has spent her entire life. Kitzi takes on the lion’s share of the work, looking after a pair of former music professors who are in decline. Gene and Jean are serious hoarders of stuff (including innumerable cats) and live in absolute squalor. Susie, meanwhile, cares for Joan’s skittish cat, Oscar, until his owner moves into an assisted-living facility, the last station on her life’s journey.

Not all of O’Nan’s novel is dedicated to the work the women do for others. He also details each character’s inner workings (memories, regrets—and, in one case, secrets). The friends’ relationships with each other are described, as is their long membership in the church, where they once sang in the choir. (Susie, the youngest, continues to do so.)

Except for the segments focusing on church events, which were slow-going for me, I found this an immersive and satisfying read. (Perhaps not surprisingly, given the novel’s title, there’s quite a lot about the sacred music performed and the elements of the Anglican service.) This is the fifth of O’Nan’s many novels I’ve read. Though accessible, his work is never lightweight. The novels are consistently unshowy, intelligent, and insightful, with convincing, well-drawn characters. The focus here, of course, is on the women’s poignant efforts to find meaning and purpose, knowing they are nearing the end. The melancholy tone is leavened by gentle, humorous interludes: details about the eccentric ex-spouse of one of the hoarders and Susie’s forays into the world of online dating, for example.

While I don’t think the book is quite as strong as the two other books I’ve read which more fully feature Emily and Arlene Maxwell, I still enjoyed and recommend it. It is a quiet, reflective, character-driven work, focusing on elders, so it’s likely not for everyone. But most of us do live to grow older, and anyone willing to acknowledge and contemplate that reality will appreciate O’Nan’s novel.

Rating: 3.5 rounded up.

As a woman of a certain age whose hometown is Pittsburgh, I dove into the ARC of Stewart O’Nan’s Evensong. Thank you, Grove Press and NetGalley. I also should mention that O’Nan is the nephew of my second-grade teacher, circa 1962, who was renowned for the inventive disciplinary techniques she deployed (including on me) at Turner School in Wilkinsburg.

So I am the perfect niche reader for Evensong, a quiet novel that is almost a series of character studies or vignettes. There is a faint strain of a storyline running through it. Joan, the relentlessly efficient leader of the Humpty Dumpty Club, is incapacitated by a fall. The club runs errands and offers rides and other volunteer services for parishioners of their Episcopal church. A few of the characters starred in previous O’Nan novels, and there is a continuity here as the characters age.

It took me a while to straighten out all the characters. Kitzi takes on the leadership of the club, so fervently that she ministers to a couple of extreme hoarders who are outside their church circle. Emily was featured in O’Nan’s Emily, Alone. Her sister-in-law is Arlene, a retired teacher who is starting to suffer the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Susie is a bit younger; she has a fondness for Vicodin and manages to enjoy sex regularly—with a musician! And there is a host of children and grandchildren, thirty or so cats that belong to the hoarders, and a couple more pets who have bit parts throughout the novel.

Joan, rehabilitating, assigns the hoarders Jean and Gene to Kitzi. They are concert pianists who taught at Chatham University, and the husband is diagnosed with cancer. The lengths that Kitzi goes to for this couple, often neglecting her homebound husband, stretched credulity a bit for me. Her motivation was unclear. The club routinely performed tasks such as picking up prescriptions and offering rides to the doctor. Now Kitzi is scrambling to get thirty cats vaccinated, transporting them in her car to a rural county; spending long hours with Jean at her husband’s hospital bedside; and eventually cleaning out the infested house.

The chapters describe what seem like routine events in their lives. But I could relate to the aging friends, incrementally losing mobility and freedom while the world goes on around them. In one chapter, Susie is gamely trying to plan a trip downtown for them to enjoy the Christmas market. “They’d always wanted to go, yet, whether it was too cold out or they were too busy getting ready for the holidays or their husbands weren’t interested, none of them had ever been.” In a leap of faith, Susie pays in advance for parking. I laughed at the doomed attempt to get everyone on the same page, arguing over where they would eat, fending off illness, worrying about the weather. Spoiler alert: The trip did not happen.
Arlene babysits Emily’s dog, Angus, and her description of the dog’s drooling psychopathic neediness was hilarious to me, who had just completed a dog-sitting assignment:

“It was this manic intensity that annoyed her, his urgency shamelessly self-centered. He was like a child, all raw need. She fed him every day, yet he raced for the back door as if he were starving, mussing the rug so she couldn’t open it.” Woman and dog come to terms by the end of the chapter.
They are all active in their local Episcopal church in the Shadyside neighborhood, and the novel ends on New Year’s Day with the traditional Evensong service. The novel itself is a series of canticles, quiet odes to these women who soldier on with friendships, declining health, tender mercies, problematic families, slobbery dogs, and the knowledge that the end is ever closer. O’Nan does a masterful job of chronicling their everyday lives in a tender way that makes us care.

