Live and Let Die
Bianca Sloane, 2012
CreateSpace
290 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781301050918
Summary
On a bitterly cold January evening, Tracy Ellis went for a jog along Chicago’s snowy lakefront and disappeared. Her body was discovered days later, her beautiful face bashed in with a rock. Police determine her brutal death to be a mugging gone wrong and drop the matter into their cold case files.
Over a year later, Tracy’s sister, Sondra, still can’t come to grips with what happened. She throws herself into her work as a documentary filmmaker to try and forget the cruelty of her sister’s death. However, a chance encounter with a man from Tracy’s past rips the wound open and sends Sondra on a desperate search for answers about the secrets from her sister’s life that may have led to her death.
As Sondra struggles to uncover what happened to Tracy, she’s launched into a tangled web of deceit and danger that put her on a collision course with life and death. (From the author.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Little Rock, Arkansas, USA
• Education—University of Miami
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
Bianca Sloane is the author of the psychological suspense novel, Live and Let Die, which was chosen as “Thriller of the Month” (May 2013) by e-thriller.com, a leading online reviewer of “e-thrillers” from independent and traditionally published authors.
Sloane began her career as a bookseller for Barnes and Noble, which included a stint as community relations coordinator, where she interacted with such authors as David Sedaris, Elizabeth Berg, and Raymond Benson. Sloane moved on to the world of public relations and advertising, where she worked in industries as varied as education, real estate and healthcare.
In addition to penning suspense novels, Sloane’s works as a freelance writer, producing press releases, bylined articles and speeches for corporate clients. (From the author .)
Book Reviews
Thriller of the Month (May 2013)
e-thriller.com
[A] cross between Sleeping with the Enemy and a superb murder mystery.
acrimereadersblog.wordpress.com
Live and Let Die is a book that will leave the reader scratching their head trying to figure out the villain. And, just when the reader thinks they have it all figured out—think again—AND AGAIN!
Examiner.com (New Orleans)
If you love puzzles and you like it when the author fools you all the way to the last page, you can’t go wrong with Live and Let Die.
Ionia Martin - Readful Things Blog
For a debut novel, Live and Let Die flows very smoothly - or perhaps I should say "gallops," because I was reading at a frantic pace to discover what happens next.
SheTreadsSoftly.Blogspot.com
This is one of those novels that will keep you turning the pages wondering what kind of secrets are going to be unearthed.
OOSA Online Book Club
A gripping suspense read.
WiLoveBooks.Blogspot.com
It’s been a really long time since I’ve read a thriller book that just completely wowed me as much as this one did. Considering that I am a huge suspense and thriller fan of many authors that have books that have just blown my mind, for a debut novel I think [Bianca Sloane] did outstanding!
Whatisthatbookabout.com
This is American author Bianca Sloane’s first novel. You wouldn’t know it. This is a great story that carries you along with it from the first page… enjoy the ride!
e-thriller.com
Discussion Questions
1.Given the stark differences in their personalities, were you surprised at how strong the bond was between sisters Sondra and Tracy?
2.When Tracy, who is African American, disappears, Sondra can’t help but notice the disparity in media coverage between her sister and the disappearances of white women. Is this something you’ve ever noticed when watching or reading news coverage of women who go missing?
3. The character of Paula is a very traditional housewife, focusing all of her attention and energies towards being completely devoted to her husband. In this modern age, how did it make you feel to read about a character with such traditional views and values?
4. How did you feel about the relationship between Phillip and Paula? What about Phillip’s relationship with Tracy?
5.The main characters of Live and Let Die are African American. How did this book compare to other books you’ve read where the main characters were African American? What were the differences or similarities you noticed?
6.What character did you most identify with and why?
7.In some ways, Live and Let Die follows the conventions of the mystery/suspense genre. How does it differ from other mystery/suspense novels you’ve read? What surprised you the most? Did you guess any of the plot twists?
8.Taking the entire story into account, what significance does the title of the book hold for you?
9. What were some of the recurring themes of the story? Where there some that were more prominent than others?
10.What is the most satisfying aspect of the book? Is there anything you would have wished turned out differently?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)
Live by Night (Joe Coughlin Novel, 2)
Dennis Lehane, 2012
HarperCollins
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060004873
Summary
Boston, 1926. The '20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.
Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city's most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.
But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one—neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover—can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt.
Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa's Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba.
Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 4, 1965
• Where—Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Eckerd College; M.F.A., Florida International University
• Awards—Shamus Award, Best First Novel; Anthony Award; Dilys Award
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts
Dennis Lehane is an American author. He has written several award-winning novels, including A Drink Before the War and the New York Times bestseller Mystic River, which was later made into an Academy Award-winning film.
Another novel, Gone, Baby, Gone, was also adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film. His novel Shutter Island was adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2010. Lehane is a graduate of Florida International University in Miami, Florida.
Personal Life
Lehane was born and reared in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, and continues to live in the Boston area, which provides the setting for most of his books. He spent summers on Fieldston Beach in Marshfield. Lehane is the youngest of five children. His father was a foreman for Sears & Roebuck, and his mother worked in a Boston public school cafeteria. Both of his parents emigrated from Ireland. His brother, Gerry Lehane, who is two and a half years older than Dennis, is a veteran actor who trained at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence before heading to New York in 1990. Gerry is currently a member of the Invisible City Theatre Company.
He was previously married to Sheila Lawn, formerly an advocate for the elderly for the city of Boston but now working with the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office as an Assistant District Attorney. Currently, he is married to Dr. Angela Bernardo, with whom he has one daughter.
He is a graduate of Boston College High School (a Boston Jesuit prep school), Eckerd College (where he found his passion for writing), and the graduate program in creative writing at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He occasionally makes guest appearances as himself in the ABC comedy/drama TV series Castle.
Literary Career
His first book, A Drink Before the War, which introduced the recurring characters Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, won the 1995 Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel. The fourth book in the series, Gone, Baby, Gone, was adapted to a film of the same title in 2007; it was directed by Ben Affleck and starred Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan as Kenzie and Gennaro. Reportedly, Lehane "has never wanted to write the screenplays for the films [based on his own books], because he says he has 'no desire to operate on my own child.'"
Lehane's Mystic River was made into a film in 2003; directed by Clint Eastwood, it starred Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon. The novel itself was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and won the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction, and France's Prix Mystère de la Critique.
Lehane's first play, Coronado, debuted in New York in December 2005. Coronado is based on his acclaimed short story "Until Gwen," which was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly and was selected for both The Best American Short Stories and The Best Mystery Short Stories of 2005.
Lehane described working on his historical novel, The Given Day, as "a five- or six-year project" with the novel beginning in 1918 and encompassing the 1919 Boston Police Strike and its aftermath. The novel was published in October, 2008.
On October 22, 2007 Paramount Pictures announced that they had optioned Shutter Island with Martin Scorsese attached as director. The Laeta Kalogridis-scripted adaptation has Leonardo DiCaprio playing U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, "who is investigating the disappearance of a murderess who escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane and is presumed to be hiding on the remote Shutter Island." Mark Ruffalo played opposite DiCaprio as U.S. Marshal Chuck Aule. Shutter Island was released on February 19, 2010.
Teaching Career
Since becoming a literary success after the broad appeal of his Kenzie and Gennaro novels, as well as the success of Mystic River, Lehane has taught at several colleges. He taught fiction writing and serves as a member of the board of directors for a low-residency MFA program sponsored by Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He has also been involved with the Solstice Summer Writers' Conference at Boston's Pine Manor College and taught advanced fiction writing at Harvard University, where his classes quickly filled up.
In May 2005, Lehane was presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Eckerd College and was appointed to Eckerd's Board of Trustees later that year. In Spring 2009, Lehane became a Joseph E. Connor Award recipient and honorary brother of Phi Alpha Tau professional fraternity at Emerson College in Boston, MA. Other brothers and Connor Award recipients include Robert Frost, Elia Kazan, Jack Lemmon, Red Skelton, Edward R. Murrow, Yul Brynner, and Walter Cronkite. Also in Spring 2009, Lehane presented the commencement speech at Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts, and was awarded an honorary degree.
Film Career
Lehane wrote and directed an independent film called Neighborhoods in the mid 1990s. He joined the writing staff of the HBO drama series The Wire in 2004. Lehane returned as a writer for the fourth season in 2006 Lehane and the writing staff won the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony and the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay for their work on the fourth season. Lehane remained a writer for the fifth and final season in 2008. Lehane and the writing staff were nominated for the WGA Award award for Best Dramatic Series again at the February 2009 ceremony.He served as an executive producer for Shutter Island. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Bibliography
The Kenzie-Gennaro Novels
1994 - A Drink Before the War
1996 - Darkness, Take My Hand
1997 - Sacred
1998 - Gone, Baby, Gone
1999 - Prayers for Rain
2010 - Moonlight Mile
Joe Coughlin Novels
2008 - The Given Day
2012 - Live by Night
2015 - World Gone By
Stand-alones
2001 - Mystic River
2003 - Shutter Island
2006 - Coronado
Book Reviews
Live by Night is Crime Noir 101, as taught by the best of its current practitioners.... Sophisticated, literary and barbed.... A sentence-by-sentence pleasure. You are in the hands of an expert. And you'll know it.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Reduced to a bare-bones summary, Live by Night might sound like the sort of standard crime saga we've all encountered far too many times. In Lehane's hands, however, it becomes something larger and infinitely more complex. With its fresh, precise language, its acute sympathy for the passions that shape—and sometimes warp—its central characters and its lovingly detailed recreation of an earlier age, Live by Night transcends the familiar and assumes an unimpeachable reality of its own.... [A] meticulously crafted portrait of our violent national past.
Bill Sheehan - Washington Post
Bestseller Lehane (The Given Day) chronicles the Prohibition-era rise of Joe Coughlin, an Irish-American gangster, in this masterful crime epic. While most hard-working stiffs are earning their wages by day in 1926 Boston, 19-year-old Joe and his friends live by night, catering to the demand for prostitution, narcotics, and bootleg alcohol. When Joe falls for a competing mobster’s gun moll, he sets in motion a chain of events that land him in prison, with the girl missing and presumed dead. In the joint, Joe meets aging Mafia don Thomaso “Maso” Pescatore, who becomes his mentor. On Joe’s release, Maso sets Joe up in Tampa, Fla., as his point man. Years pass, and Joe creates a huge empire in the illegal rum trade. He marries Graciela Corrales, a fiery Cuban revolutionary, and eventually builds a life for himself in Batista’s Cuba, soothing his conscience by doing good works with his dirty money. This idyllic existence can’t last forever, though, especially in the night, with its shifting alliances and fated clashes. Lehane has created a mature, quintessentially American story that will appeal to readers of literary and crime fiction alike.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Lehane’s novel carves its own unique place in the Prohibition landscape.... This is an utterly magnetic novel on every level, a reimagining of the great themes of popular fiction—crime, family, passion, betrayal—set against an exquisitely rendered historical backdrop.
Booklist
The acclaimed mystery writer again tries his hand at historical fiction, combining period detail from the Prohibition era with the depth of character and twists of plot that have won him such a devoted readership. Though this novel serves as a sequel to The Given Day (2008), it can be read independently of Lehane's previous historical novel.... Its protagonist is Joe Coughlin, the morally conflicted youngest son of a corrupt Boston police official.... He ultimately builds a bootlegging empire in Tampa, backed by a vicious gang lord whose rival had tried to kill Joe, and he falls in love with a Cuban woman whose penchant for social justice receives a boost from his illegal profits.... Neither as epic in scope nor as literarily ambitious as its predecessor, the novel builds to a powerful series of climaxes, following betrayal upon betrayal, which will satisfy Lehane's fans and deserves to extend his readership as well. Power, lust and moral ambiguity combine for an all-American explosion of fictional fireworks.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Live by Night begins with Joe Coughlin in a tub of cement surrounded by armed men on a boat heading out to sea. How does this opening foreshadow the story that unfolds?
2. Joe, the youngest son of Thomas Coughlin, a high-ranking member of the Boston Police Department, was born into a socially respected and accomplished family. How did he fall into a life of crime? Think about his relationship with his father. How are the two men alike? Did they love each other? Did they respect each other?
3. Talk about Prohibition America as it is portrays in Live by Night. Do you see any similarities with twenty-first-century America? Why does Joe thrive in this world?
4. Joe's first boss, Tim Hickey, tells him, "the people we service, they visit the night. But we live in it. They rent what we own." What is the "night"? What is the significance of the title Live by Night? Joe tells his older brother Danny, "the night. It's got it's own set of rules." What are those rules? What is the darkness inside Joe that draws him to the night? Why does he prefer the night's rules to those of the day? Joe also tells him, "there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself." How does making individual rules work in Joe's world? If we all made our own rules, what kind of society would we have?
5. Tim also offers Joe several pieces of advice. "The smallest mistake sometimes cast the longest shadow," and "when a house falls down, the first termite to bite into it is just as much to blame as the last." How do you interpret Tim's wisdom? How are his insights reflected in the events of Joe's life? What about Joe's future bosses, Albert White and Maso Pescatore?
6. Everything changes for Joe when he meets Emma Gould. Why does Joe fall in love with her? When his father meets her, he tells Joe she's "dead inside." Explain his observation. Emma does not like Joe's father either, and classifies him as one of those people, "who confuse being lucky with being better." She tells Joe, "We're not less than you." Who is the "we" she is talking about and why does she say this? Do successful people—especially those who have done well financially—think they are better than those less well off? Does wealth make someone "better"? Are the assessments Emma Gould and Thomas Coughlin make about each other correct?
7. Throughout the story, Joe insists that he isn't a gangster, he's an outlaw. How does he define each? Do you think they are different? If Joe isn't a gangster, who is? Joe believes his father—"a pillar of the City on the Hill, the Athens of America, Hub of the Universe"—was more criminal than he could ever be, thanks to a lifetime of "payoffs and kickbacks and graft." Is he right? Does Joe's honesty about himself make him nobler—or just more honest—than his father?
8. Joe's father tells him, "People don't fix each other, Joseph. And they never become anything but what they've been." He also tells him, "the foundation of all lives is luck." What do you think of both of these statements? Can we change our circumstances and our lives? Does luck make a person's life? What does it say for those who are successful and those who are not? Joe argues with his father, "You make your luck, Dad." Can we make our own luck? How can we do so and how do we recognize it when happens? Do you think most people recognize luck when it comes their way?
9. Talk about Joe's relationship with Maso Pescatore. What kind of man is Maso? How does he stand up to comparisons with Thomas Coughlin? What does Joe learn from Maso?
10. Thomas Coughlin gives Joe his beloved pocket watch. Why? What significance does the watch hold for both father and son? Do you think Joe will pass the watch down to his own child?
11. Joe says he doesn't believe in an afterlife. "You didn't die and go to a better place; this was the better place because you weren't dead. Heaven wasn't in the clouds; it was the air in your lungs." If there is nothing else besides this life, what stops people from taking all they can? Do we need religious values to keep us moral? Is Joe and ethical man? Does he have his own code of honor? How would you define it?
12. How does Joe's life change when he meets Graciela? What draws the two together? Does she remind him of Emma? What does she offer him that the night does not?
13. When Joe arrives in Ybor, he meets its lawman, Chief Irving Figgis. Figgis tells Joe he's "incorruptible." Is anyone free from temptation? How does the chief's daughter, Loretta, test this assessment? What impact does she have on Joe and his business? How would Joe characterize Loretta?
14. Joe occasionally dreams of a panther. What does the animal represent and when does it appear to him?
15. Religious revivals and bootleg liquor were embraced throughout the 1930s. What draws people to either—or both—during hard times like the Depression?
16. Where would Joe fit in today's world?
17. Live by Night interweaves themes of class, race, money, power, honor, and betrayal. Choose one and trace its arc through the story, showing how it reverberates in any of the characters' lives. What insights does it offer for our lives today? How much has America changed since the 1930s?
18. What intrigued you most while reading Live by Night?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Living
Annie Dillard, 1992
HarperCollins
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060924119
Summary
Annie Dillard evokes the frontier generation of the 19th century in Washington state's Puget Sound. Focusing primarily on three men and the settlement of Whatcom, Dillard presents us with a brilliant array of characters, their optimism and charity in the face of hardship, as well as racism, brutality and greed.
We watch as the inexorable rise of civilization rushes in upon the settlement, changing the region, the lives and fortunes of those who live there. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 30, 1945
• Where—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., Hollins College
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize (1975); Academy Award for
Literature, American Academy of Arts & Letters; National
Endowment for the Arts Grant; New York Public LIbrary
Literary Lion; Guggenheim Foundation Grant.
• Currently—lives in New York City
Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, best known for her narrative nonfiction. She has also published poetry, essays, literary criticism, autobiography, and fiction. She is married to the historical biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr.
Dillard describes her childhood at length in An American Childhood. She is the oldest of three daughters, born to affluent parents who raised her in an environment that encouraged humor, creativity, and exploration. Her mother was a non-conformist and incredibly energetic. Her father taught her everything from plumbing to economics to the intricacies of the novel On The Road. Dillard's childhood was filled with days of piano and dance classes, rock and bug collecting, and devouring the books on the shelves of the public library. But there were also many troubles—like the horrors of war, which she often read about.
After graduating from high school, Dillard attended Hollins College (Hollins University since 1998), in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied literature and creative writing. She married her writing teacher, the poet R. H. W. Dillard (her maiden name is Doak)—the person she says "taught her everything she knows" about writing. In 1968 she graduated with a Masters in English, after writing a 40-page thesis on Thoreau's Walden, which focused on the use of Walden Pond as "the central image and focal point for Thoreau's narrative movement between heaven and earth." The next couple of years after graduation Dillard spent painting and writing. During this time, she published several poems and short stories.
Dillard's family did not attend Presbyterian church but when she was a child she and her sister did. She also spent a few summers at a fundamentalist summer camp. During her rebellious teenage years, she quit church because of the "hypocrisy." When she told her minister, he gave her a stack of books by C. S. Lewis, which ended this rebellion. After her college years, Dillard became, as she says, "spiritually promiscuous," incorporating the ideas of many religious systems into her own religious understanding. Not only are there references to Christ and the Bible in her first prose book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but also to Judaism, Buddhism, Sufism, and even Eskimo spirituality. In the 1990s, Dillard converted to Roman Catholicism.
Writing
After a near-fatal bout of pneumonia in 1971, Dillard decided that she needed to experience life more fully and began work on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She spent four seasons living near Tinker Creek, a suburban area surrounded by forests, creeks, mountains, and myriad animal life. When she wasn't in the library, she spent her time outdoors, walking and camping. After living there for about a year, Dillard began to write about her experiences near the creek. She started by transposing notes from her twenty-plus-volume reading journal. It took her eight months to turn the notecards into the book. Towards the end of the eight months, she was so absorbed that she sometimes wrote for fifteen hours a day, cut off from society without interest in current events (like the Watergate scandal).
The finished book brought her a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 at the age of twenty-nine. Her other books in this vein include Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, and For the Time Being. She has also written a memoir about growing up in Pittsburgh, An American Childhood, and two novels, The Living, and 2007's The Maytrees.
Dillard spent some years as a faculty member in the English department at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The Living is an august celebration of human frenzy and endurance. Her living are hectically alive, her dead recur in furious memory. And Annie Dillard, sometimes by an apparent crabwise indirection but with utter thoroughness, proves herself a fine novelist.
Thomas Keneally - New York Times Book Review
The kind of book a reader sinks into completely.... The characters are so compelling, the setting so detailed, so convincing, so absolutely complete.... The Living is an extraordinary accomplishment, one of those rare occasions when the written word results through the magic and talent of the author in the creation of the whole world
Boston Sunday Globe
The Living is an impressive piece of fiction and a riveting hunk of history.... The many readers who have been drawn in the past to Dillard's work for its elegant and muscular use of language won't be disappointed in these pages.... She has given herself a landscape large enough to challenge her talents.
Los Angeles Times
Pulitzer Prize-winner Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974) turns her hand to fiction with this historical novel of the American Northwest in the late 19th century. Focusing on the settlement at Whatcom on Bellingham Bay (near Puget Sound), Dillard offers a compelling portrait of frontier life. The novel has a large and richly varied cast of characters, from the engaging frontiersman Clare Fishburn and Eastern socialite-turned-pioneer Minta Honer to the disturbed and violent Beal Obenchain and kleptomaniac Pearl Sharp. The Living is unflinching in its delineations of pioneer life at its worst and best—racism and brutality on the one hand and optimism and charity in adversity on the other. Dillard's view of "the living" in its many senses is a fine novel that is an essential purchase for all fiction collections. — Dean James, Houston Acad. of Medicine/Texas Medical Center Library.
Library Journal
The popular Pulitzer-winning Dillard (An American Childhood, 1987, The Writing Life, 1989, etc.) has come up with a novel at last—a panoramic and engrossing re-creation of 19th-century pioneer life in the Pacific Northwest—complete with gentlemanly gold miners, avuncular railroad speculators, misty-eyed sweethearts, assorted schemers and dreamers, and even a three-card- monte player or two. Ada and Rooney Fishburn were barely into their early 20s when they set off by covered wagon for the untamed western coastland just south of Canada. Youthful ignorance and optimism proved to be their greatest assets, though, as they arrived at Whatcom, a minuscule settlement in Bellingham Bay, and threw themselves into a lifelong battle against the physical hardship, grueling labor, and frequent tragedies of frontier life. With the help of other settlers and a tribe of friendly Lummi Indians, the Fishburns managed to survive—long enough to watch with amazement as gold, railroads, and real estate brought undreamed-of fortune and calamity to their isolated shore. By the time the two surviving Fishburn sons were grown, an ever-increasing influx of shopkeepers, politicians, and entrepreneurs arriving from the Midwest, the East Coast, and Europe had quickened the rhythms of the town sufficiently to send all of Whatcom's fortunes reeling. New personalities joined the fray, including John Ireland Sharp, the soul-searching school principal forever marked by the poverty he witnessed in New York City; Minta and June Randall, Baltimore heiresses who bet their hearts and their inheritances on this coastland; Johnny Lee, a Chinese railway worker whose younger brother was deliberately drowned; andbrooding, depraved Beal Obenchain, who toyed with his fellow settlers' psyches as a form of recreation. As usual in Dillard's work, sparkling prose and striking insights abound, though a tendency toward overdescription, plus a certain emotional distance from her many characters—who must regularly vacate the stage to let others have a turn—take some of the power out of her punch. Otherwise: a triumph of narrative skill and faithful research—headed for success.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Talk about the role of women in this story—especially the competing views by Eustace Honer and the Noosack chief, Kulshan Jim. Both feel the other culture mistreats its women. What do you make of the comparison?
2. Many of Dillard's characters are an eccentric bunch—but they are also richly drawn. Which ones do you have particular sympathy for—or find repellant—and why? In particular, talk about Ada and Rooney Fishburn: are they equipped for what faces them? John Ireland Sharp and his idealism? Minta and June Randall and the choices they make?
3. Death is ever present in this work. Discuss the ways in which Dillard uses the crab (pincers of death?) as a symbol of life's tenuous hold, death's constant presence.
4. The structure of this novel is interesting: Dillard covers the events at the beginning of the book in a breath-taking pace, and then revisits them. As a result, she has removed much of the suspense—readers know what happens. How does her unusual plot structure strike you? Why might she have written in this manner?
5. Consider the different cultures that bump up against each other. How do they impact one another—do they assimilate with or learn from each other...or remain untouched? In what way is this slice of frontier similar or different from the nation as a whole?
6. How does the influx of civilization—gold, the railroad, and real estate—affect Whatcom and its residents? In your view, are changes for the better or worse...or both?
7. Talk about how the dream of brotherhood is turned on its head with the brutal treatment of the socialists and unionists toward the Celestials and Terrestials.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Living Blood (Immortal Brethren series #2)
Tananarive Due, 2002
Simon & Schuster
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780671040840
Summary
Acclaimed for her riveting fiction, which tests the boundaries of supernatural suspense, Tanarive Due returns with a gloriously imagined tale of an ancient cult's undying powers—now embodied by a child who can grow to become either monster or savior.
Jessica Jacobs-Wolde worked hard to rebuild her life in Maimi after the disappearance of her husband, David, and the death of her daughter Kira at his hand. Four years later, she is still coming to terms with a shocking truth: David, who is part of an ancient group of immortals—a hidden African clan that has survived for more than a thousand years—gave Jessica and their second daughter, Fana, the gift of his healing blood.
Now Jessica is running an isolated clinic in Botswana—one that has swiftly earned a reputation for its astounding success rate in curing desperately ill children—and she hopes to find the tribe of souls with whom Fana truly belongs. Just three and a half years old, the girl is displaying signs of tremendous power—conjuring storms, editing her mother's memories, and striking people down with a thought. Her growing abilities need to be tamed—and soon. Already Fana's dreams are haunted by a shadowy entity, someone—or something—she can only call the Bee Lady.
Unaware that they are being tracked by Lucas Shepard, a doctor from Florida who hopes to save his dying son, and by a group of fortune hunters who will stop at nothing to exploit the power coursing through her veins, Jessica journeys to Ethiopia in search of the Life Brothers. There, she will be reunited with her immortal beloved. There, the full force of Fana's powers will be revealed. And there, Jessica,David, Fana, and the good doctor Shepard, though himself a mere mortal, will engage in an epic and transcontinental battle over the ultimate fate of humanity.
Blending the supernatural with a thrilling vision of our times, this is a powerful and sweeping tale of love, horror, immortality, and redemption from an astounding storyteller. (From the publisher.)
This is the second in Due's "African Immortals" series, which begins with My Soul to Keep (1997). The third book in the series is Blood Colony (2008).
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Education—B.A., Northwestern (USA); M.A., University of
Leeds (UK)
• Awards—American Book Award, 2002
• Currently—lives in Southern California, USA
Tananarive Due—pronounced tah-nah-nah-REEVE doo—is the American Book Award-winning author of nine books, ranging from supernatural thrillers to a mystery to a civil rights memoir.
Her most recent novel, Blood Colony (2008), is the long-awaited sequel to her 2001 thriller The Living Blood and 1997’s My Soul to Keep, a reader favorite that Stephen King said "bears favorable comparison to Interview with the Vampire."
Due also collaborates with her husband, novelist and screen-writer Steven Barnes. Due and Barnes published Casanegra: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel, which they wrote in collaboration with actor Blair Underwood. Publishers Weekly called Casanegra "seamlessly entertaining." In the Night of the Heat, is the second in the series.
The Living Blood, which received a 2002 American Book Award, "should set the standard for supernatural thrillers of the new millennium," said Publishers Weekly, which named The Living Blood and My Soul to Keep among the best novels of the year. The Good House was nominated as Best Novel by the International Horror Guild. The Black Rose, based on the life of business pioneer Madam C.J. Walker, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. My Soul to Keep and The Good House are both in film development at Fox Searchlight.
Due’s novel Joplin’s Ghost blends the supernatural, history and the present-day music scene as a rising R&B singer’s life is changed forever by encounters with the ghost of Ragtime King Scott Joplin. Due also brought history to life in The Black Rose, a historical novel based on the research of Alex Haley—and Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights, which she co-authored with her mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due. Freedom in the Family was named 2003's Best Civil Rights Memoir by Black Issues Book Review. (Patricia Stephens Due took part in the nation’s first “Jail-In” in 1960, spending 49 days in jail in Tallahassee, Florida, after a sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter). In 2004, alongside such luminaries as Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, Due received the "New Voice in Literature Award”" at the Yari Yari Pamberi conference co-sponsored by New York University’s Institute of African-American Affairs and African Studies Program and the Organization of Women Writers of Africa.
Due has a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University and an M.A. in English literature from the University of Leeds, England, where she specialized in Nigerian literature as a Rotary Foundation Scholar. Due currently teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. Due has also taught at the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s Writers’ Week, the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and the summer Imagination conference at Cleveland State University. She is a former feature writer and columnist for the Miami Herald.
Due lives in Southern California with her husband, Steven Barnes; their son, Jason; and her stepdaughter, Nicki. (From www.tananarivedue.com.)
Book Reviews
Like the hurricane that threatens Florida at its climax, this stunning sequel to My Soul to Keep (1997) is an event of sustained power and energy. Its predecessor introduced Jessica Jacob-Wolde, a journalist who belatedly discovers that her "perfect" husband, David, is a renegade from a secretive 1,000-year-old clan of Ethiopian immortals who will kill to prevent members from sharing their life-extending blood with mortals. David has returned to Africa to do penance among his Life Brothers, and Jessica, whom he resurrected from the dead with a transfusion from himself, follows close behind, setting up a jungle clinic to dispense dilutions of her blood as medicine. Jessica's daughter Fana, whom David did not know Jessica was pregnant with when he transfused her, has begun to show magical powers, and her precocious divinity is the catalyst for a volatile brew of subplots that includes a violent schism among the Life Brothers, an alternative medicine guru's desperate efforts to save his leukemic son with Jessica's blood and a force of unspeakable evil trying to channel itself through Fana. Due exercises assured control over her wildly gyrating story, exploring its drama in terms of African culture, African-American experience and a variety of parent-child relationships. What's more, she fuses clich d themes from a variety of genres jungle adventure, transcontinental espionage, natural disaster into an amalgam that reclaims their powers to excite. A rare example of a sequel that improves upon the original, this novel also should set a standard for supernatural thrillers of the new millennium. My Soul to Keep was one of the most talked-about debuts in the horror field since the advent of Stephen King. Expect heavy interest sales for this sequel.
Publishers Weekly
In this sequel to My Soul To Keep, protagonist Jessica Jacobs-Wolde has joined the ranks of immortals thanks to a ceremonial infusion of magical blood from her husband, David, a member of an ancient, secret society the Life Brothers. After being accused of murder, David disappears, leaving Jessica alone in Florida to await the birth of their daughter, Fana. Two years later, Jessica and Fana move first to South Africa and then to Botswana. With rising horror, Jessica watches as little Fana begins to demonstrate tremendous psychic powers that give her control of life and death over mortals. Jessica believes that with their age-old knowledge, only David and his Brothers can give Fana the guidance she needs. So Jessica ventures into Ethiopia to find the Colony to which her husband has retreated. How unfortunate that this intriguing plot is so poorly executed. The writing is flaccid, and the story moves at a glacial pace. Better editing might have made this a more readable novel. Not recommended.
Library Journal
Readers will be glad to see the resurrection of the characters from Due's last novel, My Soul to Keep (1997), but there is nothing to keep readers new to the author from enjoying this sequel. It reunites Jessica and Dawit for the rearing of their daughter, Fana, and in the many pages of this mesmerizing narrative, Due shares the lives of Jessica and her sister, Alex, since they learned of Dawit's existence as a Life Brother. From Miami to South Africa to Botswana to Tallahassee, these women are constantly reminded of Dawit's extraordinary curse-gift through the positive powers and negative abilities of the child Fana. These women's determination to use the living blood in a healing and charitable way to help children is the decision that sets this novel on its course. In five compelling sections, Due explores human behavior, scientific discovery, medical and natural healing practices, and religious ideology. Due ends the novel at a place to begin the next installment. — Lillian Lewis
Booklist
This supernatural thriller continues the story of reporter Jessica Jacobs-Wolde, four years after the death of her first child and the disappearance of her husband. She has revealed the secret of the living blood (from book one) to her sister, a doctor, and together with Fana, the child she gave birth to nine months after her husband's disappearance, the sisters live as quietly as possible in remote African villages. The constant action takes Jessica and Fana eventually to Ethiopia, to the place where the immortals live, to be reunited with Fana's father, Jessica's husband. It doesn't stop there, however, and the suspense builds as the action goes from Africa back to the States in a desperate chase to save a small boy's life, to protect the miraculous blood, to find a way to live in the world as immortals. Due is a wonderful storyteller. She is a young woman who already has an impressive career as a writer and journalist. As an African American, writing about African Americans, she brings layers of cultural nuance to an already complex story. The living blood obviously has religious significance, and there is much in this story that ties African Americans to African culture and history. One of the Christian churches that traces back to the early centuries of Christianity is the Ethiopian church, an important fact that pulls this story together thematically. Most readers will want to search the Internet or the library for photographs of the underground churches in Ethiopia so vividly described in this thriller. Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. — Claire Rosser
KLIATT
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Living Blood:
1. Based on the evidence he had, was it cowardly or courageous of Lucas Shepard to leave his dying son to search for the magic blood? Did he truly believe it was real, or was he only fooling himself?
2. In what ways has Jessica changed since My Soul to Keep and in what ways is she still the same?
3. In what ways has David changed since My Soul To Keep and in what ways is he still the same?
4. If you were Jessica—or David—would you be able to forgive your partner for the events of the past? Why/why not?
5. Did you always believe David and Jessica would be reunited? Why/why not?
6. Why does David hesitate to see Jessica in the Life Colony in Lalibela?
7. What parenting mistakes, if any, does Jessica make with her daughter, Fana (Bee-Bee)? What one thing should she have done differently?
8. Do you believe Fana is good, evil or neither?
9. What do you think of Khaldun’s separatist philosophy? Based on the events in this book, do you think he was right or wrong to keep mortals and immortals apart?
10. If you had Living Blood, would you share it with the world? At what price? What precautions would you take?
11. What are the Shadows?
12. Do you believe the Living Blood is really the blood of Christ, or is that a story Khaldun has made up? Why might he lie?
13. What is the role of fate and destiny in this story regarding Lucas? Jessica? Fana?
14. What do you think Fana will be like in the future?
(Questions from www.tananarivedue.com.)
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Living the Dream
Carmen K. Glenn, 2013
Dog Ear Publising
209 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781457519420
Summary
Good-looking, educated and charming Jeremiah Cole has always had it easy with the ladies. Even at forty-two, he's still able to rival men half his age and the steady flow of women has not slowed since he was a teenager, especially now that his is a successful lawyer. Not even following his proposal of marriage to his leading lady, the beautiful and successful Judge Jasmine Pratt. Soaring in their careers and flying high on life, they are Living The Dream.
Inevitably lives so perfect do not remain unsoiled. As adversity moves in, the newly engaged couple begins to question their commitment, their dreams and their future together.
Author Bio
• Birth—August 24, 1968
• Where—Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Central State University; M.A., Ball
State University
• Currently—lives in Indianapolis, Indiana
Carmen K. Glenn is a graduate of Central State University and Ball State University. She currently resides in Indianapolis, Indiana, with her husband and two children.
Indianapolis is the setting for Carmen's trilogy of inter-office politics: Overdrive, Ambition and Office Gossip.
Carmen has been a member of Go On Girl Book Club, for thirteen years. Her book club membership has been an inspiration for her writing. She hopes her writing will give the reader food for thought and interesting discussion. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
In her debut effort, Glenn provides a page-turner that rivals some primetime soaps with the tension, deceit and relentless chase of external and material gratification, along with a health dose of satisfaction by the last page.
C. Denise Johnson - Pittsburgh Courier
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the nature of Jeremiah and Jasmine's romance.
2. Discuss the impact of infidelity in relationships.
3. Can men and women in a committed relationship also have platonic friends of the opposite sex?
4. Give your thoughts on the dynamics of the Pratt sisters. Jasmine, Nicole and Toni.
5. What are you willing to forgive in a relationship?
6. What are you unwilling to forgive of your lover?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)
Local Souls
Allan Gurganus, 2013
Liveright Publishing
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780871403797
Summary
With the meteoric success of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus placed himself among America’s most original and emotionally engaged storytellers. If his first comic novel mapped the late nineteenth-century South, Local Souls brings the twisted hilarity of Flannery O’Connor kicking into our new century.
Through memorable language and bawdy humor, Gurganus returns to his mythological Falls, North Carolina, home of Last Confederate Widow. This first work in a decade offers three novellas mirroring today’s face-lifted South, a zone revolutionized around freer sexuality, looser family ties, and superior telecommunications, yet it celebrates those locals who have chosen to stay local.
In doing so, Local Souls uncovers certain old habits—adultery, incest, obsession—still very much alive in our New South, a "Winesburg, Ohio" with high-speed Internet.
Wells Tower says of Gurganus, "No living writer knows more about how humans matter to each other." Such ties of love produce hilarious, if wrenching, complications: "Fear Not" gives us a banker's daughter seeking the child she was forced to surrender when barely fifteen, only to find an adult rescuer she might have invented. In "Saints Have Mothers," a beloved high school valedictorian disappears during a trip to Africa, granting her ambitious mother a postponed fame that turns against her. And in a dramatic "Decoy," the doctor-patient friendship between two married men breaks toward desire just as a biblical flood shatters their neighborhood and rearranges their fates.
Gurganus finds fresh pathos in ancient tensions: between marriage and Eros, parenthood and personal fulfillment. He writes about erotic hunger and social embarrassment with Twain's knife-edged glee. By loving Falls, Gurganus dramatizes the passing of Hawthorne’s small-town nation into those Twitter-nourished lives we now expect and relish.
Four decades ago, John Cheever pronounced Allan Gurganus "the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation." Local Souls confirms Cheever’s prescient faith. It deepens the luster of Gurganus’s reputation for compassion and laughter. His black comedy leaves us with lasting affection for his characters and the aching aftermath of human consequences. Here is a universal work about a village. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 11, 1947
• Where—Rocky Mount, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., Sarah Lawrence College; Iowa
Writers' Workshop
• Awards—Sue Kaufman Prize (American Academy of
Arts and Letters); Lambda Literary Award
• Currently—lives in North Carolina
Allan Gurganus is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work, which includes Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989) and Local Souls (2013), is often influenced by and set in his native North Carolina.
Gurganus was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. He first trained as a painter, studying at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He served three years with the United States Navy during the Vietnam War and began writing during his time on the USS Yorktown.
He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where he studied with Grace Paley. He studied with John Cheever and Stanley Elkin at the University of Iowa in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Cheever sold Gurganus's short story "Minor Heroism" to The New Yorker without telling Gurganus beforehand.
In addition to later teaching at both Sarah Lawrence and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has also taught at Stanford and Duke Universities.
His best known work is his 1989 debut novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which was on the New York Times Best Seller list for eight months. It won the Sue Kaufman Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and sold over four million copies. It was made into a CBS television play, with Cicely Tyson winning one of its four Emmy Awards as best supporting actress in the role of the freed slave Castalia. The novel was also adapted for a one-woman Broadway play, starring Ellen Burstyn, in 2003.
Gurganus's other works include White People (1990), a collection of short stories and novellas; Plays Well With Others (1997), a novel; The Practical Heart (1993/2001), a collection of four novellas, which won a 2001 Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Men's Fiction category; and Local Souls (2013), a novel. His shorter fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Paris Review, in addition to being included in the O. Henry Prize Collection and the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.
After living in New York City for a number of years, Gurganus returned to North Carolina, where he co-founded the political group Writers Against Jesse Helms and, as a result, appeared as himself in Tim Kirkman's 1998 documentary Dear Jesse. Gurganus has also taken a position against the Iraq War, most notably by citing his Vietnam War experience in an essay published in The New York Times Magazine, "The War at Home," published April 6, 2003, a few weeks after the invasion. Gurganus was also the inaugural guest editor of New Stories From the South, an annual collection of notable fiction by Southern writers published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, in 2006.
He is the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Award and a 2006 Guggenheim fellowship.
In an editorial about the Duke University lacrosse players accused of rape, Gurganus stated, "When the children of privilege feel vividly alive only while victimizing, even torturing, we must all ask why." The players were acquitted of all charges, and later settled with the university for an undisclosed sum. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/01/2013.)
Book Reviews
"Decoy" is the most dignified and searching of these novellas. It's got a lot to say about class—the narrator's family has "barely made the broad-jump from clay tobacco fields to red clay courts"—and just as much about the ways communities emotionally expand and contract. It has a soulful pang of heartache, especially over abandonment by close friends.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
It’s been 12 years since Gurganus last published a full-length work—but if there remains any doubt of [Gurganus's] literary greatness…Local Souls should put it to rest forever…[it] is a tour de force in the tradition of Hawthorne. It shows that Gurganus's vast creative and imaginative powers, still rooted in the local, are increasingly universal in scope and effect. The book is an expansive work of love…The prose is taut with the electric charge of internal rhyme, assonance and alliteration. Each touch yields an invigorating shock…Like Chekhov and Cheever before him, Gurganus registers an enormous amount of compassion for the characters he holds to the fire. These local souls may be "fallen," but Gurganus seems well aware that the biblical fall also implies a promise: the chance to earn forgiveness, and perhaps even redemption.
Jamie Quatro - New York Times Book Review
Gurganus unearths Falls's piquant, humanizing secrets. If the gossip seems cruel, it's always meant with affection. "Small towns, being untraveled literalists, do tend to tease a lot," Mr. Gurganus writes. "What big cities might call Sadism little towns name Fun.
Wall Street Journal
Allan Gurganus proves once again that small-town life in the New South can be as tragic and twisted as anything out of an ancient Greek playbook…. The chatty, roundabout storytelling, the wicked humor and sense of the absurd often disguise the gravity of these investigations into life’s tendency to ‘retract its promise overight,’ to ‘become a vale of tears breaking over you in sudden lashing.’ Hidden above the safe confines of the Falls, Zeus readies his lightning bolts.
Gina Webb - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Occasionally shocking, consistently understated and knowing, Local Souls deploys three related novellas that deal with people who don't fit in. The world of Allan Gurganus' first new work of fiction in a dozen years is both familiar and eccentric…. Just as all-American as the folks Sherwood Anderson brought to life in Winesburg, Ohio nearly a century ago….Giving away the ending would be to give away a secret. Mr. Gurganu—imaginative, kind, even humorous—builds toward that secret so skillfully, our arrival at it becomes a pact with the characters themselves.
Carlo Wolff - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Gurganus [is] fearfully gifted…. The gem of Local Souls is the gorgeous Decoy, in which Gurganus removes the gloves and delivers the literary equivalent of a bare-knuckled knockout. Decoy is so good that you want to lob all sorts of adjectives its way: warm, humane, profound, sagacious, hilarious, nostalgic, and incisive…. The last pages of Local Souls prove once again that there is no writer alive quite like Allan Gurganus.
Laura Albritton - Miami Herald
The first-person voice’s capacity for lifelikeness and oral illusion has been Gurganus’s great Southern storytelling inheritance… Local Souls stays true to its author’s vocal aesthetic.
Thomas Mallon - New Yorker
[A]n astounding testament to Gurganus's narrative vibrancy, faultless plotting, and Everyman/mythic vision…. Of living novelists in English, only Martin Amis and Cormac McCarthy can match Gurganus's pyrotechnical aptitude for language, for forging a verbiage both rapturous and exact. He's categorically incapable of crafting a dull sentence…. [He is] one of the most exciting fiction writers alive.
William Giraldi - Oxford American
"Fear Not" subjects a smalltown golden girl to horrific loss, an unplanned pregnancy, and a lifetime of wondering about the fate of her baby. The protagonist of "Saints Have Mothers" reluctantly sees her luminous, gifted daughter off on a global adventure, and has her worst fears realized.... In "Decoy," a family history gets spun out as a backdrop to the retirement of the town's senior physician.... In these layered, often funny narratives...Gurganus exposes humanity as a strange species.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) In this first work in 12 years, Gurganus offers three luscious, perceptively written pieces, each as rich as any full-length novel and together exploring the depth of our connections.... These pieces are so fresh and real that the reader has the sense of walking through a dissolving plate-glass window straight into the lives of the characters. Highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
Vivid language, provocative sentence structure, and metaphors that elevate the reader’s consciousness. [Gurganus] shares with his southern cohorts a delight in discovering the quotidian within lives led under extraordinary, even bizarre circumstances.
Booklist
(Starred review.) A witty and soulful trio of novellas by master storyteller Gurganus who....manages the neat hat trick of blending the stuff of everyday life with Faulkner-ian gothic and Chekhov-ian soul-searching, all told in assured language that resounds, throughout all three novellas... [T]he novellas have a conversational tone and easy manner that are a testimony to the author's craftsmanship. A gem.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.
Loitering with Intent(Stone Barrington Series, 16)
Stuart Woods, 209
Penguin Group USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451228567
Summary
Dumped by his glamorous Russian girlfriend during dinner at Elaine's, and running low on cash, Stone Barrington is having a bad week. So his luck seems to be improving when he's hired to locate the missing son of a very wealthy man—lucky because the job pays well, and because the son is hiding in the tropical paradise of Key West.
But when Stone and his sometime running buddy Dino Bacchetti arrive in the sunny Keys, it appears that someone has been lying in wait. When Stone very nearly loses his life after being blindsided at a local bar, he realizes that the young man he's been hired to track may have good reason for not wanting to be found.
Suddenly Key West is looking less like Margaritaville and more like the mean streets of New York. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 9, 1938
• Where—Manchester, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Georgia
• Awards—Edgar Award for Chiefs, 1981; Grand Prix de
Litérature Policière for Imperfect Strangers, 1995
• Currently—lives in Key West, Florida; Mt. Desert, Maine;
New York City
Stuart Woods was born in 1938 in Manchester, Georgia. After graduating from college and enlisting in the Air National Guard, he moved to New York, where he worked in advertising for the better part of the 1960s. He spent three years in London working for various ad agencies, then moved to Ireland in 1973 to begin his writing career in earnest.
However, despite his best intentions, Woods got sidetracked in Ireland. He was nearly 100 pages into a novel when he discovered the seductive pleasures of sailing. "Everything went to hell," he quips on his web site "All I did was sail." He bought a boat, learned everything he could about celestial navigation, and competed in the Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic Race (OSTAR) in 1976, finishing respectably in the middle of the fleet. (Later, he took part in the infamous Fastnet Race of 1979, a yachting competition that ended tragically when a huge storm claimed the lives of 15 sailors and 4 observers. Woods and his crew emerged unharmed.)
Returning to the U.S., Woods wrote two nonfiction books: an account of his transatlantic sailing adventures (Blue Water, Green Skipper) and a travel guide he claims to have written on a whim. But the book that jump-started his career was the opus interruptus begun in Ireland. An absorbing multigenerational mystery set in a small southern town, Chiefs was published in 1981, went on to win an Edgar Award, and was subsequently turned into a television miniseries starring Charlton Heston.
An amazingly prolific author, Woods has gone on to pen dozens of compelling thrillers, juggling stand-alone novels with installments in four successful series. (His most popular protagonists are New York cop-turned-attorney Stone Barrington, introduced in 1991's New York Dead, and plucky Florida police chief Holly Barker, who debuted in 1998's Orchid Beach.) His pleasing mix of high-octane action, likable characters, and sly, subversive humor has made him a hit with readers—who have returned the favor by propelling his books to the top of the bestseller lists.
Extras
• His first job was in advertising at BBDO in New York, and his first assignment was to write ads for CBS-TV shows. He recalls: "They consisted of a drawing of the star and one line of exactly 127 characters, including spaces, and I had to write to that length. It taught me to be concise.
• He flies his own airplane, a single-engine turboprop called a Jetprop, and tours the country every year in it, including book tours.
• He's a partner in a 1929 motor yacht called Belle and spends two or three weeks a year aboard her.
• In 1961-62, Woods spent 10 months in Germany with the National Guard at the height of the Berlin Wall Crisis.
• In October and November of 1979, he skippered a friend's yacht back across the Atlantic, with a crew of six, calling at the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands and finishing at Antigua in the Caribbean. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Never one to avoid a glamorous vacation spot, Stone Barrington travels to Key West, Fla., in this easygoing entry in bestseller Woods's long-running series (Hot Mahogany, etc.) to feature the New York cop turned lawyer. Stone is supposed to track down Evan Keating, a young man whose signature is needed on documents allowing his father to sell the family business, except that Evan doesn't want to be found and when he is, doesn't want to sign the papers. Meanwhile, there's always time to enjoy good food and romance. Stone and Dino Bacchetti, his former NYPD partner, eat a lot of conch, while a beautiful Swedish doctor, Annika Swenson, learns the hard way that being involved with Stone is the most dangerous job in America. Woods handles the proceedings with dispatch and good humor, the pages fly by, and contented readers will sit back and eagerly await the next installment.
Publishers Weekly
After a less than thrilling turn in Hot Mahogany (2008), Stone Barrington is back in top form with this twist-filled page-turner.... An exciting entry in prolific Woods’ long-running series.
Booklist
Beneath the excruciatingly apt title lurks a welcome return to detection, more or less, for jet-setting New York attorney Stone Barrington. Offered a hefty sum to sell the family business, chemist Warren Keating has already won the reluctant blessing of his ancient father Eli. But company rules require him to get the permission of his son as well. That's a bit awkward, because Warren hasn't seen Evan since the boy's college graduation five years ago, and a recent postcard Evan sent from Key West doesn't sound as if it's laying the groundwork for a reunion. Deputized to fly to Key West and get Evan's signature on the appropriate documents, Stone packs light—an easy job since his girlfriend, Tatiana Orlovsky, has just returned to her unworthy husband. With the help of his ex-partner Lt. Dino Bacchetti and Dino's old buddy Lt. Tommy Sculley, who retired from the NYPD to police Key West, Stone quickly traces Evan to a convenient barstool, makes his pitch and gets decked for his trouble—not by Evan, but by his enterprising girlfriend Gigi Jones. Stone awakens to find comely Dr. Annika Swenson bending over him. Since she doesn't have any American hang-ups about sex, she's soon putting Stone through his paces, leaving him panting for sleep and another round of conch fritters. Meanwhile, Evan's schoolmate Charley Boggs has been identified as a likely drug mule, then becomes a murder victim, and Evan has accused his father of poisoning his later brother Harry, who ran the company, and trying to hire a hit man to kill Evan. For a while everything seems confusing and uncertain. Luckily for Stone's legion of fans, the guilt is swiftly fixed to a professional killer you just know is going to be left free at journey's end to decimate the casts of future Stone adventures. Middling for this wildly uneven series. Readers who quit halfway through won't miss a thing.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Loitering with Intent:
1. What kind of character is Evan Keating? Why does he seem to be the target of other's schemes?
2. Why is Evan so illusive and then uncooperative when Stone finally tracks him down? What did you come to suspect about Evan? Do his alibi's pan out...or is he lying?
3. What is the reason that Evan's girlfriend attacks Stone? Is an explanation ever offered?
4. How 'bout that Swedish doctor? An charming diversion to the plot...or tiresome and dispensible?
5. At what point did you begin to suspect that Warren Keating might be on the up and up? Were you stumped by all the twists and turns the story takes?
6. Do you find the ending satisfying...does it wrap up all the loose ends and offer a few suprises along the way? Or did you find the end predictable...with a few explanations still missing?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
Knopf Doubleday
317 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679723165
Summary
Nabokov's Lolita was originally published in 1955 and immediately became embroiled in its own censorship battles.
The story is admittedly, purposefully, a shocking one: Humbert Humbert, an emigré academic, has a thing for young girls. Nymphets, he calls them, prepubescent girls who betray some precocious awareness of their own sensuality. Upon accepting a position at a new college, Humbert rents a room in town and falls madly, passionately, horrifyingly in love with his landlady's 12-year-old daughter, Dolores Haze, the Lolita of the novel's title. He marries Dolores's mother in order to maintain proximity to Dolores herself, and his relationship with her very quickly exceeds the bounds of stepfatherly affection.
There are several upsetting things about this story, not the least of which is that, it appears, Lolita herself is the seducer, and Humbert the seducee. Hence the ubiquitous comparisons of any precociously sexual, slightly dangerous girl to this character (for example, the "Long Island Lolita"). These comparisons—and the moral censorship to which the novel has been subject—are, however, based on a most superficial reading of the book, one that overlooks a basic literary concept: the unreliable narrator.
Humbert Humbert is the one who tells us the story. From an insane asylum. He's a child molester and, ultimately, a murderer. Why on earth should we take his word for how it happened?
This, in fact, is the real story of Lolita. The novel is about the ways in which a reader can be manipulated to feel sympathy for—even to identify with—the most horrifying person imaginable. That early readers of the novel were so shocked by Dolores's behavior—so shocked, in fact, that governments moved to ban the book—is precisely Nabokov's point: Rather than acknowledge the ultimate evil that lies under the otherwise charming persona, we as a culture are more inclined to turn him into a tragic hero, a victim. (From the editors at Barnes and Noble.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 23, 1899
• Where—St. Petersburg, Russia
• Death—July 02, 1977
• Where—Montreux, Switzerland
• Education—Trinity College, Cambridge
The eldest son of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and his wife Elena, née Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova, he was born to a prominent and aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, where he also spent his childhood and youth. Nabokov's childhood, which he called "perfect", was remarkable in several ways. The family spoke Russian, English and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. In fact, much to his father's patriotic chagrin, Nabokov could read and write English before he could Russian. In Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls numerous details of his privileged childhood, and his ability to recall in vivid detail memories of his past was a boon to him during his permanent exile, as well as providing a theme which echoes from his first book Mary all the way to later works such as Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
The Nabokov family left Russia in the wake of the 1917 February Revolution for a friend's estate in Crimea, where they remained for 18 months. At this point the family did not expect to be out of Russia for very long, when in fact they would never return. Following the defeat of the White Army in Crimea in 1919, the Nabokovs left Russia for exile in western Europe. The family settled briefly in England, where Vladimir enrolled in Trinity College, Cambridge and studied Slavic and Romance languages where his experiences would later help him to write the novel Glory.
In 1923, Nabokov graduated from Cambridge and relocated to Berlin, where he gained a reputation within the colony of Russian émigrés as a novelist and poet, writing under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin. He married Véra Slonim in Berlin in 1925. Their son, Dmitri, was born in 1934.
In 1922, Nabokov's father was assassinated in Berlin by Russian monarchists as he tried to shelter their real target, Pavel Milyukov, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile. This episode of mistaken, violent death would echo again and again in the author's fiction, where characters would meet their violent deaths under mistaken terms. In Pale Fire, for example, the poet Shade is mistaken for a judge who resembles him and is murdered.
Nabokov was a synesthete* and described aspects of synesthesia in several of his works. In his memoir Speak, Memory, he notes that his wife also exhibited synesthesia; like her husband, her mind's eye associated colors with particular letters. They discovered that Dmitri shared the trait, and moreover that the colors he associated with some letters were in some cases blends of his parents' hues—"which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle".
Nabokov left Germany with his family in 1937 for Paris and in 1940 fled from the advancing German troops to the United States. It was here that he met Edmund Wilson, who introduced Nabokov's work to American editors, eventually leading to his international recognition.
Nabokov came to Wellesley College in 1941 as resident lecturer in comparative literature. The position, created specifically for him, provided an income and free time to write creatively and pursue his lepidoptery. Nabokov is remembered as the founder of Wellesley's Russian Department. His lecture series on major nineteenth-century Russian writers was hailed as "funny," "learned," and "brilliantly satirical." During this time, the Nabokovs resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Following a lecture tour through the United States, Nabokov returned to Wellesley for the 1944-45 academic year as a lecturer in Russian. He served through the 1947–48 term as Wellesley's one-man Russian Department, offering courses in Russian language and literature. His classes were popular, due as much to his unique teaching style as to the wartime interest in all things Russian. At the same time he was curator of lepidoptery at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Biology. After being encouraged by Morris Bishop, Nabokov left Wellesley in 1948 to teach Russian and European literature at Cornell University. In 1945, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
Also in 1945, Vladimir Nabokov was told by a relative that his homosexual brother, Sergei, who had lived most of his adult life in Paris and Austria, had died in a Nazi concentration camp at Neuengamme, Germany.
Nabokov wrote his novel Lolita while traveling in the Western United States. In June, 1953 he and his family came to Ashland, Oregon, renting a house on Meade Street from Professor Taylor, head of the Southern Oregon College Department of Social Science. There he finished Lolita and began writing the novel Pnin. He roamed the nearby mountains looking for butterflies, and wrote a poem "Lines Written in Oregon". On October 1, 1953, he and his family left for Ithaca, New York.
After the success of Lolita, Nabokov was able to move to Europe and devote himself to writing. From 1960 to the end of his life he lived in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland. (From Wikipedia)
*Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled. In one common form, known as color synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Lolita has achieved iconic status as a literary masterpiece. But it's disturbing, highly disturbing, because of its subject matter, pedophilia. Even worse, you find yourself taking the side of...rooting for... identifying with...ohgod-ohgod...a pedophile. And you find yourself laughing. The pedophile is a wickedly funny narrator. How does Nabokov do it?