“It was true, they felt that urgency now, the need to finally make things right, or as right as they could be. They only had so much time.”

I enjoy Stewart O'Nan's writing and how he can take ordinary circumstances and reveal their quiet beauty. This novel is no exception -- it follows a group of elderly friends who care for each other in everyday actions like picking up medications and wellness checks. As is typical for O'Nan's novels, nothing momentous happens in these pages. However, if you enjoy quiet, reflective books that cause you to consider your own life in a way you might not have thought of before, I highly recommend this novel. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. Pud Date: Nov 11th, 2025.

#Evensong

I just finished! Man, it was so good. I really like revisiting Arlene--I really liked when she reminisced about Henry when they were young. I feel now very attached to Jean and Gene and want more about them. I really like the idea that they would be dismissed by people as being "gross hoarders" but then you find out that they are these incredibly accomplished musicians. I really love that hidden reality. The way that O'Nan tells the intimae innerworkings of everyday people is my exact favorite fiction. O'Nan and Strout do it best. Thank you for another wonderful book.

I couldn’t really get into this- it was too slow, there were too many characters and so I couldn’t keep track of who was who and it was just too ploddy really for my liking.

I had to look up what an “evensong” is—the final hymn, the closing note before the service ends. It’s meant to send you off in a spirit of peace. Isn’t that beautiful? Since learning it, I keep trying to make space in my sentences for this word because it feels like a benediction for the small, quiet things that life is made of.

Stewart O’Nan writes like that. He turns the small, quiet, ordinary things into holy ground. That’s why he’s one of my favorite writers. Last Night at the Lobster is so task-driven, so seemingly unremarkable, and yet the questions of labor and the frailty of life come through so incredibly loud. Evensong is the same. Readers become invisible observers, moving with the characters through their soft, fading evensong.

The novel follows a group of elderly friends in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill. They tend to each other in small, vital ways—driving one another to CVS, managing pills, hand-holding, listening, organizing vigils the right (or wrong) way, noticing quiet changes in behavior, even arranging vaccines for a huge number of cats. Joan, the mother hen of this group, falls on page one and is out of action. Her role is picked up by Kitzie and the others, who do their best to keep the rhythm going.

Not much “happens” in this book, and yet everything does. Life happens, which is basically just a series of nothing punctuated by interesting things. We witness the quiet dignity of aging, which seems to me a stage of life that rarely gets to take center stage. What comes through most clearly is the importance of community—how we care for each other when everything else, notably who we were when we were young, begins to fade.

And I found myself wondering: who will I be at the end? Will I feel at peace with the choices I’ve made? We spend our youth preparing for old age—eating well, saving money, stretching our bodies and minds like we can bend time itself. But maybe (just maybe) peace doesn’t come from preparation. We can’t prepare and manifest our way through life. Maybe it comes from presence. From loving and being loved. From showing up for each other, over and over again.

This is a book that I thought I’d really like with it being about a group of friends that are in my age group. I had a difficult time for about half of the book keeping the characters straight in my mind. I felt as if I needed a little more detail about each of them sooner. After I began to know each one a little bit, I began to enjoy the story. There’s no earth shattering lesson from the story. Just a reminder that we can all be kind and that while it’s easy to judge people by what we see on the outside, there’s often a whole other story. Overall a story about everyday life.

I don't know what it is about Stewart O'Nan stories. I just love them. You live with these honest, real characters and are then so sad to move on. I love Pittsburgh and all it's quirks. I love the girls and how they take care of their community. I want to be a Stewart O'Nan old lady when I grow up

Stewart O'Nan has crafted yet another solid offering with Evensong. I was so happy to reconnect with Emily and Arlene, as well as other central characters of the Humpty Dumpty club. Now clearly, I'm in the demographic that this book might appeal to. However, I think the writing in this book would appeal to most.
Evensong is a meandering book, connected stories of the women and their activities. No real action, yet compelling in the way only a good author can create. The HDs worship together, share meals, attend concerts and generally show up for each other and their extended community. Would that we might all have our own HDs.
I'm particularly fond of the subtle yet visceral setting. No one paints a gray wintery Pittsburgh as well as O'Nan. I wanted to pull my scarves out!
I will be waiting for the next book by this author in hope that we might follow more of Arlene's story.
Meanwhile, many thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Monthly Press for the ARC of Evensong

I unfortunately missed that this novel was part of a wider series of books about these characters before I started in. So, while I enjoyed the cozy, slow-moving world of this group of elderly friends as they navigate their lives, I certainly missed a lot of context that would have brought more color into the world O'Nan built. I've read a couple of his books before, most notably "Last Night at Lobster," which is one of my favorite novellas. "Evensong" has a similar familiarity and ease with a large cast of characters. They were all a joy to get to know. I just wish I'd realized this novel was part of an interconnected world!