A LitLovers LitPick (Sept. '08)
[Lolita's] illicit nature will both shock the reader into paying attention and prevent sentimentally false sympathy from distorting his judgment. Contrariwise, I believe, Mr. Nabokov is slyly exploiting the American emphasis on the attraction of youth and the importance devoted to the “teen-ager” in order to promote an unconscious identification with Humbert’s agonies. Both techniques are entirely valid. But neither, I hope, will obscure the purpose of the device: namely, to underline the essential, inefficient, painstaking and pain-giving selfishness of all passion, all greed—of all urges, whatever they may be, that insist on being satisfied without regard to the effect their satisfaction has upon the outside world. Humbert is all of us.
Elizabeth Janeway - The New York Times, 1958
Discussion Questions
1. Lolita begins with an earnest foreword, purportedly written by one John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., author of Do the Senses Make Sense? (whose initials—"J.R., Jr."— echo as suspiciously as "Humbert Humbert"). Why might Nabokov have chosen to frame his novel in this fashion? What is the effect of knowing that the narrative's three main characters are already dead—and, in a sense, nonexistent, since their names have been changed?
2. Why might Nabokov have chosen to name his protagonist "Humbert Humbert"? Does the name's parodic double rumble end up distancing us from its owner's depravity? Is it harder to take evil seriously when it goes under an outlandish name? What uses, comic and poetic, does Nabokov make of this name in the course of Lolita?
3. Humbert's confession is written in an extraordinary language. It is by turns colloquial and archaic, erudite and stilted, florid and sardonic. It is studded with French expressions, puns in several other languages, and allusions to authors from Petrarch to Joyce. Is this language merely an extension of Nabokov's own—which the critic Michael Wood describes as "a fabulous, freaky, singing, acrobatic, unheard-of English" (Michael Wood, The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 5.) — or is Humbert's language appropriate to his circumstances and motives? In what way does it obfuscate as much as it reveals? And if Humbert's prose is indeed a veil, at what points is this veil lifted and what do we glimpse behind it?
4. Humbert attributes his pedophilia (or "nympholepsy") to his tragically aborted childhood romance with Annabel Leigh. How far can we trust this explanation? How do we reconcile Humbert's reliance on the Freudian theory of psychic trauma with his corrosive disdain for psychiatrists?
5. In the early stages of his obsession Humbert sees Lolita merely as a new incarnation of Annabel, even making love to her on different beaches as he tries to symbolically consummate his earlier passion. In what other ways does Humbert remain a prisoner of the past? Does he ever succeed in escaping it? Why is Lolita singularly impervious to the past, to the extent that she can even shrug off the abuse inflicted on her by both Humbert and Quilty?
6. How does Humbert's marriage to Valeria foreshadow his relationships with both Charlotte and Lolita? How does the revelation of Valeria's infidelity prepare us for Lolita's elopement with Quilty? Why does Humbert respond so differently to these betrayals?
7. On page 31 we encounter the first of the "dazzling coincidences" that illuminate Lolita like flashes of lightning (or perhaps stage lightning), when Humbert flips through a copy of Who's Who in the Limelight in the prison library. What is the significance of each of the entries for "Roland Pym," "Clare Quilty," and "Dolores Quine." In what ways do their names, biographies, and credits prefigure the novel's subsequent developments? Who is the mysterious "Vivian Darkbloom," whose name is an anagram for "Vladimir Nabokov"? Where else in Lolita does Nabokov provide us with imaginary texts that seem to lend verisimilitude to Humbert's narrative and at the same time make us question the factuality of the world in which it is set?
8. Humbert Humbert is an émigré. Not only has he left Europe for America, but in the course of Lolita he becomes an erotic refugee, fleeing the stability of Ramsdale and Beardsley for a life in motel rooms and highway rest stops. How does this fact shape his responses to the book's other characters and their responses to him? To what extent is the America of Lolita an exile's America? In what ways is Humbert's foreignness a corollary of his perversion? Is it possible to see Lolita as Nabokov's veiled meditation on his own exile?
9. We also learn that Humbert is mad—mad enough, at least, to have been committed to several mental institutions, where he took great pleasure in misleading his psychiatrists. Is Humbert's madness an aspect of his sexual deviance or is it something more fundamental? Can we trust a story told by an insane narrator? What is Humbert's kinship with the "mad" narrators of such works as Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Gogol's Diary of a Madman?
10. What makes Charlotte Haze so repugnant to Humbert? Does the author appear to share Humbert's antagonism? Does he ever seem to criticize it? In what ways does Charlotte embody the Russian word poshlust which Nabokov translated as "not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive?" (Cited by Alfred Appel, Jr., in The Annotated Lolita. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970, pp. xlix-1.)
11. To describe Lolita and other alluring young girls, Humbert coins the word "nymphet." The word has two derivations: the first from the Greek and Roman nature spirits, who were usually pictured as beautiful maidens dwelling in mountains, waters, and forests; the second from the entomologist's term for the young of an insect undergoing incomplete metamorphosis. Note the book's numerous allusions to fairy tales and spells; the proliferation of names like "Elphinstone," "Pisky," and "The Enchanted Hunters," as well as Humbert's repeated sightings of moths and butterflies. Also note that Nabokov was a passionate lepidopterist, who identified and named at least one new species of butterfly. How does the character of Lolita combine mythology and entomology? In what ways does Lolita resemble both an elf and an insect? What are some of this novel's themes of enchantment and metamorphosis as they apply both to Lolita and Humbert, and perhaps to the reader as well?
12. Before Humbert actually beds his nymphet, there is an extraordinary scene, at once rhapsodic, repulsive, and hilarious, in which Humbert excites himself to sexual climax while a (presumably) unaware Lolita wriggles in his lap. How is this scene representative of their ensuing relationship? What is the meaning of the sentence "Lolita had been safely solipsized" [p. 60], "solipsism" being the epistemological theory that the self is the sole arbiter of "reality"? Is all of Lolita the monologue of a pathological solipsist who is incapable of imagining any reality but his own or of granting other people any existence outside his own desires?
13. Can Humbert ever be said to "love" Lolita? Does he ever perceive her as a separate being? Is the reader ever permitted to see her in ways that Humbert cannot?
14. Humbert meets Lolita while she resides at 342 Lawn Street, seduces her in room 342 of The Enchanted Hunters, and in one year on the road the two of them check into 342 motels. Before Lolita begins her affair with Clare Quilty, her mother mentions his uncle Ivor, the town dentist, and sends Lolita to summer at Camp Q (near the propitiously named Lake Climax). These are just a few of the coincidences that make Lolita so profoundly unsettling. Why might Nabokov deploy coincidence so liberally in this book? Does he use it as a convenient way of advancing plot or in order to call the entire notion of a "realistic" narrative into question? How do Nabokov's games of coincidence tie in with his use of literary allusion (see Questions 4, 15, and 16) and self-reference (see Question 7)?
15. Having plotted Charlotte's murder and failed to carry it out, Humbert is rid of her by means of a bizarre, and bizarrely fortuitous, accident. Is this the only time that fate makes a spectacular intrusion on Humbert's behalf? Are there occasions when fate conspires to thwart him? Is the fate that operates in this novel—a fate so preposterously hyperactive that Humbert gives it a name— actually an extension of Humbert's will, perhaps of his unconscious will? Is Humbert in a sense guilty of Charlotte's death? Discuss the broader question of culpability as it resonates throughout this book.
16. Quilty makes his first onstage appearance at The Enchanted Hunters, just before Humbert beds Lolita for the first time. Yet rumors and allusions precede him. Does the revelation of Quilty's identity come as a surprise? Is it the true climax of Lolita? How does Nabokov prepare us for this revelation? Since the mystery of Quilty's identity turns this novel into a kind of detective story (in which the protagonist is both detective and criminal), it may be useful to compare Lolita to other examples of the genre, such as Poe's The Purloined Letter, Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" stories, or Agatha Christie's A Murder Is Announced, all of which are alluded to in the text.
17. Among our early clues about Quilty is his resemblance to Humbert (or Humbert's resemblance to him). This resemblance is one of the reasons that Lolita finds her mother's boarder attractive, and we are reminded of it later on when Humbert believes for a brief time that Quilty may be his uncle Trapp. How does Quilty conform to the archetype of the double or Doppelgänger? In its literary incarnations, a double may represent the protagonist's evil underself or his higher nature. What sort of double is Quilty? Are we ever given the impression that Humbert may be Quilty's double?
18. If we accept Humbert at his word, Lolita initiates their first sexual encounter, seducing him after he has balked at violating her in her sleep. Yet later Humbert admits that Lolita sobbed in the night—"every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep" [p. 176]. Should we read this reversal psychologically: that what began as a game for Lolita has now become a terrible and inescapable reality? Or has Humbert been lying to us from the first? What is the true nature of the crimes committed against Lolita? Does Humbert ever genuinely repent them, or is even his remorse a sham? Does Lolita forgive Humbert or only forget him?
19. Humbert is not only Lolita's debaucher but her stepfather and, after Charlotte's death, the closest thing she has to a parent. What kind of parent is he? How does his behavior toward the girl increasingly come to resemble Charlotte's? Why, during their last meeting, does Lolita dismiss the erotic aspect of their relationship and "grant" only that Humbert was a good father?
20. As previously mentioned, Lolita abounds with games: the games Humbert plays with his psychiatrists, his games of chess with Gaston Godin, the transcontinental games of tag and hide-and-go-seek that Quilty plays with Humbert, and the slapstick game of Quilty's murder. There is Humbert's poignant outburst, "I have only words to play with!" [p. 32]. In what way does this novel itself resemble a vast and intricate game, a game played with words? Is Nabokov playing with his readers or against them? How does such an interpretation alter your experience of Lolita? Do its game-like qualities detract from its emotional seriousness or actually heighten it?
21. The last lines of Lolita are: "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita" [p. 309]. What is the meaning of this passage? What does art offer Humbert and his beloved that sexual passion cannot? Is this aesthetic appeal merely the mask with which Humbert conceals or justifies his perversion, or is the immortality of art the thing that Humbert and his creator have been seeking all along? In what ways is Lolita at once a meditation on, and a re-creation of, the artistic process?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Lone Wolf
Jodi Pioult, 2012
Simon & Schuster
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439102749
Summary
A life hanging in the balance...a family torn apart. The #1 internationally bestselling author Jodi Picoult tells an unforgettable story about family secrets, love, and letting go.
In the wild, when a wolf knows its time is over, when it knows it is of no more use to its pack, it may sometimes choose to slip away. Dying apart from its family, it stays proud and true to its nature. Humans aren’t so lucky.
Luke Warren has spent his life researching wolves. He has written about them, studied their habits intensively, and even lived with them for extended periods of time. In many ways, Luke understands wolf dynamics better than those of his own family. His wife, Georgie, has left him, finally giving up on their lonely marriage. His son, Edward, twenty-four, fled six years ago, leaving behind a shattered relationship with his father. Edward understands that some things cannot be fixed, though memories of his domineering father still inflict pain. Then comes a frantic phone call: Luke has been gravely injured in a car accident with Edward’s younger sister, Cara.
Suddenly everything changes: Edward must return home to face the father he walked out on at age eighteen. He and Cara have to decide their father’s fate together. Though there’s no easy answer, questions abound: What secrets have Edward and his sister kept from each other? What hidden motives inform their need to let their father die...or to try to keep him alive? What would Luke himself want? How can any family member make such a decision in the face of guilt, pain, or both? And most importantly, to what extent have they all forgotten what a wolf never forgets: that each member of a pack needs the others, and that sometimes survival means sacrifice?
Another tour de force by Picoult, Lone Wolf brilliantly describes the nature of a family: the love, protection, and strength it can offer—and the price we might have to pay for those gifts. What happens when the hope that should sustain a family is the very thing tearing it apart? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 19, 1966
• Where—Nesconset (Long Island), New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; M.Ed., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Hanover, New Hampshire
Jodi Lynn Picoult is an American author. She was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for fiction in 2003. Picoult currently has approximately 14 million copies of her books in print worldwide.
Early life and education
Picoult was born and raised in Nesconset on Long Island in New York State; when she was 13, her family moved to New Hampshire. Even as a child, Picoult had a penchant for writing stories: she wrote her first story— "The Lobster Which Misunderstood"—when she was five.
While still in college—she studied writing at Princeton University—Picoult published two short stories in Seventeen magazine. To pay the bills, after graduation she worked at a variety of jobs, including copy writing and editing textbooks; she even taught eighth-grade English and attained a Masters in Education from Harvard University.
In 1989, Picoult married Timothy Warren Van Leer, whom she met in college, and while pregnant with their first child, wrote her first book. Song of the Humpbacked Whale, her literary debut, came out in 1992. Two more children followed, as did a string of bestseller novels. All told, Picoult has more than 20 books to her name.
Writing
At an earlier time in her life, Picoult believed the tranquility of family life in small-town New England offered little fodder for writing; the truly interesting stuff of fiction happened elsewhere. Ironically, it is small-town life that has ended up providing the settings for Picoult's novels. Within the cozy surroundings of family and friends, Picoult weaves complex webs of relationships that strain, even tear apart, under stress. She excels at portraying ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Disoriented by some accident of chance, they stumble, whirl, and attempt to regain a footing in what was once their calm, ordered world.
Nor has Picoult ever shied from tackling difficult, controversial issues: school shooting, domestic violence, sexual abuse, teen suicide, and racism. She approaches painful topics with sympathy—and her characters with respect—while shining a light on individual struggles. Her legions of readers have loved and rewarded her for that compassion—and her novels have been consistent bestsellers.
Personal life
Picoult and her husband Timothy live in Hanover, New Hampshire. They have three children and a handful of pets. (Adapted from a 2003 Barnes and Noble interview and from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/28/2016.)
Book Reviews
Picoult tackles this sensitive subject with her usual flawless research and convincing characters ... as is Picoult's signature style, the reader is left just as torn as the characters over the best solution. Thought-provoking and gripping.
SHE
Jodi Picoult takes a controversial and provocative subject and uses it as a backdrop to a touching and emotional drama. Her characters are believable and well drawn and the book is all the more powerful for it.
Sunday Express (UK)
You can always rely on Jodi Picoult to spin a riveting read around an issue of our times.
Good Housekeeping
Picoult returns with two provocative questions: can a human join a wolf pack, and who has the right to make end-of-life decisions? Luke Warren, a vital free spirit, has devoted himself to understanding wolf behavior, to the point of having once abandoned his family to live with wolves. Now divorced and raising his 17-year-old daughter, Cara, near his wolf compound, Luke sustains a traumatic brain injury in an accident. His ex-wife, Georgie, remarried to a lawyer, summons Cara’s brother, Edward, from Thailand, where he’s lived for years alienated from his family, who assume the estrangement stems from his father’s rejection of Edward’s homosexuality. Cara wants to keep her father on life support; Edward struggles with resentment but believes his father wouldn’t want to exist in a vegetative state. As Cara and Edward navigate their own conflicts and Luke languishes in a coma, Picoult folds in mesmerizing excerpts of Luke’s book about life with the wolves. There are no surprises, as Picoult (My Sister’s Keeper) as usual probes intriguing matters of the heart while introducing her fans to subjects they might not otherwise explore. You can always count on Picoult for a terrific page-turner about a compelling subject.
Publishers Weekly
Luke Warren has spent decades learning the inner workings of wolf packs. Yet his relationship with his own family is strained. Divorced from his wife and estranged from his son, Edward, Luke remains close to his daughter, Cara. When the two are involved in a car accident that leaves Luke in a coma, Edward must return home to make important medical decisions regarding life-sustaining measures. With facts that aren't always clear and emotional baggage getting in the way, Cara and Edward find themselves on opposite sides regarding what is best for their father. Verdict: Picoult (Sing You Home) once again has written a compelling story involving current issues and family drama with a unique twist. The inclusion of Luke's relationship with wolves adds an element of depth, and details like these are why readers find Picoult's books impossible to put down. Her many fans won't be disappointed. —Madeline Solien, Deerfield P.L., IL
Library Journal
The thoroughly researched wolf lore is fascinating; the rest of the story is a more conventional soap opera of hospital, and later courtroom histrionics. Readers will care less about Luke's prospects for survival than they will about the outcome for his wild companions.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Edward and Cara strongly disagree over whether to keep Luke on life support. Which character did you think was most likely to know Luke’s wishes? Did your opinion change over the course of the novel?
2. What emotions, such as guilt and anger, influence Edward and Cara’s decisions about how to handle their father’s coma? In your opinion, how much weight should the paper Luke signed before he went to Canada have carried? Should Cara’s age have prevented her from being next-of-kin?
3. Cara sees her father as a hero whereas to Edward he is all too human. Why was Cara so much closer to her father than Edward was? Did this portrayal of a family’s dynamic remind you of any relationships in your own life?
4. At the scene of the accident, an EMT tells Cara that if it wasn’t for her, her father might not be alive. She thinks: “Later, I will wonder if that comment is the reason I did everything I did…Because I know her words couldn’t be farther from the truth.” (p. 8) When you learn what Cara means, does it justify her actions, including accusing her brother of attempted murder? If she hadn’t felt such guilt, do you think she would have been less opposed to ending her father’s life? Why or why not?
5. What motivates Edward to arrange for the termination of his father’s life after Cara says, “I can’t do this. I just want it to be over.”? (p. 143) Why does he overlook her earlier objections? How did you react to the scene in which Edward pulls the plug on the ventilator?
6. Luke is the most enigmatic character in the book—a man in a coma, a man torn between the wolf and human world. How do his chapters balance what you learn about him from the other characters? How would the novel and your understanding of Luke and his relationship with wolves have been different without those chapters?
7. Georgie knows Luke is unusual from the moment she meets him, and she’s attracted to his rawness and vigor. Was it fair of Georgie to expect Luke to live a conventional life? Was it unfair of Luke to expect Georgie to sacrifice her own hopes?
8. Luke seems torn between his love for his wolf family and for his human family; and ultimately his human family suffers. Do you think he loved his wolves more, as Edward believed? Do you think he ever could have found a happy medium between the two worlds?
9. Consider the role each member of the Warren family plays in the family unit both before and after the family dissolves. How does the family compare to a wolf pack, where “everyone has a position in it; everyone’s expected to pull his own weight.”? (p. 14) Do you think the Warrens know and understood each other as well as the wolves seem to know each other? Is there one person to blame for the family’s break-up? What could the family have done differently to prevent the collapse?
10. Discuss the Warrens’ family issues that have long gone unspoken or misunderstood, such as Edward’s reason for leaving. What other issues have the Warren family avoided? What were the repercussions of doing so? How would you characterize the way they relate?
11. Why do you think Edward kept his reason for leaving a secret for so long? When he reveals the truth in court, how do Cara and Georgie react? Do his revelations about Luke have a bearing on the hearing?
12. Georgie says of her children, “You may never admit it out loud, but the one you love the most is the one who needs you more desperately than his siblings.” (p. 271) Do you agree? Discuss why and how she favors each of her children at different points in the novel. How does it affect her relationship with Joe to be on the other side of the aisle during the hearing?
13. The moment when Luke opens his eyes and seems to follow Cara is a compelling one, but Dr. Saint-Clare explains that it is merely a reflex. Did you agree with Cara’s perception or the doctor’s? Did it change how you felt about Luke’s chances?
14. Picoult writes: “Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions inside the walls of a hospital.” (p. 70) How do Cara, Georgie, and Edward’s experiences give truth to this statement? Did Dr. Saint-Clare’s testimony affect your belief in the kind of medical miracles Cara hoped for?
15. Ultimately, both the advocate and the judge reach the same conclusions about whether Luke would want to live or die. After reading the chapters from Luke’s point of view, what do you think he would have wanted? In a situation such as this, can there be an answer that is wholly right or wholly wrong? Discuss.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Olivia Laing, 2016
Picador
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250039576
Summary
A dazzling work of memoir, biography and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of six iconic artists.
What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens?
When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art.
Moving fluidly between works and lives - from Edward Hopper's Nighthawks to Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, from Henry Darger's hoarding to David Wojnarowicz's AIDS activism - Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone.
Humane, provocative and deeply moving, The Lonely City is about the spaces between people and the things that draw them together, about sexuality, mortality and the magical possibilities of art. It's a celebration of a strange and lovely state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Olivia Laing, born in 1977, is a British writer, author, and critic.
Her first book, To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface, was published in 2011. It was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and named a Book of the Year by a number of British papers: Independent, Evening Standard, Financial Times, and Scotsman. The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, her second book, came out in 2013, and her third, The Lonely City: Adventures in Being Alone was released in 2016. The latter books have both been widely praised.
Laing has served as the deputy books editor of the Observer and also writes for the Guardian, New Statesman, and Granta, among other publications.
She has been a MacDowell and Yaddo Fellow and Writer in Residence at the British Library. She lives in Cambridge, England. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Olivia Laing, in her new book, The Lonely City, picks up the topic of painful urban isolation and sets it down in many smart and oddly consoling places. She makes the topic her own.... Perhaps the best praise I can give this book is to concur with Ms. Laing’s dedication: "If you’re lonely, this one’s for you."
Dwight Garner - New York Times
This book serves as both provocation and comfort, a secular prayer for those who are alone―meaning all of us.
Ada Calhoun - New York Times Book Review
[Laing] is a brave writer whose books, in their different ways, open up fundamental questions about life and art…. What’s startling is that her book succeeds in offering its readers a redemptive experience comparable to the one she’s describing. Reading it at a lonely moment, I found that I responded easily to the confident muscularity of her prose and the intimate way she described emotional states. I became swiftly less lonely as I did so, earthed by the company of Wojnarowicz, Warhol and Laing herself….This triumphant book is in part an appeal for us to value the kind of loneliness that can be rendered, by the intimacy of art, both tolerable and shareable.
Daily Telegraph (UK)
[A] lovely thing. Exceptionally skillful at changing gears, Ms. Laing moves fluently between memoir, biography (not just of her principal cast but of a large supporting one), art criticism and the fruits of her immersion in "loneliness studies."... She writes about Darger and the rest with insight and empathy and about herself with a refreshing lack of exhibitionism.…every page of The Lonely City exudes a disarming, deep-down fondness for humanity.
Wall Street Journal
Laing, who used group biography to examine the connections between alcoholism and literature in The Trip to Echo Spring, here performs an almost magical trick: Reminding us of how it feels to be lonely, this book gently affirms our connectedness.
Boston Globe
An uncommonly observant hybrid of memoir, history and cultural criticism... [A] book of extraordinary compassion and insight.
San Francisco Chronicle
Laing is an astute and consistently surprising culture critic who deeply identifies with her subjects' vulnerabilities... absolutely one of a kind.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR's Fresh Air
It's not easy to pull off switching between criticism and confession―and like Echo Spring, The Lonely City is an impressive and beguiling combination of autobiography and biography, a balancing act that Laing effortlessly performs. Her gift as a critic is her ability to imaginatively sympathize with her subject in a way that allows the art and life of the artist to go on radiating meaning after the book is closed.
Elle
One of the finest writers of the new non-fiction...compelling and original.
Harper's Bazaar
Laing is always circling back toward a piercingly relevant observation. And, oh, those observations! ... Laing is a great critic, not least because she understands that art can and often does manifest multiple conflicting meanings and desires at once.
Laura Miller - Slate
[An] acute, nervy and personal investigation into urban solitude….[Laing] writes with lyrical clarity, empathy, and a knack for taking a wandering, edgy path, stretching themes (and genres), while never losing an underlying urgency…. A group biography all in one, which takes a difficult, almost taboo, subject and deftly turns it over anew.
New Statesman
By focusing on four artists…Laing’s writing becomes expansive, exploring their biographies, sharing art analysis, and weaving in observations.... She invents new ways to consider how isolation plays into art or even the Internet.... For once, loneliness becomes a place worth lingering.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [An] imaginative and poignant quest….Through her ardent research, empathetic response, original thought, courageous candor, and exquisite language, Laing [is one of the authors] transforming memoir into a daring and dynamic literary form of discovery.
Booklist
[An] absorbing melding of memoir, biography, art essay, and philosophical meditation...[An] illuminating, enriching book.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for The Lonely City...then take off on your own:
1. Olivia Laing writes of loneliness in a large city—New York, specifically—and after a relationship break-up. If you don't live in a metropolitan area, however, does this book resonate with you? Is the urban loneliness that Laing dissects in her book different than loneliness felt elsewhere...or under different conditions?
2. Laing talks about loneliness in these terms:
What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged.
What do you make of this particular passage? In reading it—or others in the book—were you consoled to think that others have a deep sense of isolation, that you are not alone in your loneliness? In other words, did you become less lonely reading this book?
3. Laing writes about feelings common to loneliness: that we're unattractive or sexually undesirable. Is that a cause or an effect of loneliness?
4. Talk about your own loneliness and isolation—the times when you felt cut off, ashamed. Were there (are there) specific times or events in your life that have brought on loneliness?
5. What is Laing's take regarding our online lives? How does the internet contribute to a sense of isolation? Do you agree?
6. Talk about the four artists Laing researches, considering them one by one. Discuss how their work is bound up with the concept of loneliness—or in providing the author insights into her own. Which artist biographies do you find most interesting? Were Laing's choice of artists apt...or does she force fit her subjects to the topic at hand?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Lonely Polygamist
Brady Udall, 2010
W.W. Norton & Co.
602 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393062625
Summary
Golden Richards, husband to four wives, father to twenty-eight children, is having the mother of all midlife crises. His construction business is failing, his family has grown into an overpopulated mini-dukedom beset with insurrection and rivalry, and he is done in with grief: due to the accidental death of a daughter and the stillbirth of a son, he has come to doubt the capacity of his own heart.
Brady Udall, one of our finest American fiction writers, tells a tragicomic story of a deeply faithful man who, crippled by grief and the demands of work and family, becomes entangled in an affair that threatens to destroy his family’s future. Like John Irving and Richard Yates, Udall creates characters that engage us to the fullest as they grapple with the nature of need, love, and belonging.
Beautifully written, keenly observed, and ultimately redemptive, The Lonely Polygamist is an unforgettable story of an American family—with its inevitable dysfunctionality, heartbreak, and comedy—pushed to its outer limits. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—St. Johns, Arizona, USA
• Education—B.A., Brigham Young University; Iowa Writers'
Workshop
• Currently—lives in Boise, Idaho
Brady Udall grew up in a large Mormon family in St. Johns, Arizona. He graduated from Brigham Young University and later attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He was formerly a faculty member of Franklin & Marshall College starting in 1998, then Southern Illinois University, and now teaches writing at Boise State University.
A collection of his short stories titled Letting Loose the Hounds was published in 1998, and his debut novel The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint was first published in 2001. The characterization and structure of the latter has been favorably compared to the work of John Irving. Thematically it has been compared to Charles Dickens. Michael Stipe has optioned a film adaptation of Miracle, with United Artists hiring Michael Cuesta to direct.
In 2010 he published The Lonely Polygamist to both critical and popular acclaim and which climbed rapidly on the best seller lists.
Extras
• In July 2007, Udall appeared on an episode of This American Life.
• Udall is a member of the Udall family, a U.S. political family rooted in the American West. Its role in politics spans over 100 years and four generations and includes his great-uncles former U.S. congressman and Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and former congressman and presidential candidate Morris Udall. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
It is funny, it can be moving, it is ambitious and it is tender about man's endless absurdities and failings.... Sometimes, reading The Lonely Polygamist, one wishes the author had a little less respect, but then the book might be that much less charming.
Eric Weinberger - New York Times
In Brady Udall's audacious, frequently funny new novel, the polygamous patriarch is just a poor, henpecked schmo.... Udall's blunt, empathetic portrait paints the polygamist as a beleaguered and bewildered Everyman. Golden can't keep his three households from warring with one another, let alone make their inhabitants happy.... Telling a story that perpetually unsettles our expectations, Udall whipsaws between moods and roves among points of view.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post
A family drama with stinging turns of dark comedy, the latest from Udall (The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint) is a superb performance and as comic as it is sublimely catastrophic. Golden Richards is a polygamist Mormon with four wives, 28 children, a struggling construction business, and a few secrets. He tells his wives that the brothel he's building in Nevada is actually a senior center, and, more importantly, keeps hidden his burning infatuation with a woman he sees near the job site. Golden, perpetually on edge, has become increasingly isolated from his massive family—given the size of his brood, his solitude is heartbreaking—since the death of one of his children. Meanwhile, his newest and youngest wife, Trish, is wondering if there is more to life than the polygamist lifestyle, and one of his sons, Rusty, after getting the shaft on his birthday, hatches a revenge plot that will have dire consequences. With their world falling apart, will the family find a way to stay together? Udall's polished storytelling and sterling cast of perfectly realized and flawed characters make this a serious contender for Great American Novel status.
Publishers Weekly
Udall's long-awaited novel (after The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint) depicts a lively, humorous, and sometimes tragic picture of Golden Richards, his four demanding wives, and his 28 children. They are an unruly Mormon clan, scattered among three separate houses in rural Utah. Richards, a hapless graying contractor with a limp and a sinus condition, supports them with his less-than-successful construction business. To avoid bankruptcy, he takes a job in Nevada, a project he tells everyone is a senior citizens' home but in fact it is a bordello. That's only one of Golden's secrets. The sister wives hold weekly summits to schedule Golden's visits from wife to wife, house to house. He doesn't have a home of his own, so he frequently takes refuge in a playhouse built for a daughter who died in a tragic accident. In trying to help, he often makes things worse, but he valiantly makes one last effort to bring harmony to his fractious family. Verdict: Udall observes with a keen eye for the ridiculous while showing compassion. Think of the zany theatrics of Carl Hiaasen paired with the family drama of Elizabeth Berg. Enthusiastically recommended. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Library Journal
Unhappy families are different, quoth Leo Tolstoy—even when they're headed by the same patriarch, the situation from which Udall's (The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, 2001, etc.) latest unfolds. "There's hard things we have to do in this life," says a wizened desert rat to an existentially confused Golden Richards, the protagonist. "We bite our lip and do 'em. And we pray to God to help us along the way." Golden is in need of such guiding words. At 48, he calls three houses home, each of them stuffed full of children. Things aren't going well out in the world that he's unsuccessfully tried to keep at bay; his construction business is mired in recession, and he's working in Nevada, far away from the comforts of home(s). To complicate matters, Golden, though already blessed or burdened with three wives, has taken up with another woman, a fringe effect of which is that now he has a fondness for mescal. Golden's life occasions a series of hard choices and often-rueful meditations, and Udall smartly observes how each plays out. His novel opens with a tumultuous welter of children who, though tucked away in a remote corner of Utah, have access to all the media and know, aptly, what a zombie is. As Golden's saga progresses, he learns about the mysteries of such things as condoms (as a friend meaningfully says, "so you don't go fucking yourself out of a spot at the dinner table") and the endless difficulties and intrigues of family politics, with all their plots against the patriarchal throne. Udall layers on real history with the tragedy of atomic testing in the Southwestern deserts of old, and imagined tragedy with some of the unexpected losses Golden must endure. In the end, Udall's story has some of the whimsy of John Nichols's The Milagro Beanfield War but all the complexity of a Tolstoyan or even Faulknerian production—and one of the most satisfying closing lines in modern literature, too. Fans of the HBO series Big Love will be pleased to see an alternate take on the multi-household problem, and lovers of good writing will find this a pleasure, period.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What were your views on polygamy before reading the book? Did they change after you finished reading?
2. Discuss Golden’s progression from lonely polygamist to social polygamist. How does a renewal of faith assist this transformation?
3. Compare and contrast Golden’s behavior at the two funerals. How are they similar? In what ways are they different?
4. How does Glory affect the other family members and Golden in particular?
5. Discuss the motifs of creation and destruction that appear throughout the novel.
6. Do you think Rusty is a representative figure for all of the Richards children in the novel, or is he in some ways unique?
7. Trish is one of the most conflicted mothers in the novel. What do you think of her decision at the end? Was it the right thing to do?
8. How has the family changed at the conclusion of the novel? Do you think they are happy with their decisions?
9. Discuss Rose-of-Sharon’s reaction to Rusty’s accident. Do you think you would have reacted the same way if you were in her place?
10. Why do you think Golden isn’t able to consummate his affair with Huila?
11. Physical appearance is described with exacting clarity throughout the novel. Golden is described as bucktoothed and “Sasquatch,” and Glory as “lopsided” and “overstuffed.” Why do you think there is such a heightened awareness of the body?
12. What is the effect of polygamy on the women in the novel? How do you think their lives and personalities would be different if they weren’t in a polygamous relationship?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry, 1986
Simon & Schuster
864 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451606539
Summary
Winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize
Bestselling winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, Lonesome Dove is an American classic. First published in 1985, Larry McMurtry's epic novel combined flawless writing with a storyline and setting that gripped the popular imagination, and ultimately resulted in a series of four novels and an Emmy-winning television miniseries. Now, with an introduction by the author, Lonesome Dove is reprinted in an S&S Classic Edition.
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry, the author of Terms of Endearment, is his long-awaited masterpiece, the major novel at last of the American West as it really was.
A love story, an adventure, an American epic, Lonesome Dove embraces all the West — legend and fact, heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settiers — in a novel that recreates the central American experience, the most enduring of our national myths.
Set in the late nineteenth century, Lonesome Dove is the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana — and much more. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved not only a daring, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part of the American Dream — the attempt to carve out of the last remaining wilderness a new life.
Augustus McCrae and W. F. Call are former Texas Rangers, partners and friends who have shared hardship and danger together without ever quite understanding (or wanting to understand) each other's deepest emotions. Gus is the romantic, a reluctant rancher who has a way with women and the sense to leave well enough alone. Call is a driven, demanding man, a natural authority figure with no patience for weaknesses, and not many of his own. He is obsessed with thedream of creating his own empire, and with the need to conceal a secret sorrow of his own. The two men could hardly be more different, but both are tough, redoubtable fighters who have learned to count on each other, if nothing else.
Call's dream not only drags Gus along in its wake, but draws in a vast cast of characters:
- Lorena, the whore with the proverbial heart of gold, whom Gus (and almost everyone else) loves, and who survives one of the most terrifying experiences any woman could have...
- Elmira, the restless, reluctant wife of a small-time Arkansas sheriff, who runs away from the security of marriage to become part of the great Western adventure...
- Blue Duck, the sinister Indian renegade, one of the most frightening villains in American fiction, whose steely capacity for cruelty affects the lives of everyone in the book...
- Newt, the young cowboy for whom the long and dangerous journey from Texas to Montana is in fact a search for his own identity...
- Jake, the dashing, womanizing exRanger, a comrade-in-arms of Gus and Call, whose weakness leads him to an unexpected fate...
- July Johnson, husband of Elmira, whose love for her draws him out of his secure life into the wilderness, and turns him into a kind of hero...
Lonesome Dove sweeps from the Rio Grande (where Gus and Call acquire the cattle for their long drive by raiding the Mexicans) to the Montana highlands (where they find themselves besieged by the last, defiant remnants of an older West).
It is an epic of love, heroism, loyalty, honor, and betrayal — faultlessly written, unfailingly dramatic. Lonesome Dove is the novel about the West that American literature — and the American reader — has long been waiting for. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 3, 1936
• Where—Wichita Falls, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., North Texas State University; M.A., Rice
University; studied at Stanford University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1986
• Currently—Archer City, Texas
Back in the late 60s, the fact that Larry McMurtry was not a household name was really a thorn in the side of the writer. To illustrate his dissatisfaction with his status, he would go around wearing a T-shirt that read "Minor Regional Novelist." Well, more than thirty books, two Oscar-winning screenplays, and a Pulitzer Prize later, McMurtry is anything but a minor regional novelist.
Having worked on his father's Texas cattle ranch for a great deal of his early life, McMurtry had an inborn fascination with the West, both its fabled history and current state. However, he never saw himself as a life-long rancher and aspired to a more creative career. He achieved this at the age of 25 when he published his first novel. Horseman, Pass By was a wholly original take on the classic western. Humorous, heartbreaking, and utterly human, this story of a hedonistic cowboy in contemporary Texas was a huge hit for the young author and even spawned a major motion picture starring Paul Newman called Hud just two years after its 1961 publication. Extraordinarily, McMurtry was even allowed to write the script, a rare honor for such a novice.
With such an auspicious debut, it is hard to believe that McMurtry ever felt as though he'd been slighted by the public or marginalized as a minor talent. While all of his books may not have received equal attention, he did have a number of astounding successes early in his career. His third novel The Last Picture Show, a coming-of-age-in-the-southwest story, became a genuine classic, drawing comparisons to J. D. Salinger and James Jones. In 1971, Peter Bogdonovich's screen adaptation of the novel would score McMurtry his first Academy award for his screenplay. Three years later, he published Terms of Endearment, a critically lauded urban family drama that would become a hit movie starring Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine in 1985. A sequel, Evening Star, was published in 1992 and adapted to film in 1996.
That year, McMurtry published what many believe to be his definitive novel. An expansive epic sweeping through all the legends and characters that inhabited the old west, Lonesome Dove was a masterpiece. All of the elements that made McMurtry's writing so distinguished — his skillful dialogue, richly drawn characters, and uncanny ability to establish a fully-realized setting — convened in this Pulitzer winning story of two retired Texas rangers who venture from Texas to Montana. The novel was a tremendous critical and commercial favorite, and became a popular miniseries in 1989.
Following the massive success of Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry's prolificacy grew. He would publish at least one book nearly every year for the next twenty years, including Texasville, a gut-wrenching yet hilarious sequel to The Last Picture Show, Buffalo Girls, a fictionalized account of the later days of Calamity Jane, and several non-fiction titles, such as Crazy Horse.
Interestingly, McMurtry would receive his greatest notoriety in his late 60s as the co-screenwriter of Ang Lee's controversial film Brokeback Mountain. The movie would score the writer another Oscar and become one of the most critically heralded films of 2005. The following year he published his latest novel. Telegraph Days is a freewheeling comedic run-through of western folklore and surely one of McMurtry's most inventive stories and enjoyable reads. Not bad for a "minor regional novelist."
Extras
McMurtry comes from a long line of ranchers and farmers. His father and eight of his uncles were all in the profession.
The first printing of McMurtry's novel In a Narrow Grave is one of his most obscure for a rather obscure reason. The book was withdrawn because the word "skyscrapers" was misspelled as "skycrappers" on page 105. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
(Books prior to the internet have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Weaves a dense web of subplots involving secondary characters and out-of-the-way places, with the idea of using the form of a long old-fashioned realistic novel to create an accurate picture of life on the American frontier.... The Great Cowboy Novel.
Nicholas Lemann - New York Times
If you only read one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove.
USA Today
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
top of page (summary)
The Long and Faraway Gone
Lou Berney, 2015
HarperCollins
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062292438
Summary
Winner-2016 Edgar Award, Best Paperback
In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were brutally killed in an armed robbery. Then a teenage girl vanished from the annual state fair.
Neither crime was ever solved.
Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases continue to echo through the lives of those devastated by the crimes. Wyatt, the one teenage employee who inexplicably survived the movie-theater massacre, is now a private investigator in Las Vegas. A case unexpectedly brings him back to a hometown and a past he's tried to escape—and drags him deeper into the harrowing mystery of the movie-house robbery that left six of his friends dead.
Like Wyatt, Julianna struggles with the past—specifically the day her beautiful older sister, Genevieve, disappeared at the fair. When Julianna discovers that one of the original suspects has resurfaced, she'll stop at nothing to find answers.
As Wyatt's case becomes more complicated and dangerous, and Julianna seeks answers from a ghost, their obsessive quests not only stir memories of youth and first love, but also begin to illuminate dark secrets of the past. Even if they find the truth, will it help them understand what happened and why they were left behind that long and faraway gone summer? Will it set them free—or ultimately destroy them? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1964-65
• Where—Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA
• Education—Loyola University, New Orleans; University of Massachuesetts, Amherst
• Awards—Edgar Award
• Currently—lives in Oklahoma City
Lou Berney is the author of several novels, including November Road (2018), The Long and Faraway Gone (2015), Whiplash River (2012), and Gutshot Straight (2010), as well as a collection of short stories, The Road to Bobby Joe (1991).
His short fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and he has written feature screenplays and created television pilots for, among others, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Focus Features, ABC, and Fox. He teaches in the Red Earth MFA program at Oklahoma City University. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The two key players [Wyatt and Julianna] in Lou Berney's superb regional mystery…suffer from separate but equally crushing cases of survivor guilt…Berney tells both their stories with supreme sensitivity, exploring "the landscape of memory" that keeps shifting beneath our feet, opening up the graves of all those ghosts we thought we'd buried
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review
[T]hat rare literary gem—a dark, quintessentially cool noir novel that is both deeply poignant, and very funny...as hip, hilarious, and entertaining as it is wrenching, beautiful, and ultimately redemptive.
Huffington Post
(Starred review.) Edgar Award–finalist Berney will raise a lump in the throats of many of his readers with this sorrowful account of two people's efforts to come to terms with devastating trauma.... The leads' struggles are portrayed with painful complexity, and Berney, fittingly, avoids easy answers.
(Starred review.) Focused, very insightfully, on love, loss, and memory . . . fully realized creations that readers won’t soon forget. A genuinely memorable novel of ideas.
Booklist
So much to love here...easy to read yet difficult to forget.... Berney is a mighty fine wordsmith whose name should be mentioned more often than it is during discussions of new bright lights in the literary world.
Bookreporter.com
(Starred review.) Twenty-five years after a devastating shooting and the unrelated disappearance of a teenage girl, the survivors of both events struggle to find out what really happened so they can move on with their separate lives.... The novel smartly avoids being coy.... But both characters do achieve their own kind of closure.... A mystery with a deep, wounded heart. Read it.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our LitLovers generic mystery questions.)
GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers
1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?
2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?
3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?
4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?
5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.
- Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
- Are they plausible or implausible?
- Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?
6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?
7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?
- Is the conclusion probable or believable?
- Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
- Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
- Perhaps it's too predictable.
- Can you envision a different or better ending?
8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?
9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?
(Generic Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page (summary)
Long Bright River
Liz Moore, 2020
Penguin Publisher
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525540670
Summary
Two sisters travel the same streets, though their lives couldn't be more different. Then one of them goes missing.
In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds.
One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.
Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit—and her sister—before it's too late.
Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 25, 1983
• Raised—Framingham, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College; M.F.A., Hunter College
• Awards—Rome Prize in Literature
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylania
Liz Moore is an American author with several novels under her name. Raised in Massachusetts, she attended Barnard College for her BA and Hunter College for an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Both colleges are in New York City.
Her decision to remain in New York, working as a musician, inspired her first novel, The Words of Every Song (2007). Following its publication, Moore shifted her focus to writing, subsequently publishing the novels Heft (2012) and The Unseen World (2016).
Moore received the 2014 Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, and Heft was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Moore now lives in Philadelphia, the city on which she based her third novel, Long Bright River, a police procedural and family drama centered on addiction. She lives there with her husband and daughter. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/24/2020.)
Book Reviews
"Satisfyingly, the characters’ interior lives are as important as the mysteries that propel the action (10 Books to Watch for January].
New York Times
[E]xtraordinary…. [T]he mundane has been made menacing…. Moore is an astute social observer. Her depictions of Mickey’s isolation are sharp-eyed to the point of pain…. Moore is every bit as deft in constructing suspense… nervously twists, turns and subverts readers’ expectations till its very last pages. Simultaneously, it also manages to grow into something else: a sweeping, elegiac novel about a blighted city. As Chandler did for various sections of Los Angeles, Moore—who lives in Philadelphia—excavates Kensington and surrounding areas in Philadelphia, illuminating the rot, the shiny facades of gentrification and the sturdy endurance of small pockets of community life.
Maureen Corrigan - Washington Post
[A] novel 10 years in the making that bears witness to the author’s extensive research and first-hand experience of the lives of those who fall through the cracks… is being marketed as a thriller, but, as with the best crime novels, its scope defies the constraints of genre; it is family drama, history and social commentary wrapped up in the compelling format of a police procedural…. [A]lthough the tropes are familiar to the point of cliche, the result feels startlingly fresh.… At the heart of the novel are questions about moral responsibility, and what it means to be honourable. It’s also an exploration of the vulnerability and strength of women. Moore—who volunteers with women’s groups in the area—has created a memorable portrait of the devastation created by poverty and addiction, and the compassion and courage that can rise to meet it.
Guardian (UK)
Deftly plotted with strong, vivid characters, Liz Moore’s outstanding Long Bright River works as solid crime fiction and an intense family thriller.… Moore skillfully explores the sisters' bond from their closeness during their toxic upbringing to the decay of their relationship that seems almost irreparable…. The clever plot and involving characters of Long Bright River set a high standard for this new year.
Associated Press
[E]ectrifying…. In taut, propulsive sentences, Moore draws on the police procedural in conjuring a community on the brink while exploring tensions between two sisters on either side of the thin blue line.… Moore navigates assuredly through plot twists and big reveals… equal parts literary and thrilling—a compassionate, multidimensional look at an epidemic that surrounds us.… it’s got all the ingredients that make for an unputdownable mystery, but it’s got something more, a narrator who leads you into unexpected places, and keeps surprising you until the end.
Oprah Magazine
Moore weaves a police procedural and a family drama into a captivating novel.… Mickey’s personal journey [which] runs parallel to her pursuit is smartly crafted. Filled with strong characters and a layered plot, this will please fans of both genre and literary fiction.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) In her fourth novel, Rome Prize–winning author Moore blends the reality of today’s deadly opioid crisis with a complicated family dynamic to create an intense mystery with stunning twists and turns. Impossible to put down, impossible to forget. —Beth Anderson, formerly of Ann Arbor Dist. Library
Library Journal
(Starred review) One of the pleasures of this deeply moving, absolutely page-turning novel is the way Moore…slowly peels back layer after layer, revealing the old-boy’s network in the Philadelphia police force…. Give this to readers who like character-driven crime novels with a strong sense of place.
Booklist
A young Philadelphia policewoman searches for her addicted sister on the streets.… The pace is frustratingly slow…, then picks up…toward the end…. With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it's almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The author sets Long Bright River against one city’s experience of the opioid epidemic, informed by her own research. To what degree do you think the drug crisis in Kensington represents the situation in other regions of the United States? Did reading the plight of Kacey, and its impact on her sister and larger family, make you think about the epidemic any differently? How did the portrayal in the book compare with your understanding of the problem from news, or from your personal life?
2. In this novel, the author combines a crime story with a family drama, as she moves back and forth between present and past, and sets it all against a real and researched city and culture. Which elements moved or compelled you most? Did knowing it was influenced by real life make it more or less powerful for you?
3. While Kacey and Mickey grew up in the same house, they followed vastly diverging paths in adolescence. In what ways were the girls different by nature? Or was it a matter of nurture? Which differences do you think most influenced their fates, and why? What impact did these differences have on their relationship as children, and as adults? What do you think the author is ultimately saying about the connection between family and fate?
4. The author explores the pressures that are put on single parents, juggling child care and an unpredictable work schedule. Did Mickey’s life make you see this in a new way? How did you feel about the ways she manages this juggling? What about the ways she manages her child’s relationship with his father? Do you think such pressures would be different for a man?
5. The vividly drawn neighborhood of Kensington plays a crucial role in the book, becoming almost a character itself, with its own history. How does the author’s portrayal of Kensington contribute to the larger story? Consider the different characters’ feelings about this place, its role in their personal lives, histories, and struggles.
6. Mickey’s Philadelphia is a melting pot of haves and have-nots. What do we learn about class and privilege, and the way they are manifested in the lives of the characters? Consider in particular the times when social tensions emerge as a result of class. Do any of the characters demonstrate class mobility or the ability to socialize across these carefully-drawn lines?
7. How does Mickey’s outlook on justice and the methods and culture of the police department compare with that of her superiors and partners? How do these outlooks compare with your own observations and opinions? In this time of heightened tensions between civilians and police, what do you think about the larger relationship between the police and the community as seen in Long Bright River? Do you think it’s an authentic portrayal?
8. The author explores the concept of addiction in multiple ways in this story. Beyond the obvious heroin addiction, what other kinds of compulsion do you see? For instance, addiction to work, to the chase, to power, to a certain kind of sex or love or support? What role do these other forms of compulsion play in the story? In what ways is the author interested not just in the effects addiction has on the person suffering from it, but also in the effects on that person’s family and friends and, ultimately, community? Which scenes or relationships show this most powerfully?
9. Over the course of her life, Mickey has had many mentors, including Officer Cleare, Mrs. Powell, and even Truman. What impact does each relationship have on the development of Mickey’s character? In what ways do these mentorships dictate her future decisions?
10. Do you think Mickey’s life and profession would have turned out differently if she had been able to go to college as she initially hoped? Would such an education have changed her fate? Why or why not? If not, what would have changed her fate? Or did she end up in the best place for herself, regardless?
11. After their mother, Lisa, dies, Mickey and Kacey are left to live with their grandmother Gee, but Mickey begins to play the role of a pseudo-mother to Kacey. Analyze the mother-daughter relationships presented in the novel: Gee to Lisa; Lisa to Mickey; Gee to Mickey and Kacey; Mickey to Kacey; Mickey to Thomas. How are these parenting styles different, and in what ways are they similar?
12. What is the novel saying about the development of community and the importance of neighbors? Consider the role of Mrs. Mahon in the story, and of the informal network of relationships that Mickey and Truman have with shopkeepers and others on the Avenue. What different types of communities are portrayed in the book?
13. The author launches several mysteries in the course of the story. The biggest and most obvious are established early on: Who is killing young women in the neighborhood, and what has happened to Kacey? Were you surprised by the resolutions of these questions in the end? Were you more surprised by the information that is revealed, or by the way in which emerged Did you have competing suspicions or theories?
14. There are also several smaller mysteries or questions propelling the storytelling, such as what is going on with Truman, or with Gee, or with Mickey’s other relatives, or what happened in Mickey’s past to bring her and her child to this new apartment. Some of these are mysteries only to the reader, as certain information is slowly released by the narrative; and some of these are mysteries to Mickey as well. Which unknowns compelled you most, and why? Which surprised you most? Did you see any of the revelations coming, and if so, when and why?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Long Fall
Walter Mosley, 2009
Little, Brown & Co.
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451230256
Summary
His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: LEONID McGILL—PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR.
It's a name that takes a little explaining, but he's used to it. "Daddy was a communist and great-great-Granddaddy was a slave master from Scotland. You know, the black man's family tree is mostly root. Whatever you see above ground is only a hint at the real story."
Ex-boxer, hard drinker, in a business that trades mostly in cash and favors: McGill's an old-school P.I. working a city that's gotten fancy all around him. Fancy or not, he has always managed to get by—keep a roof over the head of his wife and kids, and still manage a little fun on the side—mostly because he's never been above taking a shady job for a quick buck.
But like the city itself, McGill is turning over a new leaf, "decided to go from crooked to slightly bent."
New York City in the twenty-first century is a city full of secrets—and still a place that reacts when you know where to poke and which string to pull. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 12, 1952
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Johnson State College
• Awards—Mystery Writers Grand Master; Shamus Award, Private Eye Writers of America; Grammy Award for Best Album Notes
• Currently—lives in New York City
When President Bill Clinton announced that Walter Mosley was one of his favorite writers, Black Betty (1994), Mosley's third detective novel featuring African American P.I. Easy Rawlins, soared up the bestseller lists. It's little wonder Clinton is a fan: Mosley's writing, an edgy, atmospheric blend of literary and pulp fiction, is like nobody else's. Some of his books are detective fiction, some are sci-fi, and all defy easy categorization.
Mosley was born in Los Angeles, traveled east to college, and found his way into writing fiction by way of working as a computer programmer, caterer, and potter. His first "Easy Rawlins" book, Gone Fishin' didn't find a publisher, but the next, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) most certainly did—and the world was introduced to a startlingly different P.I.
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Part of the success of the Easy Rawlins series is Mosley's gift for character development. Easy, who stumbles into detective work after being laid off by the aircraft industry, ages in real time in the novels, marries, and experiences believable financial troubles and successes. In addition, Mosley's ability to evoke atmosphere—the dangers and complexities of life in the toughest neighborhoods of Los Angeles—truly shines. His treatment of historic detail (the Rawlins books take place in Los Angeles from the 1940s to the mid-1960s) is impeccable, his dialogue fine-tuned and dead-on.
In 2002, Mosley introduced a new series featuring Fearless Jones, an Army vet with a rigid moral compass, and his friend, a used-bookstore owner named Paris Minton. The series is set in the black neighborhoods of 1950s L.A. and captures the racial climate of the times. Mosley himself summed up the first book, 2002's Fearless Jones, as "comic noir with a fringe of social realism."
Despite the success of his bestselling crime series, Mosley is a writer who resolutely resists pigeonholing. He regularly pens literary fiction, short stories, essays, and sci-fi novels, and he has made bold forays into erotica, YA fiction, and political polemic. "I didn't start off being a mystery writer," he said in an interview with NPR. "There's many things that I am." Fans of this talented, genre-bending author could not agree more!
Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Mosley is an avid potter in his spare time.
• He was a computer programmer for 15 years before publishing his first book. He is an avid collector of comic books. And ahe believes that war is rarely the answer, especially not for its innocent victims.
• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, here is what he said:
The Stranger by Albert Camus probably had the greatest impact on me. I suppose that's because it was a novel about ideas in a very concrete and sensual world. This to me is the most difficult stretch for a writer—to talk about the mind and spirit while using the most pedestrian props. Also the hero is not an attractive personality. He's just a guy, a little removed, who comes to heroism without anyone really knowing it. This makes him more like an average Joe rather than someone beyond our reach or range.
(Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble .)
Book Reviews
While nowhere near as charming as Rawlins, McGill is easy to like, given the character-building temptations that come his way as he tries to be an honest investigator and a good family man.... All things considered, McGill is someone you can definitely settle down with.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times
After Easy Rawlins and Paris Minton, Mosley's best-known creations, McGill is a welcome conundrum. A detective in the classic noir style—cynical, romantic, doomed—who exists not in the 1940s but in today's New York City.... We follow eagerly, seduced by Mosley's laconic style and by a newly arrived hero who seems to have been around forever.
Washington Post - Anna Mundow
Mosley leaves behind the Los Angeles setting of his Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones series (Devil in a Blue Dress, etc.) to introduce Leonid McGill, a New York City private detective, who promises to be as complex and rewarding a character as Mosley's ever produced. McGill, a 53-year-old former boxer who's still a fighter, finds out that putting his past life behind him isn't easy when someone like Tony "The Suit" Towers expects you to do a job; when an Albany PI hires you to track down four men known only by their youthful street names; and when your 16-year-old son, Twill, is getting in over his head with a suicidal girl. McGill shares Easy's knack for earning powerful friends by performing favors and has some of the toughness of Fearless, but he's got his own dark secrets and hard-won philosophy. New York's racial stew is different than Los Angeles's, and Mosley stirs the pot and concocts a perfect milieu for an engaging new hero and an entertaining new series.
Publishers Weekly
Mosley, a master of detective stories best known for his Easy Rawlins series, introduces Leonid McGill, a reformed bad man who strives to hold to his own principles in the roughest situations. Cops don't trust him, hard guys pressure him, and most people underestimate him. His wife abandoned him but now wants him back, two of their kids aren't his, and he's in love with a beautiful woman who's trying to kick him out of his office. McGill is hired to find the names and addresses of four men. Soon, they're all dead, and he wants to know why. The violence escalates, but he refuses to give up. Mosley always tells a compelling story, and this is no exception. But, unlike the Rawlins novels, it has an air of the formulaic. It takes too many digressions to explain McGill's past, and while the Rawlins's Mouse comes across persuasively as a particularly lethal product of the harsh ghettos, McGill's Hush, an ex-hit man who now drives a limousine, seems too good (or bad) to be real. For all its flaws, though, once you start reading this mystery, you won't want to stop. Recommended.
David Keymer - Library Journal
The creator of Easy Rawlins, Socrates Fortlow and Fearless Jones introduces a new detective struggling to live down his checkered past in present-day New York. Leonid McGill has never killed anyone maliciously, but he's done plenty of other bad things. Still working as a private eye in his 50s, he's decided to expiate his sins by going "from crooked to only slightly bent." So he's not eager to help Albany shamus Ambrose Thurman track down four men for vague and unpersuasive reasons, especially after he learns that one is dead, a second is in prison and a third is in a holding cell. Who pays $10,000 to locate men like these unless some further crime is involved? McGill isn't any happier about finding a union accountant for midlevel mobster Tony "The Suit" Towers. And he's deeply troubled when his computer spying in his own home tells him that Twill, his wife Katrina's 16-year-old son, plans to kill the father of a girl who's been sending him distraught e-mails. But the PI's heart drops to his shoes when he realizes that someone is executing the men he's been hired to locate for Thurman. Plotting has never been Mosley's strong point, but McGill, a red-diaper baby, ex-boxer and a man eternally at war with himself, may be his most compelling hero yet.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Long Fall:
1. What do you think of Mosley's new detective hero, Leonid Trotter McGill? How would you describe him...his personality and the code of ethics he lives by—having changed from being "crooked to slightly bent"? If you're a fan of the "Private I" genre, how is LT similar to or different from other PI's...in either in Mosley's or other authors' works?