Because I feel like I missed a lot of the world building by hopping into a later book in the series, this is very hard to "rate" with stars. I think, likely, this is a 3.5 for me, but I'll round up to 4. I hope readers who are looking for slow-paced stories with caring, nuanced depictions of aging find this one.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Evensong is a relaxing, gallivanting sort of novel following a group of aging women named "The Humpty Dumpties" who assist others in their community. Not a lot happens, and that's ok!!!

I overall enjoyed this reading experience but did find that I was a little jolted and confused at times trying to track characters. I think that if I had read the prior 2 books that this book's associated with I would have had an easier time following this. Going in blind, there was some backstory I feel was left out or unexplained.

Goodreads Link: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7503225137

Thank you to Grove Atlantic, Atlantic Monthly Press, and NetGalley, for offering me an ARC copy of Evensong.

Rating: 3.5/5

Evensong is set in contemporary Pittsburgh among members of The Humpty Dumpty Club, a group of older and elderly women who support each other through a community of care and social activity.

This novel is heartwarming and very moving. It is very literary, following the everyday lives of these women and those in their social circles. At points of transition in their life: whether changes in health, relationships, marriage or home. It details their relationships with partners, siblings, children, friends and even pets, offering heartwarming, intimate depictions of care between family members but also the members of this community they have grown together.

Evensong offers a profound portrayal of the communities of care which have emerged in American cities as a form of political resistance. Evensong is a politically anxious book, with its characters often sharing political worries, desires, and ideas with the reader, and the ways in which these women go on with their lives and help others enables O’Nan to explore care as an act of political resistance.

Quiet and reflective.

We follow a group of older women - the Humpty Dumpty Club, as they help each other and their broader network as their health essentially declines as they move through their 60’s and into their 80’s.

There’s very little plot, more like linked vignettes. But gorgeously written and I wanted to stay with the characters. A book to enjoy for the pleasure of reading 3.5 stars rounded down to 3.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Alcove Press for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

An ARC of this book was provided for review by the publisher, via NetGalley.

Stewart O’Nan’s latest novel, Evensong, is a quiet reflection on mortality, faith, and the connections that make a family – be they biological, geographical, social, or emotional.

There’s very little action here, and not a great deal of plot. Mostly the story revolves around a group of older women connected by what they refer to as the “Humpty-Dumpty Club”. Ranging in age from early sixties to late eighties, they are all white, all Christian, mostly college-educated liberals, all moderately well-to-do – what O’Nan calls “comfortable East Enders” – who get together for a weekly bridge game and generally watch over one another's well-being. In the absence of spouses or nearby adult children, they ferry each other to medical appointments, deliver soup to the ailing, find plumbers for weekend emergencies, bring food to funerals, and otherwise keep themselves benignly occupied minding each other's business.

When Joan, the leader and driving force in the group, suffers a serious fall at home and is hospitalized for what will be a long and questionable recovery, responsibilities shift somewhat in the HD club and Kitzy, long second-in-command, steps up to see that the group continues to function. In fact, they pick up a major responsibility when a reclusive married couple that formerly asked only for routine delivery of their prescription medications suddenly faces multiple emergencies.

That’s about it for the plot. In carefully crafted quotidian detail, O’Nan follows several of the HD members as they move through late summer into the year’s end, contemplating their own mortality and adjusting, without a great deal of fuss, to the decline or loss of various abilities. Through it all, they are kept together through the group, and through the musical presentations of Pittsburgh’s Calvary Episcopal Church.

Ultimately, this is a deep and intricate character study of change and acceptance, and may be best suited to readers who are themselves seeking emotional closure of lives well lived.

4 stars

Joan Hargrove, the inimitable leader of the Humpty Dumpty Club of the Shadyside area of Pittsburgh, takes a bad fall, so the other members band together to help out, driving others to appointments, running errands and the like. This chosen family is always there for each other and O’Nan focuses on four women, Susie, Kitzi, Arlene and Emily, as they move into the last chapters of their lives.

This was a lovely book that I really liked and I would have enjoyed even more had I read some of O’Nan’s Emily books. But even missing some of the back stories I really enjoyed this. Especially poignant was the sorrow expressed, even four years later, over the Tree of Life shooting which happened in the neighborhood. My husband is from Pittsburgh, so I love the way the city is portrayed. Very nice read.