2. Much of literature is concerned with how the past never leaves us, how it dogs the present. In what way is that especially true of McGill? How does he struggle to live down his past? Is it possible to escape the past, especially a past like McGill's?
3. Talk about McGill's Buddhist approach toward life: "Throwing a punch is the yang of a boxer's life. The Yin is being able to avoid getting hit." How does that translate into LT's life "philosophy" (or anyone's life philosophy)?
4. Comment on this statement by McGill: "One thing I had learned in fifty-three hard years of living is that there's a different kind of death waiting for each and every one of us — each and every day of our lives. There's drunk drivers behind the wheels of cars, subways, trains, planes, and boats; there's banana peels, diseases and the cockeyed medicines that supposedly cure them; you got airborne viruses, indestructible microbes in the food you eat, jealous husbands and wives, and just plain bad luck." Is that a realistic view of life...tragic... cynical...or absurdly pessimistic?
5. What is McGill's relationship with his wife...and what about his mistress? How does he relate to his children? Talk about their problems, especially Twill's.
6. Mosley introduces a large cast of characters fairly early on in the book. Did you find their number confusing...or were you able to follow along easily?
7. Why does McGill accept Thurman's job offer to locate the four young men ... even though he has misgivings? How is LT used to extract revenge, thus becoming an accomplice to murder? To what degree is McGill "responsible" for the various deaths that occur?
8. Talk about the plot. Did you find the novel's twists and turns suspenseful? Or were they predictable...formulaic...or simply confusing?
9. What is the significance of the title? What is the "long fall"?
10. Mosley uses a degree of stream-of-consciousness in The Long Fall. Did that narrative technique work for you? Why might the author have used it, as opposed, say, to straightforward exposition?
11. The works of the great noir mystery writers (Hammett, Spillane, Chandler) serve as lenses through which to view a culture of time and place. How is Mosley's work such a lens for New York City?
12. Is the ending satisfying? Why or why not? Were you surprised by the book's conclusion...or did you "see it coming"?
13. The Long Fall is the first in a planned new series based on Leonid McGill. Is the series off to a good start? Are you intrigued enough to read newer installments as they're added.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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A Long Long Way
Sebastian Barry, 2005
Penguin Group (USA)
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143035091
Summary
History is made up of memory, and memory is a storyteller. Sebastian Barry knows this, and knows that the vast movement of history, politics, and war is a cloth woven of the threads of personal experience, of the ways in which we come to cherish personal beliefs.
In A Long Long Way, Barry uses his exceptional gifts to tell the story of Ireland’s entry into the First World War through the heart and mind of one young soldier.
Willie Dunne, brother of Annie from Barry’s previous novel Annie Dunne, joins the Royal Dublin Fusiliers at age seventeen because he is less than six feet tall. Six feet is the height requirement for becoming a policeman. Willie’s father is a policeman and is disappointed that his son cannot follow in his footsteps. Willie becomes a soldier instead. While many around him are willing to fight because of the promise of home rule for Ireland, such beliefs are still foggy in Willie’s young mind. Like so many young men, he wants to please his father and prove himself a man. One of the many truths revealed in this story is the way in which the relentless violence of war is fueled by such simple motivations.
The history of Ireland’s role in the Great War is not well remembered, and Barry is a master at embodying political issues in the hearts of his characters, with all the ambivalence and emotion of the human heart. Willie’s father is devoted to king and country while Willie must question many familiar assumptions as he develops the ability to hold his own opinion. The hideous daily violence of war and the larger political beliefs that seem to make it necessary are the raw material that Barry uses to ask a more fundamental question: How does a person come to think for him- or herself?
As one character says to Willie, "The curse of the world is people thinking thoughts that are only thoughts which have been given to them. They’re not their own thoughts. They’re like cuckoos in their heads. Their own thoughts are tossed out and cuckoo thoughts put in instead" (p. 9). Barry is asking what makes people think and behave as they do. Almost one hundred years after the events in this novel, with the world still engaged in war after war, could any question be more important?
Barry, who is also a poet, writes with a lyrical power that makes this lost world pulse with reality. The music and beauty of Irish speech is everywhere here and is all the more poignant when brought to bear on the terror and madness of life in the trenches.
Barry’s knowledge of his characters is deeply felt, and their story is shared by all of us who live in a world continually threatened by war and by unexamined beliefs. A Long Long Way is a work of profound sadness and beauty that rings with the truth of what it is to be human. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 5, 1955
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—Catholic University School and Trinity College
• Awards—Costa Book of the Year; James Tait Black Memorial Prize;
Cezam Prix Litteraire Inter CE (France); Walter Scott Prize
• Currently—lives in Wicklow, Ireland
Sebastian Barry, an Irish playwright, novelist and poet is considered one of his country's finest writers, noted for his dense literary writing style. Born in Dublin, his mother was the late Irish actress Joan O'Hara. He attended Catholic University School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he read English and Latin.
Barry's literary career began in poetry before he began writing plays and novels. In recent years his fiction writing has surpassed his work in the theatre in terms of success, having once been considered a playwright who wrote occasional novels.
He has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his novels A Long Long Way (2005) and The Secret Scripture (2008), the latter of which won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His 2011 novel On Canaan's Side (2011) was longlisted for the Booker, and his most recent novel was published in 2014, The Temporary Gentleman.
Novels and plays
Barry started his literary career with the novel Macker's Garden in 1982. This was followed by several books of poetry and a further novel The Engine of Owl-Light in 1987 before his career as a playwright began with his first play produced in 1988 at the Abbey theatre, Boss Grady's Boys.
Barry's maternal great-grandfather, James Dunne, provided the inspiration for the main character in his most internationally known play, The Steward of Christendom (1995). The main character, named Thomas Dunne in the play, was the chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police from 1913–1922. He oversaw the area surrounding Dublin Castle until the Irish Free State takeover on 16 January 1922. One of his grandfathers belonged to the British Army Corps of Royal Engineers.
Both the play The Steward of Christendom (1995) and the novel The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998) are about the dislocations (physical and otherwise) of loyalist Irish people during the political upheavals of the early 20th century. The title character of the latter work is a young man forced to leave Ireland by his former friends in the aftermath of the Anglo-Irish War.
He also wrote the satirical Hinterland (2002), based loosely on former Irish Taoiseach Charles Haughey, the performance of which caused a minor controversy in Dublin. The Sunday Times, called it "feeble, puerile, trite, shallow, exploitative and gratuitously offensive", while The Telegraph called it “as exciting as a lukewarm Spud-U-Like covered in rancid marge and greasy baked beans.”
Barry's work in fiction came to the fore during the 1990s. His novel A Long Long Way (2005) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was selected for Dublin's 2007 One city one book event. The novel tells the story of Willie Dunne, a young recruit to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers during the First World War. It brings to life the divided loyalties that many Irish soldiers felt at the time following the Easter Rising in 1916. (Willie Dunne, son of the fictional Thomas Dunne, first appears as a minor but important character in his 1995 play The Steward of Christendom.)
His novel The Secret Scripture (2008) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction (the oldest such award in the UK), the Costa Book of the Year; the French translation Le testament cache won the 2010 Cezam Prix Litteraire Inter CE. It was also a favourite to win the 2008 Man Booker Prize, narrowly losing out to Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.
Barry's most recent play is Andersen's English (2010), inspired by children's writer Hans Christian Andersen coming to stay with Charles Dickens and his family in the Kent marshes.
On Canaan's Side (2011), Barry's fifth novel, concerns Lily Bere, the sister of the character Willy Dunne from (the 2005 novel) A Long Long Way and the daughter of the character Thomas Dunne from (the 1995 play) The Steward of Christendom, who emigrates to the US. The novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the 2012 Walter Scott Prize.
His most recent novel, The Temporary Gentleman (2014), tells the story of Jack McNulty—an Irishman whose commission in the British army in WWII was never permanent. Sitting in his lodgings in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, he’s writing the story of his life with desperate urgency.
Academia
Barry's academic posts have included Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa (1984), Villanova University (2006) and Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin (1995–1996).
Personal
Barry lives in County Wicklow with his wife, actress Alison Deegan, and their three children. (From Wikipedia. Retreived 5/8/2014.)
Book Reviews
After four years of brutal trench fighting, Willie Dunne...is still a "long long way" from home.... Barry lingers too long on the particulars of the battlefield... [and the book] often lacks the nonsoldier human faces necessary to fully counterpoint the coarseness of military conflict.
Publishers Weekly
This novel of Ireland and World War I wears a cloak of gloom and doom.... Those not familiar with British-Irish history may find some of the personal conflicts and politics in the novel confusing, but nevertheless a compellingly sad, if difficult, read. —Marta Segal
Booklist
Barry's prequel to the fine Annie Dunne (2002) turns to WWI for the story of a young Dublin soldier who loses love, crown, country, and family in the war-torn desolation.... Willie's end will be alone—and utterly, utterly pointless. Flawless, honest, humane, moving.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Gretta’s father, Mr. Lawlor, tells Willie, "I don’t care what a man thinks as long as he knows his own mind," (p. 90) and he is also the character who talks about "cuckoo thoughts," as quoted in the introduction above. Does Willie come to know his own mind in the course of this story? What is it that he comes to know? Is it a matter of knowing what his political opinions are or something more?
2. Willie enlists because he isn’t tall enough to become a policeman, and other characters reveal their motivations for joining the war to be just as personal: poverty, family circumstances, a wife’s burned hand. Does this mean that these young soldiers are not affected by the larger issues of the war or by the question of home rule for Ireland? How do they come to terms with these larger political questions? How do personal motivations interact with political beliefs for these young men?
3. Willie’s father is loyal to England, and as a teenager Willie has no reason to question his father’s viewpoint. But as he begins to see more of the world and its politics, he must struggle to make sense of ambiguity and conflicting emotions. Barry writes, "The Parliament in London had said there would be Home Rule for Ireland at the end of the war; therefore, said John Redmond, Ireland was for the first time in seven hundred years in effect a country. So she could go to war as a nation at last—nearly—in the sure and solemnly given promise of self-rule. The British would keep their promise and Ireland must shed her blood generously" (p. 14). How does Barry represent the complexities of this historical struggle through his characters? Are they naïve? Are they exploited by political forces beyond their understanding?
4. Barry’s descriptions of life in the trenches are detailed and vivid. He writes, "When they came into their trench he felt small enough. The biggest thing there was the roaring of Death and the smallest thing was a man" (p. 24). Willie spends most of the war in these trenches, where one can’t see out, can’t see the enemy, has little or no idea of what is happening, and has only one’s immediate neighbors for comfort or sources of information. Is this a useful metaphor for war itself? How does Willie’s experience in these trenches influence his developing ideas about the war, the enemy, nationalism, and his own life?
5. The larger issues in this novel are all based in history: The Royal Dublin Fusiliers are real, and the story of Ireland’s role in World War I, and of the war’s influence on Ireland’s struggle for Home Rule, is true. How does Barry represent these historical events through his characters’ thoughts and emotions? Is this an effective way of revealing deeper truths about historical events? Do the personal struggles of these characters add to an understanding of what happened in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century?
6. Willie and his father are different in many ways, as they come to hold very different beliefs about the war and about Ireland. In what ways are they the same?
7. One of the most powerful passages in the novel describes Willie’s first encounter with mustard gas and its horrible effects. Part of what makes it so fearful is the fact that the soldiers have no idea what it is or what it will do to them. And after they learn what it is, they consider it a sign that the Germans do not respect the rules of war. "Now they knew it was a filthy gas sent over by the filthy Boche to work perdition on them, a thing forbidden, it was said, by the articles of war. No general, no soldier could be proud of this work; no human person could take the joy of succeeding from these tortured deaths" (p. 51). Why would one form of killing be considered more respectable than another? Why is this form of attack considered less "human" than direct combat? Would it be seen in the same way today?
8. Why does Jesse Kirwan want to talk to Willie before he dies? What is the significance of this character in this story? What does he know that Willie does not know, and what does Willie learn from him? What meaning does Kirwan’s execution have, both to Willie personally and to the Irish army?
9. In what ways are women important in this story? How do Gretta and his sisters influence Willie? What do they represent to him? How does the war affect the roles of men and women in Irish society?
10. As the war approaches its end, Willie wonders how to go on in life when so many of his cherished ideals have been undermined. "How could a fella go out and fight for his country when his country would dissolve behind him like sugar in the rain?....How could a fella like Willie hold England and Ireland equally in his heart, like his father before him, like his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father, when both now would call him a traitor, though his heart was clear and pure, as pure as a heart can be after three years of slaughter?" (p. 282). What kinds of answers might Willie’s story suggest to these questions? Does the novel resolve any of the ambiguity it raises in the conflict between the personal and the political? What kind of meaning seems important to Barry in the face of the bleak suffering of this story?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
A Long Petal of the Sea
Isabel Allende, 2020
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781984820150
Summary
Allende's epic novel spanning decades and crossing continents follows two young people as they flee the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in search of a place to call home.
In the late 1930s, civil war grips Spain.
When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border.
Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them desires.
Together with two thousand other refugees, they embark on the SS Winnipeg, a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda, to Chile: “the long petal of sea and wine and snow.” As unlikely partners, they embrace exile as the rest of Europe erupts in world war.
Starting over on a new continent, their trials are just beginning, and over the course of their lives, they will face trial after trial. But they will also find joy as they patiently await the day when they will be exiles no more.
Through it all, their hope of returning to Spain keeps them going. Destined to witness the battle between freedom and repression as it plays out across the world, Roser and Victor will find that home might have been closer than they thought all along.
A masterful work of historical fiction about hope, exile, and belonging, A Long Petal of the Sea shows Isabel Allende at the height of her powers. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 2, 1942
• Where—Lima, Peru
• Education—private schools in Bolivia and Lebanon
• Awards—Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, 1998; Sara Lee Foundation Award, 1998; WILLA
Literary Award, 2000
• Currently—lives in San Rafael, California, USA
Isabel Allende is a Chilean writer whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition. Author of more than 20 books—essay collections, memoirs, and novels, she is perhaps best known for her novels The House of the Spirits (1982), Daughter of Fortune (1999), and Ines of My Soul (2006). She has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." All told her novels have been translated from Spanish into over 30 languages and have sold more than 55 million copies.
Her novels are often based upon her personal experience and pay homage to the lives of women, while weaving together elements of myth and realism. She has lectured and toured many American colleges to teach literature. Fluent in English as a second language, Allende was granted American citizenship in 2003, having lived in California with her American husband since 1989.
Early background
Allende was born Isabel Allende Llona in Lima, Peru, the daughter of Francisca Llona Barros and Tomas Allende, who was at the time the Chilean ambassador to Peru. Her father was a first cousin of Salvador Allende, President of Chile from 1970 to 1973, making Salvador her first cousin once removed (not her uncle as he is sometimes referred to).
In 1945, after her father had disappeared, Isabel's mother relocated with her three children to Santiago, Chile, where they lived until 1953. Allende's mother married diplomat Ramon Huidobro, and from 1953-1958 the family moved often, including to Bolivia and Beirut. In Bolivia, Allende attended a North American private school; in Beirut, she attended an English private school. The family returned to Chile in 1958, where Allende was briefly home-schooled. In her youth, she read widely, particularly the works of William Shakespeare.
From 1959 to 1965, while living in Chile, Allende finished her secondary studies. She married Miguel Frias in 1962; the couple's daughter Paula was born in 1963 and their son Nicholas in 1966. During that time Allende worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Santiago, Chile, then in Brussels, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe.
Returning to Chile in 1996, Allende translated romance novels (including those of Barbara Cartland) from English to Spanish but was fired for making unauthorized changes to the dialogue in order to make the heriones sound more intelligent. She also altered the Cinderella endings, letting the heroines find more independence.
In 1967 Allende joined the editorial staff for Paula magazine and in 1969 the children's magazine Mampato, where she later became editor. She published two children's stories, Grandmother Panchita and Lauchas y Lauchones, as well as a collection of articles, Civilice a Su Troglodita.
She also worked in Chilean television from 1970-1974. As a journalist, she interviewed famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda told Allende that she had too much imagination to be a journalist and that she should become a novelist. He also advised her to compile her satirical columns in book form—which she did and which became her first published book. In 1973, Allende's play El Embajador played in Santiago, a few months before she was forced to flee the country due to the coup.
The military coup in September 1973 brought Augusto Pinochet to power and changed everything for Allende. Her mother and diplotmat stepfather narrowly escaped assassination, and she herself began receiving death threats. In 1973 Allende fled to Venezuela.
Life after Chile
Allende remained in exile in Venezuela for 13 years, working as a columnist for El Nacional, a major newspaper. On a 1988 visit to California, she met her second husband, attorney Willie Gordon, with whom she now lives in San Rafael, California. Her son Nicolas and his children live nearby.
In 1992 Allende's daughter Paula died at the age of 28, the result of an error in medication while hospitalized for porphyria (a rarely fatal metabolic disease). To honor her daughter, Allenda started the Isabel Allende Foundation in 1996. The foundation is "dedicated to supporting programs that promote and preserve the fundamental rights of women and children to be empowered and protected."
In 1994, Allende was awarded the Gabriela Mistral Order of Merit—the first woman to receive this honor.
She was granted U.S. citizenship in 2003 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She was one of the eight flag bearers at the Opening Ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.
In 2008 Allende received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from San Francisco State University for her "distinguished contributions as a literary artist and humanitarian." In 2010 she received Chile's National Literature Prize.
Writing
In 1981, during her exile, Allende received a phone call that her 99-year-old grandfather was near death. She sat down to write him a letter wishing to "keep him alive, at least in spirit." Her letter evolved into The House of the Spirits—the intent of which was to exorcise the ghosts of the Pinochet dictatorship. Although rejected by numerous Latin American publishers, the novel was finally published in Spain, running more than two dozen editions in Spanish and a score of translations. It was an immense success.
Allende has since become known for her vivid storytelling. As a writer, she holds to a methodical literary routine, working Monday through Saturday, 9:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. "I always start on 8 January,"Allende once said, a tradition that began with the letter to her dying grandfather.
Her 1995 book Paula recalls Allende's own childhood in Santiago, Chile, and the following years she spent in exile. It is written as an anguished letter to her daughter. The memoir is as much a celebration of Allende's turbulent life as it is the chronicle of Paula's death.
Her 2008 memoir The Sum of Our Days centers on her recent life with her immediate family—her son, second husband, and grandchildren. The Island Beneath the Sea, set in New Orleans, was published in 2010. Maya's Notebook, a novel alternating between Berkeley, California, and Chiloe, an island in Chile, was published in 2011 (2013 in the U.S.). Three movies have been based on her novels—Aphrodite, Eva Luna, and Gift for a Sweetheart. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/23/2013.)
Book Reviews
Allende… has deftly woven fact and fiction, history and memory, to create one of the most richly imagined portrayals of the Spanish Civil War to date, and one of the strongest and most affecting works in her long career.
Paula McClain - New York Times Book Review
Less interested in scene than in sweep, Allende nonetheless describes her characters' emotions with great detail,… but I didn’t, at any point, forget that these characters were fictional.… [T]heir interiority felt forced…. A Long Petal of the Sea… [needed] a rigorous editorial process to support Allende’s noblesse oblige.
Kristen Millares Young - Washington Post
Allende’s latest… marks a return to the time and setting of the book that jump-started her literary career, The House of the Spirits, but with far less supernatural elements and a more expansive engagement of revolution, exile and the determination of the human spirit.… A page-turning story rich with history and surprising subplots that keep the novel unpredictable to the end.
Rigoberto Gonzalez - Los Angeles Times
Isabel Allende’s A Long Petal of the Sea gets to the heart of immigrant struggle… [It] begins, as it ends, with the heart… Victor and Roser’s story is compelling.… Allende’s prose is both commanding and comforting. The author writes eloquently on the struggle of letting go of one culture to embrace a new one and shows that one’s origin story is not the whole story.… While debate and policy surround the issues of refugees and immigration, Allende reminds us that these issues, at their core, are made up of individuals and their love stories.
USA Today
[A] sweeping saga.… Allende aims to explore something deeper about love than free and raw passion, though Petal has plenty of spicy pages and couples who yearn for each other.… At present, our culture seems to cherish stories that examine the cyclical rise of our darkest impulses.… Isabel Allende makes a similar point in a real-world way.… For while A Long Petal of the Sea is a historical love story penned in the lush and propulsive prose familiar to Allende’s millions of fans worldwide, it is also suffused with an additional noble and philosophical consciousness that feels excitingly new.
San Fracisco Chronicle
Isabel Allende has time and again proven herself a master of magical realism. Her latest novel… serves as a paean to human love and endurance.
Elle
Allende fans have been waiting with bated breath for her latest novel, and A Long Petal of the Sea doesn’t disappoint.
Marie Claire
(Starred review) Majestic… both timeless and perfectly timed for today.… Allende’s assured prose vividly evokes her fictional characters [and] historical figures… seamlessly juxtaposing exile with homecoming, otherness with belonging, and tyranny with freedom.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) A tale that is seductively intimate and strategically charming… a virtuoso of lucidly well-told, utterly enrapturing fiction.… Allende deftly addresses war, displacement, violence, and loss in a novel of survival and love under siege. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Two refugees from the Spanish Civil War…. Allende tends to describe emotions and events rather than delve into them,… but she is an engaging storyteller.… A trifle facile, but this decades-spanning drama is readable and engrossing throughout.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Long Walk Home
Will North, 2008
Crown Publishing
312 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307383037
Summary
The miracle of love after loss and longing
The Long Walk Home is a story about grief and hope, about love and loss, and about two people struggling with the agonizing complexities of fidelity–to a spouse, to a moral code, to each other, and to a passion neither thought would ever appear again.
By turns lyrical and gripping, set amid a landscape of breathtaking beauty and unpredictable danger, this is a story you will not soon forget. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
His own words:
I think we can safely blame it on Margaret D’Ascoli, though I suppose Henry Wadsworth Longfellow may bear some responsibility as well.
Mrs. D’Ascoli was my eighth grade English teacher, Longfellow was the author of—among other things—the epic poem, Evangeline, about which we had to write a critical essay. When the day came for the papers to be handed back, the class was awash in anxiety. Mrs. D’Ascoli was one tough cookie, and an even tougher grader. She walked through the aisles returning the essays to everyone but me, then went back to the front of the room and stood before the class until the rustle of papers ceased. Holding one last paper in her hand, she said, “As you know, I always give grades for both style and content. I have here a paper to which I have awarded not two, but three A’s: one for style, one for content, and one for something I cannot begin to explain to you. Then she handed me my essay. There was a silence like death, followed by excited whispers. I wanted to crawl into a hole and quietly die from embarrassment.
It wasn’t until later, on the walk home from school, that I felt excited, and it wasn’t because of the three A’s. It was because, at an age when you know with absolute certainty that you’re a totally worthless speck in the universe, I’d learned there was something I could do better than anyone else I knew: I could write.
Ever since then, writing’s been my “meal ticket.” It was my ticket out of a chaotic and sometimes frightening family in a steadily deteriorating neighborhood in Yonkers, just over the New York City border. It was my ticket to scholarships for an undergraduate degree in English, and then a graduate degree in journalism. It carried me through a series of jobs and ultimately, at the tender age of 30, to an appointed position in the Carter Administration. Much as I loved that job, one of the best things that ever happened to me was the election of Ronald Reagan, who promptly fired me and forced me to choose between holding a job and becoming an author. I chose the latter.
Over the years, I’ve written more than a dozen books, all non-fiction. Initially, they were about what might be called “progressive public policy issues.” Somewhere along the line, I also became a ghostwriter—for a President, a Vice-President, a famous mountaineer and explorer, a team of Everest climbers, a group of dinosaur-hunters, and a couple of pioneering doctors. I also wrote a series of off-the-beaten-track guidebooks to the place I love most in the world: Britain.
And I married. Twice. And divorced. Twice—though I remained friends with both of my ex-wives. I have an achingly wonderful son and a splendid grandson (yikes!) and daughter-in-law.
One last thing: If you Google “Will North” you won’t find any of my nonfiction books. “North” is my pen name. I’m not trying to be mysterious; my real surname is nearly unpronounceable unless you have a lisp, and virtually impossible to remember—not a good thing for a novelist. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
The Long Walk Home movingly conveys the life-changing effects of love between two middle-aged people with a lot of unshared history.
Seattle Times
North's bittersweet, romantic novel has invited some early comparisons with the bestselling work of Nicholas Sparks and Robert James Waller.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
In this lyrical first novel about love and loss by a ghostwriter for Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Alec, a former speech writer for Jimmy Carter, walks like a pall bearer from Heathrow Airport to North Wales to scatter the ashes of his late wife. Along the way, he meets and begins an affair with Fiona Edwards, the spirited and married operator of a Welsh bed-and-breakfast. Fiona's marriage to her shepherd husband David is foundering on the shoals of mutual lack of interest and David's pesticide-related illness that keeps him relegated to separate quarters. There are moral dilemmas aplenty, most notably when Alec discovers David near death in the same treacherous region where he just released his wife's remains. North offers vivid descriptions of the Welsh countryside, capturing its local dialect, flora and fauna, and wild weather, but his romantic boomer tale—which includes some overwrought poetry and a few witty words on Carter's handling of the Iran hostage crisis—is sometimes too idyllic. If Nicholas Sparks set a novel in North Wales, it would read a lot like this.
Publishers Weekly
How we perceive love and acknowledge its obligations is at the core of this first novel by ghostwriter North.... If visions of Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep come to mind, which they did briefly for this reviewer, the similarity to Robert Waller's The Bridges of Madison County ends there. Fi and Alec do share an immediate connection, but their witty exchanges and the fascinating descriptions of climbing, cooking (yes, Alec can do it in the kitchen), and lambing are absorbing from the very first. Alec has experienced loss and doesn't want any more of it; Fi accepts that her dreams might have to remain just that.... A joy to read.
Library Journal
New Yorker Alec Hudson is a man with a mission. Determined to fulfill his ex-wife's dying request to have her ashes scattered on a remote Welsh mountain, the site of one of their happiest times in life, Alec decides to work through the mourning process by walking from Heathrow to North Wales. There he meets Fiona Edwards, the proprietor of a quaint farmhouse bed-and-breakfast. Prevented from scaling the mountain by inclement weather, Alec is drawn into life on the farm, helping out with lambing season and falling into an easy companionship with the outgoing Fiona, whose reclusive husband is suffering the ill effects of poisoning from a cleansing agent used on the sheep. When Alec and Fiona finally recognize and act on their mutual attraction, lifelong notions of loyalty and duty endlessly complicate their relationship. With its exploration of love at midlife, this debut novel will remind readers of the megahit Bridges of Madison County. —Wilkinson, Joanne
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Alec and Gwynne have been divorced for years, yet when she becomes ill he cares for her. Do you know of someone who has been called upon to care for a dying former spouse? Can you imagine yourself in such a situation?
2. When Alec decides to walk to Wales with Gwynne’s ashes, what do you think he’s trying to accomplish? Have you ever done anything for similar motives? Can you see yourself ever doing something extreme like that?
3. When Alec arrives at Fiona’s farm, he is a man of few words. What is it about Fiona that changes him? What is it about Alec that changes Fiona—unlocking her own pain and her own capacity to love fully?
4. Fiona and Alec share a central emotional characteristic: they are both caretakers by nature and upbringing. Because of this, what do they bring to, and bring out of, each other?
5. Fiona and Alec both lost a parent when they were young: Fiona’s father drowned, Alec’s father drank himself to death. How has each of them been affected?
6. British-born novelist Jonathan Raban has said of The Long Walk Home that it is the mountain, “capricious Cadair Idris,” to which the reader must look “for the story’s deeper implications.” What do you think he means by that? Is the mountain itself a character in the story?
7. Will North admits to being, well...a guy. Do you think he succeeds in understanding and revealing Fiona’s head and heart?
8. Ultimately, despite the fact that she is married, Fiona and Alec become lovers. Both of them understand that this is wrong...and yet believe it is also utterly right. How can that be? And why do we find ourselves rooting for them?
9. Fiona has been caring for her ailing husband for three years. Do you think she should have anticipated his attempted suicide?
10. When Alec discovers David dying on the mountain, he knows that one option is to do nothing. There must be a moment, a fraction of a second, when Alec sees how life would be made simpler by David’s death. Given what happens to David—given what happens to Fiona and Alec—do you think he made the right decision?
11. Fiona’s daughter, Meaghan, is so close to and protective of her father that she sometimes behaves as if she believes she would be a better caretaker for him than his own wife. Does that ring true to you? How well do you think Fiona handles Meaghan’s possessiveness?
12. The Long Walk Home is a book about fidelity. Beyond its most obvious form—fidelity to a spouse—what other issues of fidelity do these characters wrestle with? If you were Alec, how would you choose? If you were Fiona, what would you do?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Long Way Home (Inspector Gamache Series, 10)
Louise Penny, 2014
St. Martin's Press♥
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250022066
Summary
Happily retired in the village of Three Pines, Armand Gamache, former Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Surete du Quebec, has found a peace he’d only imagined possible. On warm summer mornings he sits on a bench holding a small book, The Balm in Gilead, in his large hands. “There is a balm in Gilead,” his neighbor Clara Morrow reads from the dust jacket, “to make the wounded whole.”
While Gamache doesn’t talk about his wounds and his balm, Clara tells him about hers. Peter, her artist husband, has failed to come home. Failed to show up as promised on the first anniversary of their separation. She wants Gamache’s help to find him.
Having finally found sanctuary, Gamache feels a near revulsion at the thought of leaving Three Pines. “There’s power enough in Heaven,” he finishes the quote as he contemplates the quiet village, “to cure a sin-sick soul.” And then he gets up. And joins her.
Together with his former second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Myrna Landers, they journey deeper and deeper into Quebec. And deeper and deeper into the soul of Peter Morrow—a man so desperate to recapture his fame as an artist that he would sell that soul. And may have.
The journey takes them further and further from Three Pines, to the very mouth of the great St. Lawrence river. To an area so desolate, so damned, the first mariners called it The land God gave to Cain. And there they discover the terrible damage done by a sin-sick soul. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1958
• Where—Toronto, Canada
• Education—B.A, Ryerson University
• Awards—Agatha Award (4 times) "New Blood" Dagger Award;
Arthur Ellis Award; Barry Award, Anthony Award; Dilys Award.
• Currently—lives in Knowlton, Canada (outside of Montreal)
In her words
I live outside a small village south of Montreal, quite close to the American border. I'd like to tell you a little bit about myself. I was born in Toronto in 1958 and became a journalist and radio host with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, specializing in hard news and current affairs. My first job was in Toronto and then moved to Thunder Bay at the far tip of Lake Superior, in Ontario. It was a great place to learn the art and craft of radio and interviewing, and listening. That was the key. A good interviewer rarely speaks, she listens. Closely and carefully. I think the same is true of writers.
From Thunder Bay I moved to Winnipeg to produce documentaries and host the CBC afternoon show. It was a hugely creative time with amazingly creative people. But I decided I needed to host a morning show, and so accepted a job in Quebec City. The advantage of a morning show is that it has the largest audience, the disadvantage is having to rise at 4am.
But Quebec City offered other advantages that far outweighed the ungodly hour. It's staggeringly beautiful and almost totally French and I wanted to learn. Within weeks I'd called Quebecers "good pumpkins", ordered flaming mice in a restaurant, for dessert naturally, and asked a taxi driver to "take me to the war, please." He turned around and asked "Which war exactly, Madame?" Fortunately elegant and venerable Quebec City has a very tolerant and gentle nature and simply smiled at me.
From there the job took me to Montreal, where I ended my career on CBC Radio's noon programme.
In my mid-thirties the most remarkable thing happened. I fell in love with Michael, the head of hematology at the Montreal Children's Hospital. He'd go on to hold the first named chair in pediatric hematology in Canada, something I take full credit for, out of his hearing.
It's an amazing and blessed thing to find love later in life. It was my first marriage and his second. He'd lost his first wife to cancer a few years earlier and that had just about killed him. Sad and grieving we met and began a gentle and tentative courtship, both of us slightly fearful, but overcome with the rightness of it. And overcome with gratitude that this should happen to us and deeply grateful to the family and friends who supported us.
Fifteen years later we live in an old United Empire Loyalist brick home in the country, surrounded by maple woods and mountains and smelly dogs.
Since I was a child I've dreamed of writing and now I am. Beyond my wildest dreams (and I can dream pretty wild) the Chief Inspector Gamache books have found a world-wide audience, won awards and ended up on bestseller lists including the New York Times. Even more satisfying, I have found a group of friends in the writing community. Other authors, booksellers, readers—who have become important parts of our lives. I thought writing might provide me with an income—I had no idea the real riches were more precious but less substantial. Friendships.
There are times when I'm in tears writing. Not because I'm so moved by my own writing, but out of gratitude that I get to do this. In my life as a journalist I covered deaths and accidents and horrible events, as well as the quieter disasters of despair and poverty. Now, every morning I go to my office, put the coffee on, fire up the computer and visit my imaginary friends, Gamache and Beauvoir and Clara and Peter. What a privilege it is to write. I hope you enjoy reading the books as much as I enjoy writing them.
Chief Inspector Gamache was inspired by a number of people, and one main inspiration was this man holding a copy of En plein coeur. Jean Gamache, a tailor in Granby. He looks slightly as I picture Gamache, but mostly it was his courtesy and dignity and kind eyes that really caught my imagination. What a pleasure to be able to give him a copy of En plein coeur! (From the author's website with permission.)
Book Reviews
I’m on record suggesting that Penny has become an equal to P.D. James in the psychological depth of her characters and their emotional connection to place, but in The Long Way Home it’s just not enough.... Once again the inner lives of Penny’s characters are at the forefront, attempting to heal their "sin-sick" souls, but this time it’s at the expense of a plot that’s sluggish and lacks suspense.
Carole E. Barrowman - Minneapolis Star Tribune
[P]erceptive, perfectly paced.... Clara turns to Gamache for help in locating Peter.... At times, the prose is remarkably fresh, filled with illuminating and delightful turns of phrase (e.g., Clara notices “her own ego, showing some ankle”), though readers should also be prepared for the breathless sentence fragments that litter virtually every chapter.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) As with all the author’s other titles, Penny wraps her mystery around the history and personality of the people involved. By this point in the series, each inhabitant of Three Pines is a distinct individual, and the humor that lights the dark places of the investigation is firmly rooted in their long friendships, or, in some cases, frenemyships. The heartbreaking conclusion will leave series readers blinking back tears.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Penny dexterously combines suspense with psychological drama, overlaying the whole with an all-powerful sense of landscape as a conduit to meaning.... Another gem from the endlessly astonishing Penny.
Booklist
Armand Gamache...understands better than most that danger never strays far from home..... The emotional depth accessed here is both a wonder and a joy to uncover.... Gamache's 10th outing culminates in one breathless encounter, and readers may feel they weren't prepared for this story to end. The residents of Three Pines will be back, no doubt, as they'll have new wounds to mend.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When Leo invited Daphne and Claire to come stay for a weekend in Scotland, Daphne decided to go alone to have time to judge herself whether to continue their unorthodox relationship. The visit resulted in a proposal of marriage that Daphne decided to accept. Claire was her one big responsibility. Do you think she was considerate enough of this in accepting Leo’s proposal?
2. When Marcus and Charity decided to return to London directly after Daphne’s funeral, how did you react? Putting yourself in their shoes, and understanding that they had come all the way from London to attend the funeral of their stepmother whom they despised, were they at all justified in their actions?
3. When Claire encounters Jonas in Leo’s office, it is the first time she has spoken to him or even seen him since the day that their friendship came to an end eighteen years before. Outwardly, Claire’s emotions seemed to display anger at Jonas’s involvement with Leo’s affairs, but what else do you feel was going on in her mind?
4. It is quite apparent after the ultrasmart Kerr-Jamieson party in London what really drives Charity. What do you think of her character and her motivations?
5. When Jonas eventually reveals to Claire why he ended their friendship, was he right in keeping it from her for all those years? Discuss the implications on everyone if it had come out into the open.
6. Only Leo knew the truth, almost from the moment it happened. His own children carried out a premeditated course of action to irrevocably damage his stepdaughter’s friendship with Jonas, and as a result, she left his house and never returned. What emotions would this have evoked in Leo over the years?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)
Longbourn
Jo Baker, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385351232
Summary
Pride and Prejudice was only half the story...
If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them.
In this irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice, the servants take center stage. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber pots for the Bennet household.
But there is just as much romance, heartbreak, and intrigue downstairs at Longbourn as there is upstairs. When a mysterious new footman arrives, the orderly realm of the servants’ hall threatens to be completely, perhaps irrevocably, upended.
Jo Baker dares to take us beyond the drawing rooms of Jane Austen’s classic—into the often overlooked domain of the stern housekeeper and the starry-eyed kitchen maid, into the gritty daily particulars faced by the lower classes in Regency England during the Napoleonic Wars—and, in doing so, creates a vivid, fascinating, fully realized world that is wholly her own. . (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Lancashire, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University; Ph.D. Queen's
University-Belfast
• Currently—lives in Lancaster (in Lancashire), England
Jo Baker was born in Lancashire, England, and educated at Oxford University and Queen’s University Belfast. Although she has published three previous novels in the UK, The Undertow was her first US publication. It was released in 2012, followed by Longbourn in 2013.
Her previous UK novels are Offcomer, The Mermaid’s Child, and The Telling. She lives in Lancaster. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A triumph: a splendid tribute to Austen’s original but, more importantly, a joy in its own right, a novel that contrives both to provoke the intellect and, ultimately, to stop the heart.... Like Austen, Baker has written an intoxicating love story but, also like Austen, the pleasure of her novel lies in its wit and fierce intelligence.... Baker not only creates a richly imagined story of her own but recasts Austen’s novel in a startlingly fresh light.... Inspired.
Guardian (UK)
Impressive.... Baker takes ownership of this world without mimicking Austen’s style, asserting instead her own distinctive, authentic voice. Longbourn is not just nicely packaged fan fiction, or an Austenian Downton Abbey; it’s an engrossing tale we neither know nor expect.
Daily Telegraph (UK)
This clever glimpse of Austen’s universe through a window clouded by washday steam is so compelling it leaves you wanting to read the next chapter in the lives below stairs rather than peer at the reflections of any grand party in the mirrors of Netherfield.
Daily Express (UK)
A splendid page-turner.... The much-loved Pride and Prejudice is shaken up and given the grit that Jane Austen could never include—with great success.... Baker’s imaginative leaps are stunningly well done, both historically and emotionally.
Evening Standard (UK)
(Starred review.) The servants of the Bennett estate manage their own set of dramas in this vivid re-imagining of Pride and Prejudice. While the marriage prospects of the Bennett girls preoccupy the family upstairs, downstairs the housekeeper Mrs. Hill has her hands full managing the staff that keeps Longbourn running smoothly.... Baker takes many surprising risks in developing the relationships between the servants and the Bennetts, but the end result steers clear of gimmick and flourishes as a respectful and moving retelling.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) While the drama of husband-hunting takes place largely offstage..., the real drama unfolds when the enigmatic James Smith arrives as a footman and catches the eye of Sarah, the young housemaid with dreams of a world beyond Longbourn.... [D]ensely plotted and achingly romantic...exquisitely reimagined —Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [I]rresistible.... Baker comes at Jane Austen's most celebrated novel from below stairs, offering a working-class view of the Bennet family of Longbourn House.... Baker is at her best when touching on the minutiae of work, of interaction, of rural life.... Sequels and prequels rarely add to the original, but Baker's simple yet inspired reimagining does. It has best-seller stamped all over it.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. "He was such a frustrating mixture of helpfulness, courtesy and incivility that she could indeed form no clear notion of him" (p. 39). What lies at the heart of Sarah's confusion about James? Are her feelings based on misapprehensions of James's attitude toward her? Is James responsible for creating the false impressions and mixed signals Sarah finds so frustrating? If so, what does it reflect about his confusion and lack of experience? Are James's perceptions of Sarah as limited as her perceptions of him? Why or why not?
2. Despite the great difference between their stations in life, in what ways are both Sarah and Elizabeth defined by the social strictures of the time? Are their assumptions about what they can and cannot achieve dictated by society or do they reflect their individual personalities?
3. Why is Sarah attracted to Mr. Bingley's servant Ptolemy? What effect does his attention have on her and her sense of herself as a woman? Does their flirtation influence her behavior with James? In the end, what does James offer her that is lacking in her relationship with Ptolemy?
4. Discuss the significance of the discoveries Sarah makes when she secretly explores James's room (pp. 64-65). What does the scene reveal about Sarah's grasp of the emotional complexities behind James's carefully constructed façade? In what respects in this a turning point in the novel?
5. What similarities are there between the progression of the courtships of Sarah and James and of Elizabeth and Darcy? What part does pride play in the way Sarah initially responds to James? Is Elizabeth guilty of the same kind of misplaced pride in her rejection of Darcy's first marriage proposal?
6. Are James and Sarah more open and honest with themselves and with each other than Darcy and Elizabeth? Is Sarah able to act on her feelings and make decisions in a way that the Bennet girls cannot? How does this affect the way her relationship with James unfolds? Discuss, for example, Sarah's and James's lack of inhibitions about (and downright enjoyment of) sex.
7. Baker details the harsh daily life of Sarah and the other servants. In addition to the descriptions of the backbreaking work they perform-from hauling water on freezing mornings and emptying chamber pots to scrubbing dishes, laundering mud-spattered petticoats, and washing rags soaked with menstrual blood-how does she illustrate the more subtle yet no less humiliating aspects of being a servant? What particular interactions between the Bennets and various members of the staff bring out the true nature of the relationship between the classes?
8. Baker also draws a sweeping historical picture that is largely absent from Pride and Prejudice, including insights into economic and social realities that influence everything from the privileges enjoyed by the wealthy to institutions such as the military. Does the fact that Mr. Bingley's wealth comes from sugar and tobacco, industries dependent on the exploitation of slave labor, affect your understanding of the world the Bennets inhabitant? Discuss the difference between what the Militia represents in Pride and Prejudice and the way it is depicted in Longbourn.
9. Why do you think Baker includes the long section devoted to James's experiences during the Napoleonic Wars (pp. 246-59)? Were you taken aback by the brutality Baker describes? What do James's actions and their consequences show about the prejudices and injustices suffered by young men like James? What facets of his character come to light? How does his experience as a soldier enhance James's role as a romantic hero?
10. Baker continues her story a bit beyond the ending of Pride and Prejudice. Do you find her speculations about what happens to Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, their daughter Mary, Mr. and Mrs. Hill, and Polly, satisfying (pp. 325-27)?
11. Polly and Sarah are both orphans, a common character in nineteenth-century novels, including such well-known works as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Why is a child who has lost or been abandoned by her parents such a persistent and powerful figure? Are there similarities between Sarah and Brontë’s Jane Eyre?
12. Another motif Longbourn shares with several nineteenth-century novels (particularly works in the Gothic tradition) is the mysterious or hidden background of a significant character—James in this work, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, the woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. What hints does Baker give about James’s origins when he first appears? How does the truth about him evolve and become clearer for both Sarah and the reader? Are the connections between James and members of the household believable? How do you think Jane Austen, whose Northanger Abbey is a famous parody of the Gothic novel, would react to this aspect of Longbourn?
13. Are there aspects of Longbourn that you were surprised to find in a literary novel set in the nineteenth century? In what ways does Longbourn reflect and embrace the sensibilities of the twenty-first century? Discuss, for example, Mr. Hill's secret life; the portrayal of Mr. Bingley's servant Ptolemy; the graphic descriptions of Sarah and James's sexual encounters; and Sarah's decision to leave Pemberley and set out on her own.
14. Does a reader's enjoyment of Longbourn depend on a familiarity with Pride and Prejudice? How does Baker assert an independent voice and vision while using the framework of Austen's novel?
15. Several books inspired by Pride and Prejudice have recently been published. How does Longbourn compare to other books you have read about the lives of the Bennets and the Darcys? Why do you think reworkings of Austen have become so popular?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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The Longest Date: Life as a Wife
Cindy Chupack, 2014
Viking Press
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670025534
Summary
An award-winning writer for Sex and the City and Modern Family takes a hilarious, heartbreaking look at marriage
Cindy Chupack has spent much of her adult life writing about dating and relationships for several hit TV series and as a sex columnist for O, The Oprah Magazine. At the age of thirty-nine, she finally found The One—and a wealth of new material.
Marriage, Cindy discovered, was more of an adventure than she ever imagined, and in this collection of essays she deftly examines the comedy and cringe-worthy aspects of matrimony. Soulful yet self-deprecating, The Longest Date recounts her first marriage (he was gay) and the meeting of Husband No. 2, Ian.
After the courtship and ceremony, both Cindy and Ian realized that happily ever after takes some practice, and near constant negotiation over everyday matters like cooking, sex, holidays, monogamy, and houseguests. The Longest Date takes a serious turn when it comes to infertility.
The Longest Date is the perfect companion for anyone navigating a serious relationship, be it newlyweds or couples moving in that direction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 29, 1970
• Where—Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA
• Education—B.A., Northwestern University
• Awards—Golden Globe Awards (3); Emmy Awards (2)
• Currently—Los Angeles, California
Cindy Chupack is a screenwriter who has won three Golden Globes and two Emmys for her work as a writer/executive producer of HBO’s Sex and the City and writer/co-executive producer of ABC’s Modern Family.
Several episodes she penned—"Little Bo Bleep" (Modern Family) and "Evolution," "Attack of the 5'10" Woman," "Just Say Yes," "Plus One is the Loneliest Number," "I Love a Charade," and "Splat!" (Sex and the City—were individually nominated for Writer's Guild and/or Emmy awards. Chupack also worked on Everybody Loves Raymond as a writer/co-executive producer.
In May 2010, NBC announced it had commenced production of Love Bites, a television series created by Chupack for the NBC network.
Her first book, The Between Boyfriends Book, was published in 2003, and her second, a comic memoir about marriage, The Longest Date, in 2014. She has also written humorous essays for The New York Times, Real Simple, Harper's Bazaar, People, Allure, Slate, and Glamour.
Chupack is from Tulsa, Oklahoma. She received a journalism degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois..(From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Chupack chronicles the ups and downs of marriage in this amusing collection of short, real-life stories. The comedy writer leaves no stone unturned.... The pieces that touch on fertility issues deserve their own category: Chupack and her husband...detail this often painful subject with both sorrow and hope.
Publishers Weekly
Laugh-out-funny and surprisingly poignant.
Booklist
An award-winning TV writer and magazine sex columnist gives the scoop on the "honest, horrible, hysterical truth about the early years of marriage."... Rather, they are beginnings that, for all the pain and loss they may entail, offer the chance to "see higher highs than you ever imagined." A straight-talking, funny and poignant memoir.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
The Longest Ride
Nicholas Sparks, 2013
Grand Central Publishing
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455520640
Summary
Ira Levinson is in trouble. At ninety-one years old, in poor health and alone in the world, he finds himself stranded on an isolated embankment after a car crash.
Suffering multiple injuries, he struggles to retain consciousness until a blurry image materializes and comes into focus beside him: his beloved wife Ruth, who passed away nine years ago. Urging him to hang on, she forces him to remain alert by recounting the stories of their lifetime together—how they met, the precious paintings they collected together, the dark days of WWII and its effect on them and their families.
Ira knows that Ruth can't possibly be in the car with him, but he clings to her words and his memories, reliving the sorrows and everyday joys that defined their marriage.
A few miles away, at a local bull-riding event, a Wake Forest College senior's life is about to change. Recovering from a recent break-up, Sophia Danko meets a young cowboy named Luke, who bears little resemblance to the privileged frat boys she has encountered at school.
Through Luke, Sophia is introduced to a world in which the stakes of survival and success, ruin and reward—even life and death—loom large in everyday life. As she and Luke fall in love, Sophia finds herself imagining a future far removed from her plans—a future that Luke has the power to rewrite...if the secret he's keeping doesn't destroy it first.
Ira and Ruth. Sophia and Luke. Two couples who have little in common, and who are separated by years and experience. Yet their lives will converge with unexpected poignancy, reminding us all that even the most difficult decisions can yield extraordinary journeys: beyond despair, beyond death, to the farthest reaches of the human heart. (From the publisher.)
About the Author
• Birth—December 31. 1965
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Notre Dame
• Currently—lives in New Bern, North Carolina
Nicholas Charles Sparks is an American novelist, screenwriter and producer. He has published nearly 20 novels, plus one non-fiction. Ten have been adapted to films, including Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe, Dear John, The Last Song, The Lucky One, and most recently The Longest Ride.
Background
Sparks was born to Patrick Michael Sparks, a professor of business, and Jill Emma Marie Sparks (nee Thoene), a homemaker and an optometrist's assistant. He was the middle of three children, with an older brother and a younger sister, "Dana", who died at the age of 33 from a brain tumor. Sparks said that she is the inspiration for the main character in his novel A Walk to Remember.
His father was pursuing graduate studies at University of Minnesota and University of Southern California, and the family moved a great deal, so by the time Sparks was eight, he had lived in Watertown, Minnesota, Inglewood, California, Playa del Rey, California, and Grand Island, Nebraska, which was his mother's hometown during his parents' one year separation.
In 1974 his father became a professor of business at California State University, Sacramento teaching behavioral theory and management. His family settled in Fair Oaks, California, and remained there through Nicholas's high school days. He graduated in 1984 as valedictorian from Bella Vista High School, then enrolled at the University of Notre Dame under a full track and field scholarship. In his freshman year, his team set a record for the 4 x 800 relay.
Sparks majored in business finance and graduated from Notre Dame with honors in 1988. He also met his future wife that year, Cathy Cote from New Hampshire, while they were both on spring break. They married in 1989 and moved to New Bern, North Carolina.
Writing career
While still in school in 1985, Sparks penned his first (never published) novel, The Passing, while home for the summer between freshman and sophomore years at Notre Dame. He wrote another novel in 1989, also unpublished, The Royal Murders.
After college, Sparks sought work with publishers or to attend law school, but was rejected in both attempts. He then spent the next three years trying other careers, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling dental products by phone and starting his own manufacturing business.
In 1990, Sparks co-wrote with Billy Mills Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding. The book was published by Random House sold 50,000 copies in its first year.
In 1992, Sparks began selling pharmaceuticals and in 1993 was transferred to Washington, DC. It was there that he wrote another novel in his spare time, The Notebook. Two years later, he was discovered by literary agent Theresa Park, who picked The Notebook out of her agency's slush pile, liked it, and offered to represent him. In October 1995, Park secured a $1 million advance for The Notebook from Time Warner Book Group. The novel was published in 1996 and made the New York Times best-seller list in its first week of release.
With the success of his first novel, he and Cathy moved to New Bern, NC. After his first publishing success, he began writing his string of international bestsellers.
Personal life and philanthropy
Sparks continues to reside in North Carolina with his wife Cathy, their three sons, and twin daughters. A Roman Catholic since birth, he and his wife are raising their children in the Catholic faith.
In 2008, Entertainment Weekly reported that Sparks and his wife had donated "close to $10 million" to start a private Christian college-prep school, The Epiphany School of Global Studies, which emphasizes travel and lifelong learning.
Sparks also donated $900,000 for a new all-weather tartan track to New Bern High School. He also donates his time to help coach the New Bern High School track team and a local club track team as a volunteer head coach.
In addition to track, he funds scholarships, internships and annual fellowship to the Creative Writing Program (MFA) at the University of Notre Dame. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Nicholas Sparks clearly knows how to tug at heartstrings and so he proves again with this tale of two love stories ... The fortunes of both romances are described with a noticeably old-fashioned tenderness which prizes love and devotion.... [Sparks] has a canny knack of tapping into what makes us human, and before you know it, you are rooting for Ira and engrossed in his life story Irish Independent A fiercely romantic and touching tale, with the added bonus of a sexy cowboy. When it comes to tales about love, Nicholas Sparks is one of the undisputed kings Heat Will suck you in and leave you a sobbing mess.
Star Magazine
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.
The Longest Road
A.S. Thompson, 2012
Bradley Publishings
365 pp.
ISBN-13: 1938076168
Summary
Join Steve, Collin, Alex, Billy and Mike. A group of cousins surviving through the aftermath of a pandemic infection of unknown origin. Once contracted, the disease is irreversibly fatal, but its victims don't stay dead for long. Eventually the dead return to life, but all elements of humanity are replaced by ravenous cannibalistic tendencies.
After fleeing their homes in up-state New York, the cousins take to the safety of the road, where they travel west-bound to the rumored "safe-zone" of California. Every day is a fight to stay alive; whether scavenging for essentials or engaging in nerve-racking battles with the relentless undead. Every stop they make is filled with surprises, twists and turns as their lives are now a roller-coaster being driven by hope and shadowed by despair.
Feel their heartache. Experience their triumphs. Follow them as they journey across the wasteland that was once the United States. Ride alongside this family as they search for safety on The Longest Road. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Growing up in southern California, A.S. Thompson has always loved entertainment. So, after receiving his bachelor’s in communications, he decided to follow that love and has since gone on to explore the diversity of the entertainment industry. He has spent countless hours in music studios and worked on set and behind the scenes at TV and film production companies, searching for the right career. But when it’s time to relax, you can find him at a music venue checking out a his favorite bands, at the movies seeing a new release or at home catching up on his DVR.
A.S. has always been a creative individual. He plays multiple instruments, has written and recorded dozens of songs and performed live on stage in front of hundreds of screaming fans (well maybe not hundreds). Whenever possible, he enjoys writing and filming movies and helping friends out with their projects. He’s also the type of guy who’s always looking for something new; the next big adventure. Whether it’s learning a new skill like karate, pursuing a new hobby like becoming a pilot, or, if he could, spend his life traveling the world.
In a screen writing class in college he discovered a new passion-writing. When it comes to writing music, books or film, he is always looking for originality, that new sound or idea that is going to set himself apart. His first book, The Longest Road, was created out of his love for the horror genre. To him, there’s nothing like the suspense and thrill of reading a horror novel or watching a scary movie.... The heart pounding, the spine tingling, and that part in the back of your head that wonders what will happen next. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
(No mainstream press reviews have been posted online for this book. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Discussion Questions
1. Were the main characters’ actions/relationships/decisions believable?
2. What did you think about the author’s language and writing style?
3. Was the author fairly descriptive?
4. How was the plot? What was unique about it? Was it a stimulating, page-turner?
5. What are some of the major themes of the book? In your opinion, did the author effectively develop these?
6. Describe the setting(s) and tone of the book.
7. How do you feel about the ending?
8. What else struck you about the book? What did you like/not like about the story?
9. Would you recommend this book? Why/why not?
(Questions provided by author.)
Look Again
Lisa Scottoline, 2009
St. Martin's Press
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312380731
Summary
When reporter Ellen Gleeson gets a “Have You Seen This Child?” flyer in the mail, she almost throws it away.
But something about it makes her look again, and her heart stops—the child in the photo is identical to her adopted son, Will. Her every instinct tells her to deny the similarity between the boys, because she knows her adoption was lawful.
But she’s a journalist and won’t be able to stop thinking about the photo until she figures out the truth. And she can’t shake the question: if Will rightfully belongs to someone else, should she keep him or give him up? She investigates, uncovering clues no one was meant to discover, and when she digs too deep, she risks losing her own life—and that of the son she loves. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 1, 1955
• Where—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., J.D., University of Pennsylvania
• Awards—Edgar Award
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Lisa Scottoline is the New York Times bestselling author and Edgar award-winning author of some two dozen novels and several nonfiction books. She also writes a weekly column with her daughter Francesca Serritella for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled "Chick Wit" which is a witty and fun take on life from a woman's perspective.
These stories, along with many other never-before-published stories, have been collected in four books including their most recent, Have a Nice Guilt Trip, and the earlier, Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim, Best Friends, Occasional Enemies, Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog, which has been optioned for TV, and My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space.
Lisa reviews popular fiction and non-fiction, and her reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer. Lisa has served as President of Mystery Writers of America and has taught a course she developed, "Justice and Fiction" at The University of Pennsylvania Law School, her alma mater.
Lisa is a regular and much sought after speaker at library and corporate events. Lisa has over 30 million copies of her books in print and is published in over 35 countries. She lives in the Philadelphia area with an array of disobedient pets, and she wouldn't have it any other way.
Lisa's books have landed on all the major bestseller lists including the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Publisher's Weekly, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and Look Again was named "One of the Best Novels of the Year" by the Washington Post, and one of the best books in the world as part of World Book Night 2013.
Lisa's novels are known for their emotionality and their warm and down-to-earth characters, which resonate with readers and reviewers long after they have finished the books. When writing about Lisa’s Rosato & Associates series, Janet Maslin of the New York Times applauds Lisa's books as "punchy, wisecracking thrillers" whose "characters are earthy, fun and self-deprecating" and distinguishes her as having "one of the best-branded franchise styles in current crime writing."
Recognition
Lisa's contributions through her writing has been recognized by organizations throughout the country. She is the recipient of the Edgar Award, the Mystery Writer's of America most prestigious honor, the Fun, Fearless, Fiction Award by Cosmopolitan Magazine, and named a PW Innovator by Publisher's Weekly.
Lisa was honored with AudioFile's Earphones Award and named Voice of the Year for her recording of her non-fiction book, Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog. The follow up collection, My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space has garnered both Lisa and her daughter, Francesca, an Earphones Award as well. In addition, she has been honored with a Distinguished Author Award from Scranton University, and a "Paving the Way" award from the University of Pennsylvania, Women in Business.
Personal
Lisa's accomplishments all pale in comparison to what she considers her greatest achievement, raising, as a single mom, her beautiful (a completely unbiased opinion) daughter, an honors graduate of Harvard, author, and columnist, who is currently working on her first novel.
Lisa believes in writing what you know, and she puts so much of herself into her books. What you may or may not learn about Lisa from her books is that...
♦ she is an incredibly generous person
♦ an engaging and entertaining speaker
♦ a die-hard Eagles fan
♦ a good cook.
♦ She loves the color pink, her Ipod has everything from U2 to Sinatra to 50 Cent, she is proud to be an American, and nothing makes her happier than spending time with her daughter.
Dogs
Lisa is also a softie when it comes to her furry family. Nothing can turn Lisa from a professional, career-minded author, to a mushy, sweet-talking, ball-throwing woman like her beloved dogs. Although she has owned and loves various dog breeds, including her amazing goldens, she has gone crazy for her collection of King Charles Spaniels.
Lisa first fell in love with the breed when Francesca added her Blehneim Cavalier, Pip, to the mix. This prompted Lisa to get her own, and she started with the adorable, if not anatomically correct (Lisa wrote a "Chick Wit" column about this), Little Tony, her first male dog. Little Tony is a black and tan Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.
But Lisa couldn't stop at just one and soon added her little Peach, a Blehneim King Charles Cavalier. Lisa is now beyond thrilled to be raising Peach’s puppies, Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, and for daily puppy pictures, be sure to follow Lisa on Facebook or Twitter. Herding together the entire pack is Lisa’s spunky spit-fire of a Corgi named Ruby. The solitude of writing isn't very quiet with her furry family, but she wouldn't have it any other way.
Cats
Not to be outshined by their canine counterparts, Lisa's cats, Vivi and Mimi, are the princesses of the house, and have no problem keeping the rest of the brood in line. Vivi is a grey and white beauty and is more aloof than her cuddly, black and white partner, Mimi.
When Lisa’s friend and neighbor passed, Lisa adopted his beloved cat, Spunky, a content and beautiful ball of fur.
Chickens
Lisa loves the coziness of her farmhouse, and no farm is complete without chickens. Lisa has recently added a chicken coop and has populated it with chicks of different types, and is overjoyed with each and every colorful egg they produce. Watching over Lisa's chicks are her horses, which gladly welcomed the chicks and all the new excitement they bring. (Author bio adapted from the author's website.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Lisa on Facebook.
Book Reviews
Scottoline's writing hasn't acquired the paunch often found in thrillers by authors whose careers have reached the literary equivalent of middle age. Her plots are as lean and swift as a scull on the Schuylkill River in her native Philadelphia.
Janice Harayda - Washington Post
(Starred review.) Bestseller Scottoline (Lady Killer) scores another bull's-eye with this terrifying thriller about an adoptive parent's worst fear—the threat of an undisclosed illegality overturning an adoption. The age-progressed picture of an abducted Florida boy, Timothy Braverman, on a have you seen this child? flyer looks alarmingly like Philadelphia journalist Ellen Gleeson's three-year-old son, Will, whom she adopted after working on a feature about a pediatric cardiac care unit. Ellen, who jeopardizes her newspaper job by secretly researching the Braverman case, becomes suspicious when she discovers the lawyer who handled her adoption of Will has committed suicide. Meanwhile, Will's supposed birth mother, Amy Martin, dies of a heroin overdose, and Amy's old boyfriend turns out to look like the man who kidnapped Timothy. Scottoline expertly ratchets up the tension as the desperate Ellen flies to Miami to get DNA samples from Timothy's biological parents. More shocks await her back home.
Publishers Weekly
If you received news that threatened your family, would you ignore it or devote yourself to proving it false? Pennsylvania reporter Ellen Gleeson is living an ordinary life with her son and cat until she receives a "Have You Seen This Child?" flyer in the mail. The boy photographed in the flyer bears a striking resemblance to her three-year-old adopted son, Will, and becomes an object of obsession for Ellen, shaking the very foundations of her family and propelling her into an investigation. Is Will really Timothy Braverman, missing since infancy? Ellen finds herself anticipating the worst as her quest for the truth progresses. In typical Scottoline (Daddy's Girl) fashion, a strong female fights for what she believes in, despite more than her share of obstacles. Scottoline's best novel to date will have faithful fans and new readers singing her praises. Highly recommended to all public libraries
Library Journal
In a departure from her wildly popular Rosato & Associates series, Scottoline still sticks to what she knows in this taut stand-alone: female drama, family ties, legal intrigue, and fast-paced action. A sure-fire winner. —Mary Frances Wilkens
Booklist
Legal and illegal shenanigans take a back seat to mother love and its vicissitudes in Scottoline's barn-burning crossover novel about every adoptive mother's worst nightmare. Even though the escalating homicide count in Philadelphia includes more and more children and economic clouds portend layoffs at her newspaper, features reporter Ellen Gleeson has her own private store of sunshine: her three-year-old son Will, whom she fell in love with two years ago when a story about pediatric care brought her to his hospital bedside. Because Will had a heart defect and his mother couldn't care for him, she was willing to sign him over to a single mother, a decision Ellen has blessed every day of her life—until the day she sees a circular asking, "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?" with the photograph of a boy whose resemblance to Will is uncanny. Timothy Braverman, abducted from his wealthy Florida parents, Carol and Bill, in a carjacking that went horribly wrong, hasn't been seen since. Despite her dread of confirming her fear that Will is Tim, Ellen can't help neglecting her job (with predictably dire professional results) to gather more information about him, partly because of her reporter's nose for a story, but mostly because she wants what's best for her son, no matter the cost. The trail leads her to a garage full of adoption folders, some unwelcome revelations about Will's birth mother and a tense game of hide-and-seek with the Bravermans as she realizes what a hornet's nest her questions have stirred up, and how determined someone is to make sure this is one story she doesn't break. Though the blood-and-thunder climax arrives a mite early, there's one final twist in reserve. Fans will spot the last twist a mile away, but it doesn't matter. For once Scottoline subordinates the criminal plot to the human-interest story that rides sidesaddle in all her thrillers, and the result is her best book yet.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Look Again really examines the notion of parenthood. What do you think makes someone a parent? Do you think the bond a child has with a non-biological parent can be as strong as one they would have with a biological parent? Why?
2. Lisa's favorite quote is one from Eleanor Roosevelt, "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she's in hot water." How does Ellen prove that she is a strong woman? Does Ellen remind you of anyone you know? Could you relate to Ellen, and did you like her? Why or why not?
3. As a journalist, Ellen has a heightened need to find the truth. In this circumstance, was this a good thing, or a bad thing? What would you have done in Ellen's place? Would you have looked for the truth, even if it meant losing your son? What do you think were Ellen's motivations?
4. The idea of "letting go" a child helped shape the whole premise of the book for Lisa, which led her to thinking about who really "owns" a child. Who do you think "owns" a child, and what exactly does that mean? If children actually "own" themselves, what then is the role of parents, and what are the limitations on parenthood?
5. If the child you raised and loved with all your heart actually belonged to someone else, and you were the only one who knew, would you give the child up? How do you think those around you would react? Who in your life would agree with your decision, and who would have done the opposite?
6. How would you describe Ellen's relationship with her father and how do you think it changed over the course of the book? Ellen considered her mother her go to parent. Do you think everyone has a go to parent, and what defines them as such?
7. What effect do you think all the drama in Will's life will have on him in the future? Do you think things ultimately worked out to his benefit or detriment and why?
8. How do you feel about single parents adopting children? What kind of, if any, additional requirements do you think should be put on single parents before they can adopt? How do you feel about open adoption? Is it better or worse for children? Is it better or worse for the adoptive parents? The biological parents? At what age do you think a child should be told they are adopted?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Look at Me
Jennifer Egan, 2001
Knopf Doubleday
415 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385721356
Summary
2002, Finalist, National Book Award
At the start of this edgy and ambitiously multilayered novel, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied.
With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There’s a deceptively plain teenaged girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society.
As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 7, 1962
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Raised—San Francisco, California
• Education—University of Pennsylvania; Cambridge
University (UK)
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize; National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York
Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York City. She is perhaps best known for her 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won both the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
Background/early career
Egan was born in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in San Francisco, California. She majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and, as an undergrad, dated Steve Jobs, who installed a Macintosh computer in her bedroom. After graduating from Penn, Egan spent two years at St John's College at Cambridge University, supported by a Thouron Award.
In addition to her several novels (see below), Egan has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, among other periodicals. Her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She also published a short-story collection in 1993.
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Egan has been hesitant to classify her most noted work, A Visit from the Goon Squad, as either a novel or a short story collection, saying,
I wanted to avoid centrality. I wanted polyphony. I wanted a lateral feeling, not a forward feeling. My ground rules were: every piece has to be very different, from a different point of view. I actually tried to break that rule later; if you make a rule then you also should break it!
The book features genre-bending content such as a chapter entirely formatted as a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Of her inspiration and approach to the work, she said,
I don’t experience time as linear. I experience it in layers that seem to coexist.… One thing that facilitates that kind of time travel is music, which is why I think music ended up being such an important part of the book. Also, I was reading Proust. He tries, very successfully in some ways, to capture the sense of time passing, the quality of consciousness, and the ways to get around linearity, which is the weird scourge of writing prose.
Bibliography (partial)
Novels
1995 - The Invisible Circus
2001 - Look at Me
2006 - The Keep
2010 - A Visit from the Goon Squad
2017 - Manhattan Beach
Short fiction
1993 - Emerald City (short story collection; released in US in 1996)
2012 - "Black Box" (short story, released on The New Yorker's Twitter account)
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/3/2017.)
Book Reviews
In Propelled by plot, peppered with insights, enlivened by quirkily astute characterizations, and displaying an impressive prescience about our newly altered world, Look at Me is more nuanced than it first appears. Ultimately, it takes us beyond what we see and hints at truths we have only just begun to understand.
Amy Reiter - Salon
Equipped with an arresting premise, Egan's hip and haunting second novel (after The Invisible Circus) gets off to a promising start. Thirty-five-year-old Charlotte, a thoroughly unpleasant Manhattan-based model who escaped the middle-class nothingness of her upbringing in Rockford, Ill., then spent her adult life getting by on appearances, literally loses her face in a catastrophic car accident back in Rockford. As Charlotte's rebuilt face heals and she goes unrecognized at the restaurants and nightclubs that were her old haunts, she must grapple with the lives and losses she has tried to outrun a fractured childhood friendship, the fiance she betrayed and "Z," a suspicious man from an unidentified Middle Eastern country. Anthony Halliday, an attractive, tormented private investigator, interrupts Charlotte's isolation. Hired by a pair of nightclub owners to track down Z because he absconded with a pile of their money, Halliday carries the scent of romance, but he also kicks off a chain of introductions that bizarrely lands Charlotte in the "mirrored room" of great fame. She is reconnected with her past at the same time that she becomes part of a brave new Internet world, where identity itself is a consumable commodity. Oddly, this narrative alternates with that of her old friend Ellen's daughter (also named Charlotte), whose life in Rockford centers around two older men. Though expertly constructed and seductively knowing, Egan's tale is marred by the overblown trendiness at its core. Charlotte (the model, who progresses from horrid to just bearable by the end) and the others come to the same realization: a world ruled by the consumerist values bred by mass production and mass informationis "a world constructed from the "outside in." The Buddha said it better.
Publishers Weekly
Charlotte, a successful thirtyish model, miraculously survives a horrific car crash near Rockford, IL, her despised hometown. However, reconstructive facial surgery alters her appearance irrevocably. Within the fashion world, where one's look is one's self, she has become literally unrecognizable. Seeking a new image, Charlotte stumbles into a tantalizing Internet experiment that may both save and damn her. Back in Rockford, another Charlotte, this one a plain, unhappy teenager, wonders who she really is. Her search for self drives her to extremes; she maintains a tortuous sexual liaison with a mysterious high school math teacher and takes on an eerie scholar-disciple role opposite her unbalanced Uncle Moose, who is obsessed by his unorthodox theories about the Industrial Revolution. The intersections of these and the novel's other intriguing characters raise tantalizing questions about identity and reality in contemporary American culture. Egan continues to fulfill the literary promise she showed in her previous fiction, The Invisible Circus and Emerald City. Recommended for most collections.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. “I was not Rockford—I was its opposite, whatever that might be, ” Charlotte declares. In Charlotte’s mind, what does Rockford represent? How is her chosen path a reaction to her place of birth? Is her return to Rockford at the end of the book merely circumstantial, or does it represent a symbolic shift in her perception of her hometown?
2. Charlotte describes her notion of the shadow self as, “that caricature that clings to each of us, revealing itself in odd moments when we laugh or fall still, staring brazenly from certain bad photographs.” Why does this concept interest Charlotte, and what does that reveal about her character? What do you imagine Charlotte’s shadow self looks like? Does it change after her accident?
3. Many of the characters in Look at Me undergo major transformations—whether during the course of the novel or before it begins. In what specific ways do the characters change, and how do these changes affect their lives? Which transformations do you find most surprising? How is the idea of transformation linked to the novel’s larger thematic concerns about identity and self?
4. Discuss Z/Michael West. For what is he searching, and what does he find? How does his personal journey mirror Charlotte Swenson’s?
5. While recuperating from her accident and subsequent surgery, Charlotte allows none of her friends or acquaintances to see her. Once people see you in a weakened state, she claims, they’ll never forget, “and long after you’ve regained your vitality, after you yourself have forgotten these exhibits of your weakness, they’ll look at you and stillsee them.” How does this statement reflect Charlotte’s worldview at the beginning of the book? Is she right? Is her perspective borne out over the course of the novel, or does it evolve?
6. Misperceptions and misunderstandings play a crucial role in the plot of Look at Me; characters often reach for something they believe they see in one another, only to find that they were mistaken, or even purposely deceived. Identify some of these misunderstandings and talk about their significance to the novel as a whole.
7. Charlotte says, “information was not a thing—it was colorless, odorless, shapeless, and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it, no way to halt its proliferation.” Compare this statement to Moose’s idea that “now the world’s blindness came from too much sight, appearances disjoined from anything real, afloat upon nothing, in the service of nothing, cut off from every source of blood and life.” What is the connection between these two statements? Do they present differing views of the world or simply different interpretations of the same problem? In the end, does Look at Me seem to sanction them or call them into question?
8. Despite his apparent instability, there is a peculiar beauty in Moose’s striving for vision and in his efforts to communicate that vision to the young Charlotte. For what is he looking? Define, if you can, his odd emotional and spiritual response to industrial and historical events. When Moose experiences his vision once again at the end of the novel, what exactly do you think he sees?
9. Discuss Charlotte’s relationship with Irene Maitlock. What is it about Irene that draws Charlotte to her? Do you see any connection between this relationship and Charlotte’s friendship with Ellen Metcalf? How does Charlotte and Irene’s relationship change over the course of the book?
10. All of the characters in Egan’s novel deal differently with the concept of memory: Michael West allows himself just one memory a day, Charlotte shuns her memories, and Moose exists in a world saturated by memories of his own life, along with imagined recollections of an earlier historical time. What connection does the novel suggest between personal memory and cultural memory? How do you suppose the young Charlotte might feel about her memories twenty years down the road?
11. Look at Me begins by recounting Charlotte Swenson and Ellen Metcalf’s girlhood sexual misadventures. At the end of the novel, Charlotte and Ellen meet again, in very different circumstances. Talk about both women’s experiences in the interim, and about the significance of their last meeting. Did it satisfy you?
12. At the end of the novel, Charlotte demurs, “As for myself, I’d rather not say very much.” Indeed, the novel seems intentionally to leave us without a clear sense of what the future holds for its characters. Why do you think Egan has chosen to end her book so ambiguously? What sorts of lives will the Charlottes, Ellen Metcalf/Hauser, Z, Moose, Ricky, and Irene Maitlock go on to live?
13. Do you feel that Look at Me, with its depiction of how behind-the-scenes events contribute in the making of public images, will have any impact on the way you perceive celebrities?
14. Do you consider Look at Me—in particular, its brutal portrayal of the modeling world—a futuristic novel? Or can it be read it as a fairly accurate look at our present, evolving world? Might there be some way of escaping some of the disturbing scenes Egan describes?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Look for Me (Detective D.D. Warren, 9)
Lisa Gardner, 2018
Penguin Publising
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524742058
Summary
In Lisa Gardner's latest twisty thrill ride, Detective D.D. Warren and Find Her's Flora Dane return in a race against the clock to either save a young girl's life … or bring her to justice.
The home of a family of five is now a crime scene: four of them savagely murdered, one—a sixteen-year-old girl—missing.
Was she lucky to have escaped? Or is her absence evidence of something sinister?
Detective D.D. Warren is on the case—but so is survivor-turned-avenger Flora Dane. Seeking different types of justice, they must make sense of the clues left behind by a young woman who, whether as victim or suspect, is silently pleading, look for me. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• AKA—Alicia Scott
• Birth—ca. 1971-72
• Where—Hillsboro, Oregon, USA
• Education—University of Pennsylvania
• Awards—Best Hardcove (Int'l. Thriller Writers); France's Grand Prix des lectrices
de Elle, prix du policie; Daphne du Maurier Award (Romances Writers of America)
• Currently—lives in New Hampshire
Lisa Gardner is an American author of fiction. She is the author of 30 some novels, including thriller-suspense works such as The Killing Hour, The Next Accident, Catch Me, and most recently Find Her. She also has written romance novels using the pseudonym Alicia Scott. With over 22 million books in print, Lisa is published in 30 countries. Four of her novels have been adapted as TV movies.
Her work as a research analyst for a consulting firm spurred her interest in police procedure, cutting edge forensics and twisted plots—a fascination she parlayed into more than 16 bestselling suspense novels.
Raised in Hillsboro, Oregon, she graduated from the city's Glencoe High School. As of 2007, Gardner lives in New Hampshire. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Family, friendships and foster relationships are explored in this emotional, page-turning thriller.
USA Today
Gardner has a talent when it comes to exploring uncomfortable topics and the various psychological aspects that accompany them while evoking truly emotional responses.… Though the material Gardner writes about might sometimes be dark, she knows how to shine a light and generate optimism when all looks lost.
Associated Press
Gardner has tackled a tough subject with some complicated protagonists…Fans will find the result satisfying as ever.
Florida Times Union
In Thriller Award–winner Gardner’s exciting ninth novel featuring Boston Sgt. Det. D.D. Warren…. Gardner shines a heartbreaking light on foster care abuse while steadily ratcheting up the tension to a genuinely surprising and emotional finale.
Publishers Weekly
The twists and turns in this gripping D.D. Warren adventure will keep readers turning the pages.
Library Journal
( Starred review.) Suspenseful and wholly believable, this ninth entry will win new fans for the series, especially among those who favor Karin Slaughter's gritty procedurals.
Booklist
Despite Gardner's considerable research into the foster-care system, her plot is a tired one populated with cardboard characters and twists any savvy reader will see coming a mile away.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
GENERIC QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers
1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?
2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?
3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?
4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead us astray. Does the author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?
5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.
a. Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
b. Are they plausible or implausible?
c. Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?
6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?
7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?
a. Is the conclusion probable or believable?
b. Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
c. Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
d. Perhaps it's too predictable.
e. Can you envision a different or better ending?
8. Point to passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing, that somehow struck you. What, if anything, made you stop and think? Or maybe even laugh.
9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Or does it somehow fall short?
10. Compare this book to other mystery, crime, or suspense thrillers that you've read. Consider other authors or other books in a the series by the same author.
(Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Look Homeward, Angel
Thomas Wolfe, 1929
Simon & Schuster
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743297318
Summary
The classic first novel from one of America's greatest men of letters "I don't know yet what I am capable of doing," wrote Thomas Wolfe at the age of twenty-three, "but, by God, I have genius—I know it too well to blush behind it." Six years later, with the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe gave the world proof of his genius, and he would continue to do so throughout his tumultuous life.
Look Homeward, Angel tells the coming-of-age story of Eugene Gant, whose restlessness and yearning to experience life to the fullest take him from his rural home in North Carolina to Harvard. Through his rich, ornate prose and meticulous attention to detail, Wolfe evokes the peculiarities of small-town life and the pain and upheaval of leaving home. Heavily autobiographical, Look Homeward, Angel is Wolfe's most turbulent and passionate work, and a brilliant novel of lasting impact.
Thomas Wolfe's classic coming-of-age novel, first published in 1929, is a work of epic grandeur, evoking a time and place with extraordinary lyricism and precision. Set in Altamont, North Carolina, this semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of a restless young man who longs to escape his tumultuous family and his small town existence. (From the publisher.)
More
The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a brilliant and restless young man whose wanderlust and passion shape his adolescent years in rural North Carolina. Wolfe said that Look Homeward, Angel is "a book made out of my life," and his largely autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced generations of readers, including some of today's most important novelists. Rich with lyrical prose and vivid characterizations, this twentieth-century American classic will capture the hearts and imaginations of every reader. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 3, 1900
• Where—Asheville, North Carolina, USA
• Died—September 15, 1938
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina; M.A.,
Harvard University
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early 20th century. He wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, reflect vividly on American culture and mores of the period, albeit filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated and hyper-analytical perspective. He was famous during his own lifetime.
After Wolfe's death, his chief contemporary William Faulkner said that Wolfe may have had the best talent of their generation. Wolfe's influence extends to the writings of famous Beat writer Jack Kerouac, authors Ray Bradbury and Philip Roth, among others. He remains one of the most important writers in modern American literature, as he was one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction. He is considered North Carolina's most famous writer.
Early life
Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest of eight children of William Oliver Wolfe (1851–1922) and Julia Elizabeth Westall (1860–1945). The Wolfes lived at 92 Woodfin Street, where Tom was born. His father, a successful stone carver, ran a gravestone business. His mother took in boarders and was active in acquiring real estate. In 1904, she opened a boarding house in St. Louis, for the World's Fair. While the family was in St. Louis, Wolfe's 12-year-old Grover died of typhoid fever.
In 1906, Julia Wolfe bought a boarding house named "Old Kentucky Home" at nearby 48 Spruce Street in Asheville, taking up residence there with her youngest son while the rest of the family remained at the Woodfin Street residence. Wolfe lived in the boarding house on Spruce Street until he went to college in 1916. It is now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. Wolfe was closest to his brother Ben, whose early death at age 26 is chronicled in Look Homeward, Angel. Julia Wolfe bought and later sold many properties, eventually becoming a successful real estate speculator.
Wolfe began to study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) when he was 15 years old; he was a member of the Dialectic Society and Pi Kappa Phi fraternity and predicted that his portrait would one day hang in New West near that of celebrated North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, which it does today. Aspiring to be a playwright, in 1919 Wolfe enrolled in a playwriting course. His one-act play, "The Return of Buck Gavin," was performed by the newly-formed Carolina Playmakers, then composed of classmates in Frederick Koch's playwriting class, with Wolfe acting the title role. He edited UNC's student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel, and won the Worth Prize for Philosophy for an essay titled "The Crisis in Industry." Another of his plays, The Third Night, was performed by the Playmakers in December 1919. Wolfe was inducted into the Golden Fleece honor society.
He graduated from UNC with a B.A. degree in June 1920. In September of that year, he entered the Graduate School for Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where he studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker. Two versions of Wolfe's play The Mountains were performed by Baker's 47 Workshop in 1921.
In 1922, Wolfe received his Master's degree from Harvard. His father died in Asheville in June of that year, an event that would strongly influence his writing. Wolfe continued to study for another year with Baker in the 47 Workshop, which produced his ten-scene play, Welcome to Our City, in May 1923.
Wolfe visited New York City again in November 1923 and solicited funds for UNC while trying to sell his plays to Broadway. In February 1924, he began teaching English as an instructor at New York University (NYU), a position he occupied periodically for almost seven years.
Career
Unable to sell any of his plays after three years due to their excessive length, including a time when the Theatre Guild came close to producing his play Welcome to Our City before ultimately rejecting it, Wolfe found his writing style more suited to fiction than the stage. He sailed to Europe in October 1924 to continue writing. From England he traveled to France, Italy and Switzerland. On his return voyage in 1925, he met Aline Bernstein (1882–1955), a scene designer for the Theatre Guild. 18 years his senior, Bernstein was married to a successful stock broker with whom she had two children.
In October 1925, Wolfe and Bernstein became lovers and remained so for five years. Their affair was turbulent and sometimes combative, but she exerted a powerful influence, encouraging and funding his writing. He returned to Europe in the summer of 1926 and began writing the first version of a novel, O Lost, which eventually evolved into Look Homeward, Angel. An autobiographical novel that fictionalized his early experiences in Asheville, the narrative chronicled family, friends and the boarders at his mother's establishment on Spruce Street. In the book, he renamed the town Altamont and called the boarding house "Dixieland." His family was fictionalized under the name Gant, with Wolfe calling himself Eugene, his father Oliver, and his mother Eliza.
The original manuscript of O Lost was over 100 pages and 66,000 words longer and considerably more experimental in character than the final edited version of Look Homeward, Angel. The editing was done by Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's, the most prominent book editor of the time, who also worked with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Initially, Wolfe expressed gratitude to Perkins for his disciplined editing. It has been said that Wolfe found a father figure in Perkins, who had five daughters and found in Wolfe a sort of foster son relationship. Perkins cut the book to focus more on the character of Eugene, a stand-in for Wolfe himself.
When the novel was published 11 days before the stock market crash of 1929, Wolfe dedicated it to Bernstein. Soon after the book's publication, Wolfe returned to Europe and ended his affair with Bernstein. The publication of the novel caused a stir in Asheville, with its over 200 thinly disguised local characters. Wolfe chose to stay away from Asheville for eight years due to the uproar; he traveled to Europe for a year on a Guggenheim fellowship. Look Homeward, Angel was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and Germany. Some members of Wolfe's family were also upset with their portrayal in the book, but his sister Mabel wrote to him that she was sure he had the best of intentions.
After four more years writing in Brooklyn, the second novel Wolfe submitted to Scribner's was The October Fair, a multi-volume epic roughly the length of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. After considering the commercial possibilities of publishing the book in full, Perkins opted to cut it down significantly and create a single, bestseller-sized volume, which would be titled Of Time and the River. This novel was more commercially successful than Look Homeward, Angel. In a twist from the publication of his previous novel, the citizens of Asheville were more upset this time if they hadn't been included than if they had. The character of Esther Jack was based on Bernstein. In 1934, Maxim Lieber served as his literary agent.
Wolfe left Scribner's and signed with Harper Bros. By some accounts, Perkins' severe editing of Wolfe's work prompted him to leave the Scribner imprint. Other accounts describe Wolfe's growing resentment that some attributed his success to Perkins' work as editor. In 1936, Bernard DeVoto, reviewing The Story of a Novel for Saturday Review, wrote that Look Homeward, Angel was "hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribners."
Wolfe spent much time in Europe and was especially popular and at ease in Germany, where he made many friends. However, in 1936, he witnessed discriminatory incidents towards Jewish people that upset him and changed his mind about the political developments in the country. Wolfe returned to America and published a short story chronicling the incidents called "I Have a Thing to Tell You" in the New Republic. Following that publication, Wolfe's books were banned by the German government and he was prohibited from traveling there. Wolfe did return to Asheville in the summer of 1937 for the first time since publication of his first book.
Death
In 1938, after turning in a large body of manuscript materials, over one million words, to his new editor, Edward Aswell, Wolfe left New York for a tour of the West. On the way, he stopped at Purdue University and gave a lecture, "Writing and Living," then spent two weeks traveling through 11 national parks in the West, the only part of the country he had never visited before. Wolfe wrote to Aswell that while he had focused on his family in his previous writing, he would now take a more global perspective. In July, Wolfe became ill with pneumonia while visiting Seattle, spending three weeks in the hospital there. His sister Mabel closed her boardinghouse in Washington, DC and went to Seattle to care for him. Complications arose, and Wolfe was eventually diagnosed with miliary tuberculosis of the brain.
On September 6, he was sent to Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital for treatment under the most famous neurosurgeon in the country, Dr. Walter Dandy, but an attempt at a life-saving operation revealed that the disease had overrun the entire right side of his brain. Without regaining consciousness, he died 18 days before his 38th birthday. His last writing, a journal of his two-week trip through the national parks, was found in his belongings hours after his death.
Despite his disagreements with Perkins and Scribner's, on his deathbed Wolfe wrote a deeply moving letter to Perkins, whom he considered to be his closest friend. He acknowledged that Perkins had helped to realize his work and had made his labors possible. In closing he wrote:
I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that Fourth of July day three years ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the cafe on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building, and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below.
Thomas Wolfe is interred in Riverside Cemetery, Asheville, North Carolina, beside his parents, W.O. and Julia Wolfe, and his siblings.
The next day, the New York Times wrote:
His was one of the most confident young voices in contemporary American literature, a vibrant, full-toned voice which it is hard to believe could be so suddenly stilled. The stamp of genius was upon him, though it was an undisciplined and unpredictable genius.... There was within him an unspent energy, an untiring force, an unappeasable hunger for life and for expression which might have carried him to the heights and might equally have torn him down.
Time magazine wrote: The death last week of Thomas Clayton Wolfe shocked critics with the realization that, of all American novelists of his generation, he was the one from whom most had been expected." Due to his early death, Wolfe spent the shortest amount of time writing of any major novelist during that time, with a career less than half as long as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Faulkner.
Upon publication of Look Homeward, Angel, most reviewers responded favorably, including John Chamberlain, Carl Van Doren, and Stringfellow Barr. Margaret Wallace wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Wolfe had produced "as interesting and powerful a book as has ever been made out of the drab circumstances of provincial American life." An anonymous review published in Scribner's magazine compared Wolfe to Walt Whitman, and many other reviewers and scholars have found similarities in their works since.
When published in the UK in July 1930, the book received similar reviews. Richard Aldington wrote that the novel was "the product of an immense exuberance, organic in its form, kinetic, and drenched with the love of life... I rejoice over Mr. Wolfe." Both in his 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech and original press conference announcement, Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, said of Wolfe, "He may have a chance to be the greatest American writer.... In fact I don't see why he should not be one of the greatest world writers."
Critical reception and legacy
Upon publication of his second novel, Of Time and the River, most reviewers and the public remained supportive, though some critics found shortcomings while still hailing it for moments or aspects of greatness. The book was well-received by the public and became his only American bestseller. The publication was viewed as "the literary event of 1935"; by comparison, the earlier attention given to Look Homeward, Angel was modest. Both the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune published enthusiastic front-page reviews. Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker that while he wasn't sure what he thought of the book, "for decades we have not had eloquence like his in American writing." Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic thought the book would be twice as good if half as long, but stated Wolfe was "the only contemporary writer who can be mentioned in the same breath as Dickens and Dostoevsky." Robert Penn Warren thought Wolfe produced some brilliant fragments from which "several fine novels might be written." He went on to say: "And meanwhile it may be well to recollect that Shakespeare merely wrote Hamlet; he was not Hamlet." Warren also praised Wolfe in the same review, though, as did John Donald Wade in a separate review.
While acclaimed when alive as one of the most important American writers of equal quality to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, Wolfe's reputation has been "all but destroyed" since his death, although the New York Times wrote in 2003 that Wolfe's reputation and related scholarship appeared to be on an "upswing." He is often left out of college courses and anthologies devoted to great writers. Faulkner and W.J. Cash listed Wolfe as the ablest writer of their generation, although Faulkner later qualified his praise. Despite his early admiration of Wolfe's work, Faulkner subsequently concluded that his novels were "like an elephant trying to do the hoochie-cooochie." Ernest Hemingway's verdict was that Wolfe was "the over-bloated Lil Abner of literature."
Two universities hold the primary archival collections of Thomas Wolfe materials in the United States: the Thomas Clayton Wolfe Papers at Harvard University's Houghton Library, which includes all of Wolfe's manuscripts, and the Thomas Wolfe Collections in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. UNC-Chapel Hill presents the annual Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture each October at the time of Wolfe's birthday to a contemporary writer, with past recipients including Roy Blount, Jr., Robert Morgan, and Pat Conroy.
Wolfe inspired the works of many other authors, including Betty Smith with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek, and Prince of Tides author Pat Conroy, who has said, "My writing career began the instant I finished Look Homeward, Angel." Jack Kerouac idolized Wolfe. Ray Bradbury was both influenced by and included Wolfe as a character in his books. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Language as rich and ambitious and intensely American as any of our novelists has ever accomplished.
Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain)
Look Homeward, Angel is one of the most important novels of my life. . . . It's a wonderful story for any young person burning with literary ambition, but it also speaks to the longings of our whole lives; I'm still moved by Wolfe's ability to convey the human appetite for understanding and experience.
Elizabeth Kostova (The Historian)
Wolfe made it possible to believe that the stuff of life, with all its awe and mystery and magic, could by some strange alchemy be transmuted to the page.
William Gay (The Long Home)
As so many other American boys had before and have since, I discovered a version of myself in Look Homeward, Angel, and I became intoxicated with the elevated, poetic prose.
Robert Morgan (Gap Creek)
Discussion Questions
1. Like Faulkner and Joyce, Wolfe has been acclaimed for his evocation of place. What details in Look Homeward, Angel evoke its setting, and what is the relation between its setting and its themes?
2. Describe the structure of Look Homeward, Angel. Discuss Wolfe's literary voice and his use of dramatic episodes and lyricism. How does Wolfe use both angels and trains symbolically? What significance does the title Look Homeward, Angel gather in the course of the novel?
3. In what ways does the novel powerfully represent the American struggle to go beyond the limitations of home and hometown? In what ways is the novel a search for America as well?
4. Describe the conflict which rages inside of Eugene Gant? How does it become the underlying force in the story?
5. Look Homeward, Angel is concerned with family and breaking away. Discuss this theme as it emerges in the book as well as in the exchanges between Eugene and Eliza, Eugene and Mr. Gant, Eugene and Ben.
6. Wolfe clearly states in the opening pages:
That we are born alone—all of us who ever lived or will live—that we live alone, and die alone, and that we are strangers to one another, and never come to know one another.
How does this sentiment pervade the novel? How does Wolfe develop it as a leitmotiv? Who else in the novel, besides Eugene, is alone?
7. Women play a significant role in Wolfe's novel, especially Eliza, Margaret, Laura James, and Helen. What distinguishes Wolfe's female characters? What do they all have in common? How do these women shape events? What impact do they have on Eugene's growth and ultimate transformation?
8. Discuss the impetus Wolfe's male characters provide Eugene. What characterizes Wolfe's male characters? How do Mr. Gant, Ben, Steve, and Luke contribute to Eugene's ultimate fate? What role do Wolfe's male characters play in the events, in the family?
9. How might Wolfe perceive his own characters? Does he offer any insights into their troubles? Does he treat them sympathetically? If so, how? In what ways do Wolfe's characters, in particular Eugene, try to win love? What keeps them from obtaining it? Do Wolfe's characters ever break through to one another? If so, who, how, and when?
10. Beginning with the death of Mr. Gant's grandfather, to the death of Mr. Gant's first child, death is a constant presence in Look Homeward, Angel. What impact does Ben's death have on the Gant family? Specifically, how does it alter Eugene's life and perspective? Why is Ben's death ironic in the novel? How does the story build to this climax? What does Ben's death accomplish that his life could not?
11. Why might Wolfe have ended the novel with a visitation of Ben's ghost with Eugene? What is its significance both for Eugene and for the novel?
12. What vision of human nature does Look Homeward, Angel seem to express? Does Wolfe prove or suggest a vision of an ideal world? What might it be?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Lookaway, Lookaway
Wilton Bernhardt, 2013
St. Martin's Press
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250020833
Summary
Jerene Jarvis Johnston and her husband Duke are exemplars of Charlotte, North Carolina’s high society, where old Southern money—and older Southern secrets—meet the new wealth of bankers, boom-era speculators, and carpetbagging social climbers.
Steely and implacable, Jerene presides over her family’s legacy of paintings at the Mint Museum; Duke, the one-time college golden boy and descendant of a Confederate general, whose promising political career was mysteriously short-circuited, has settled into a comfortable semi-senescence as a Civil War re-enactor. Jerene’s brother Gaston is an infamously dissolute bestselling historical novelist who has never managed to begin his long-dreamed-of literary masterpiece, while their sister Dillard is a prisoner of unfortunate life decisions that have made her a near-recluse.
And the four Johnston children wander perpetually toward scandal and mishap. Annie, the smart but matrimonially reckless real estate maven; Bo, a minister at war with his congregation; Joshua, prone to a series of gay misadventures, and Jerilyn, damaged but dutiful to her expected role as debutante and eventual society bride. Jerene must prove tireless in preserving the family's legacy, Duke’s fragile honor, and what's left of the dwindling family fortune. She will stop at nothing to keep what she has—but is it too much to ask for one ounce of cooperation from her heedless family?
In Lookaway, Lookaway, Wilton Barnhardt has written a headlong, hilarious narrative of a family coming apart, a society changing beyond recognition, and an unforgettable woman striving to pull it all together. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., Michigan State University; M.Phil,
Oxford University
• Currently—lives in Raleigh, North Carolina
Wilton Barnhardt is a former reporter for Sports Illustrated and is the author of Emma Who Saved My Life (1989), Gospel (1993), Show World (1999), and Lookaway, Lookaway (2013).
Barnhardt took his B.A. at Michigan State University, and was a graduate student at Brasenose College, University of Oxford, where he read for an M.Phil. in English. He teaches fiction-writing to undergraduate and graduate students at the North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he is a faculty member in the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/18/2013.)
For a longer and much funnier version of his bio, visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
A dishier array of secrets animates Lookaway, Lookaway, Wilton Barnhardt’s big, enveloping novel about a status-conscious North Carolina family.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Lacerating but affectionate, as exuberant as it is shrewd, Lookaway, Lookaway is a Southern novel so sure-footed the only real question for Barnhardt is, "What took you so long?"…Southern literature is full of humor but strangely short on satire. Barnhardt gleefully leaps into this gap like a man with a very long to-do list, eviscerating rituals and rascals ranging from sorority rush and Civil War re-enactments to back-stabbing church ladies…. Lookaway, Lookaway is that rare thing: an excellent long novel that's not long enough.
Malcolm Jones - New York Times Book Review
Sprawling, generous, delightful.... I didn't want it to end. Lookaway is both dishy an dliterary, but like all good novels, there's a nourishing quality as well.
Charlotte Observer
Scathing yet touching, this is a delicious saga of Old South meets New, a story of America lurching toward the future.
People
One helluva barn burner.
Elle
North Carolina native Barnhardt’s frothy, satirical latest is Southern gothic at its most decadent and dysfunctional.... [T]he sprawling saga of an esteemed clan’s fall from grace and fortune spools out in fits and starts.... As the scandals pile up...this mess of a family has nowhere left to go but up—well, not if they can help it.
Publishers Weekly
Told with great humor and precision, Barnhardt's fourth novel (after Show World) is a searing look at the new South, with all its contradictions. Verdict: Fans of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections will appreciate this satisfying, multigenerational tale. A fresh take on the family saga told with both Southern charm and pathos. —Jennifer B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll., Northeast
Library Journal
Dixieland was never so dishy nor dysfunctional as in Barnhardt’s ribald send-up of the conflagration that ensues when Old South tradition confronts New South tackiness…. Barnhardt’s satirical scorching of southern culture comes in second only to Sherman’s fiery march.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [A] revelation: witty, savage and bighearted all at once, it is the Southern novel for the 21st century. The Jarvis-Johnston clan is a Charlotte, N.C., family of distinction; they have all that matters to society.... But, as each family member is revealed...the ruin of the family becomes imminent.... Barnhardt masterfully reimagines the Southern gothic: There is every kind of sordid deed committed, but there is also an abundance of humanity and grace.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Lookaway, Lookaway is filled with memorable characters: indomitable Jerene, wounded but charismatic Duke, savagely funny Gaston, the adult Johnston children. Who is your favorite and why?
2. Though contemporary, this is definitely a “Southern” novel. Could this take place in another part of the country? What does it mean to be Southern anymore? Is it a nostalgia kept alive by a few old Civil war-enthusiasts and deluded High Society matrons, or is there really such a thing as “Southern”?
3. What is Jerene Johnston doing five years from the end of the novel? She’s a survivor, of course, but what will her life look like?
4. Self-destructive doesn’t even begin to describe the Johnstons. Who do you think is responsible for the family’s dysfunction? Is Duke’s failure to live up to his promise the start of it or does it go back even farther?
5. Bo and Kate once thought they would form a model Christian couple, with Bo emphasizing the institutional church life and Kate always hankering for the mission fields and the active, even radical faith. At the end of the book, have they gone their separate ways for good? How much did their differing views of religion contribute to their break-up?
6. What happens to Jerene’s family art collection? Who inherits it?
7. None of the Johnston children should write a romantic advice column. But who will end up the happiest? Is it improbably possible that Nonso and Joshua will have the best chance of living happily ever after? Despite Duke and Jerene’s solid union, none of the children seems to have figured out how to make a good match or marriage. Is there a reason for that?
8. Gaston adds himself to the pile of badly behaving, flagrantly drunken/unhappy Southern male writers (Faulkner, Wolfe, Dickey, Penn Warren, Capote, Tennessee Williams, et al). Is Norma correct—do these men just play at “Southern writer” or is there something especially destructive that lurks in the Southern literary profession?
9. What will Annie’s relationship with her mother be like after her father passes away? Will they be estranged or make some kind of détente? At the end of the book, Annie is free of the South and the pressures of the family? Will she be happier?
10. Race. Most chapters brush against (or take head-on) the inescapable topic of race in the South. The bad old days of Jim Crow may be gone, but how does the ever-changing mechanics of race-awareness and racism, overt as well as passive, limit and influence the white characters’ lives?
11. Class. Mrs. Johnston swears a couple can hail from different countries, different races or religions, but providing they share their class in common it might work out. Annie insists “class” is dead as a concept in America and that love will overcome all. Is Jerene right?
12. The Civil War—still alive, in some mutated fashion, in the South. (Maybe even still being fought.) Does anyone care about the war anywhere else in the country? Has a defeat for a lost and inglorious cause 150+ years ago truly cast that long and lasting a shadow over the American South?
13. Lookaway, Lookaway pokes a lot of fun at the Old Confederacy’s concepts of honor and the glorious gesture. Is Gaston and Duke’s final such gesture, their “honorable” solution to the inevitable decay and indignity that awaits them, merely ludicrous or is it actually chivalrous, a last romantic gesture and quest for a kind of nobility?
14. Humor is central to Barnhardt’s telling of the story. While the characters are strong and dominant, they are also really funny—intentionally or otherwise. Why is a sense of humor so important when reading this book? Which character do you think is the funniest and why?
15. Dorrie and Kate are the book’s outsiders, the eyes and thoughts of the reader. Are they changed for the better by entangling themselves with the Johnstons, or damaged? Does Kate depart the South for the mission fields mostly to escape the Johnstons and their values? Will Dorrie continue to be a faithful friend to Joshua and to Jerene?
16. Granted, Jerene is adept at fraud and petty criminality (particularly where shaking people down for money is concerned) and could probably kill detractors with her bare hands, but aren’t her sins in the service of her family? Or is she motivated by the false god of Society’s opinion and outward appearances? Is she admirable, or at least likable? Every family has a Jerene to some degree…in your family, is it you?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Looker
Laura Sims, 2018
Sribner
292 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501199110
Summary
A dazzling, razor-sharp debut novel about a woman whose obsession with the beautiful actress on her block drives her to the edge.
"I’ve never crossed their little fenced-in garden, of course. I stand on the sidewalk in front of the fern-and-ivy-filled planter that hangs from the fence—placed there as a sort of screen, I’m sure—and have a direct line of view into the kitchen at night.
"I’m grateful they’ve never thought to install blinds. That’s how confident they are. No one would dare stand in front of our house and watch us, they think. And they’re probably right: except for me."
In this taut and thrilling debut, an unraveling woman, unhappily childless and recently separated, becomes fixated on her neighbor—the actress.
The unnamed narrator can’t help noticing with wry irony that, though she and the actress live just a few doors apart, a chasm of professional success and personal fulfillment lies between them. The actress, a celebrity with her face on the side of every bus, shares a gleaming brownstone with her handsome husband and their three adorable children, while the narrator, working in a dead-end job, lives in a run-down, three-story walk-up with her ex-husband’s cat.
When an interaction with the actress at the annual block party takes a disastrous turn, what began as an innocent preoccupation spirals quickly, and lethally, into a frightening and irretrievable madness.
Searing and darkly witty, Looker is enormously entertaining—a psychologically suspenseful and fearlessly original portrait of the perils of envy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—?
• Where—Richmond, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., College of William and Mary; M.F.A., University of Washington
• Awards—Alberta Prize from Fence Books
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York
Laura Sims is an American poet and fiction writer, whose debut novel Looker (2019) sparked a bidding war, resulting in a major deal with Scribner. The book follows the spiraling descent of a woman obsessed—with the end of her marriage, with her inability to have a child, with her infuriatingly bourgeois Brooklyn neighborhood, and with her movie star neighbor.
Poetry
Prior to her novel, Sims published four books of poetry: Staying Alive (2016), My god is this a man (2014), Stranger (2009), and Practice, Restraint (2005). In 2014, she compiled and edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson. She has published five poetry chapbooks, including POST- (2011).
Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Aufgabe, Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Crayon, and Denver Quarterly, among others.
She has published book reviews and essays in Boston Review, New England Review, Rain Taxi, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Education
Sims is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington. She is a professor of creative writing, literature and composition who currently teaches at New York University.
She has been a featured writer for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog, and she is a co-editor of Instance Press with poets Elizabeth Robinson, Beth Anderson, and Susanne Dyckman. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Honors
2005 - Alberta Prize for Practice, Restraint from Fence Books
2006 - Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-US Friendship Commission
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
In prose that moves between lyrical and caterwauling, the poet Laura Sims has pulled off the high-wire act of making bitterness delicious (Most Anticipated Books of 2019).
Vogue
This debut is a penetrating and unsettling psychological thriller.… It’s a novel about identity, appearances, and envy, and it’s one of the season’s most timely reads, an innovative experiment in what a thriller can be (Most Anticipated Books of 2019).
Literary Hub
In this electrifying Hitchcockian debut, an unhappy woman’s obsession with a nearby actress will push the boundaries between insanity and desperation.
Washington Independent Review of Books
Tense, twisted and briskly paced.… Somewhat surprisingly, the most disturbing thing about Looker is the creeping sense of complicity that Sims engenders in the reader… [compelli g] us to ask: Have we been deranged, predatory voyeurs into the actress's life—or into the narrator's?
Shelf Awareness
Laura Sims’ sharp debut novel is a thriller about an unhealthy fixation between neighbors, one that’s propelled by the unnamed narrator’s unraveling as she descends into a vortex of resentment and obsession (Best New Books Winter 2019).
Southern Living
(Starred Review) [C]hilling and riveting. In this tightly plotted novel, Sims takes the reader fully into the mind of a woman becoming increasingly unhinged, and turns her emotionally fraught journey into a provocative tale about the dangers of coveting what belongs to another
Publishers Weekly
[A] gripping and intense debut.…This twisted and tightly coiled tale will define obsession on a new level.
Library Journal
Readers fond of protagonists who profess to guzzling wine at nine a.m. will breeze right through this one's bad decisions, moments of shocking clarity and cruelty, and—no spoilers!—total undoing. A dark and stylish drama featuring a self-aware yet unstable narrator.
Booklist
Like a modern-day version of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," Sims' novel shows the warped reality and claustrophobic mentality of a person losing a grip on her moral compass. But this reality is conveyed with slack language and a piling on of plot turns…. Its most original and electric moments [are] when the narrator dives into the edgy poems she teaches her students.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. At the very beginning of the novel, the narrator says that the actress “belongs to us. To our block, I mean,” (page 1). Why does she correct herself? And how does this set up the narrator’s increasingly intense feelings about the actress?
2. The narrator is very familiar with the actress’s roles, thinking, for instance, of her breakout in The Sultan of Hanover Street, which she watched with Nathan. How does her engagement with the actress’s many on-screen roles color her understanding of the actress as a wife, mother, and neighbor?
3. One of the reasons for the dissolution of the narrator’s marriage seems to be that the narrator was unable to conceive a child. How does this impact the narrator’s feelings about herself?
4. The narrator teaches her students that Emily Dickinson poems are “full of sex and rage,” (page 55). Why are these themes particularly resonant? Are there other ways of interpreting the poems she assigns?
5. When the narrator has lunch with her friend Shana, she at first believes she’s getting “appreciative looks” from every man in the room (page 58), but then realizes this might not be the case. How does this shift in reality complicate your understanding of the narrator’s reliability? What are other instances of her unreliability?
6. Describe the narrator’s transition from tolerating Cat to desperately holding on to her. How does she convince herself that Cat belongs with her?
7. When the narrator feels insecure in front of her students, she wears an outfit that “mirrors the one the actress wore to teach in every single scene of Working Class,” (page 83). Why? How would you describe the narrator’s feelings towards the actress?
8. The narrator fills up the room once intended for her and her husband’s child with the actress’s discarded family belongings, making the room into a kind of shrine. How do the narrator’s changing feelings about these belongings illuminate her moods?
9. Why do you think the narrator is so fixated on the block party?
10. Why does the narrator engage with Bernardo? Is he the unstable one, or is she?
11. After her months-long obsession with the block party, the narrator’s interaction with the actress does not go as expected. Why do you think the narrator, even after the incident with Nathan, chooses to go to the actress’s house? What does she hope to get out of the experience?
12. The narrator assigns Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” to her students (page 141). How does it speak to the way the narrator has responded to losing the things she once had—her job, her marriage, the possibility of a child?
13. On her final day with Cat, why does the narrator make the decision to act as she does? Is it planned, or an act of desperation?
14. The narrator envisions achieving a rapturous closeness with the actress as the novel comes to an end. Are these just fantasies, or are they more sinister than that?
15. How did you feel after spending so much time in the narrator’s head? When you finished reading, did you have sympathy for her? What did you think was going to happen to her afterwards?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Looking for Me
Beth Hoffman, 2013
Pamela Dorman Books
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670025831
Summary
Beth Hoffman’s bestselling debut, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, won admirers and acclaim with its heartwarming story and cast of unforgettable characters. Now her unique flair for evocative settings and richly drawn Southern personalities shines in her compelling new novel, Looking for Me.
Teddi Overman found her life’s passion for furniture in a broken-down chair left on the side of the road in rural Kentucky. She learns to turn other people’s castoffs into beautifully restored antiques, and eventually finds a way to open her own shop in Charleston. There, Teddi builds a life for herself as unexpected and quirky as the customers who visit her shop. Though Teddi is surrounded by remarkable friends and finds love in the most surprising way, nothing can alleviate the haunting uncertainty she’s felt in the years since her brother Josh’s mysterious disappearance. When signs emerge that Josh might still be alive, Teddi is drawn home to Kentucky. It’s a journey that could help her come to terms with her shattered family—and to find herself at last. But first she must decide what to let go of and what to keep.
Looking for Me brilliantly melds together themes of family, hope, loss, and a mature once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. The result is a tremendously moving story that is destined to make bestselling author Beth Hoffman a novelist to whom readers will return again and again as they have with Adriana Trigiani, Fannie Flagg, and Joshilyn Jackson. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Ohio, USA
• Currently—lives in Newport, Kentucky
Beth Hoffman was president and co-owner of a major interior design studio in Cincinnati, Ohio, before selling her business to write full time. (From the publisher.)
More
In her own words:
I was born on an elevator during a snowstorm, a story my father often enjoyed telling whenever the opportunity arose. For the first five years of my life, I lived (along with my mom, dad, and older brother) on my grandparents’ farm in northern Ohio. It was a rural area, and other than a few tolerant garden toads, a highly social chicken, and Midnight, our family dog, there wasn’t anyone to play with. So I created imaginary friends. I’d draw pictures of them and build them homes out of shoeboxes—replete with interiors furnished by pictures I’d cut from a Sears & Roebuck catalog. Eventually I wrote stories about my friends, giving them interesting names and complex lives.
From earliest memory, there were two things I loved above all else: writing and painting. I wrote my first short story when I was eleven and sold my first painting at the age of fourteen. I believed the sale of the painting was a sign of what direction I should take in life. So I chose a career in art that eventually segued into interior design, but I still kept writing and dreaming of becoming a novelist. Life sent me on many creative journeys and I ultimately landed in Cincinnati, Ohio, becoming the president and co-owner of an interior design studio.
Years went by, long hours and hard work brought success, and with it came the inevitable stresses of business ownership. During the busiest year of my professional life, I nearly died from the same infection that took puppeteer Jim Henson’s life—group A streptococcal infection that resulted in septic shock. After finally being discharged from the hospital, I returned home to convalesce. I spent weeks reevaluating my life—the good, the bad, and the downright painful. As I struggled to regain my health and find spiritual ballast, my dream of writing a novel resurfaced. But no matter how I looked at it, there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to fulfill the demands of my career and write a novel. So I let the dream go.
Then, on a snowy morning in January of 2004, a complete stranger said something to me. And like an unexpected gust of fresh air, his words blew the door wide open. In an eye-blink I knew if I were to write a novel, it had to be now or never. I chose now. I sold my portion of the design business, and after a month of sleeping and meditating and realigning my energies, I plunked down at my computer. Day after day my fingers blazed over the keyboard, and I didn’t come up for air until I typed “The End” nearly four years later.
If there’s a moral to my story, it’s this: take a chance, embrace your dreams, forgive, let go, move on. And if life gives you a big smackdown, there’s a reason—and it just might lead toward your own little piece of the rainbow.
Oh, and there’s one more thing: be mindful of the words of strangers. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Upon graduating from high school, Theodora “Teddi” Overman leaves her childhood home in rural Kentucky to pursue her passion for restoring old furniture.... One item from her past, however, continues to haunt her: the still-unexplained disappearance of her brother, Josh.... Though readers may question certain plot turns, these less plausible moments won’t detract too much from the enjoyment to be found in Teddi’s story.
Publishers Weekly
Hoffman has a good ear for dialogue, and Teddie and her friends are realistic, appealing characters. Perfect for fans of family-centered women’s fiction, this book will have special appeal to readers interested in antiques and 'shabby chic' style.
Booklist
Self-taught furniture restorer and successful business owner Teddi Overman has built a good life. Yet a mystery from her past lingers.... Just as love begins to nudge at the edges of Teddi's life, she is forced to reckon with [her brother] Josh's disappearance and her mother's dashed expectations. Hoffman's...novel confusingly mingles a charming Southern-girl romance with a weighty mystery. The romance resolves predictably, yet the mystery leaves far too many loose threads.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Teddi follows her dream to work with furniture despite her mother's lack of support, and she works hard to make her vision a reality. Do you have a similar passion or drive?
2. Why did Hoffman choose birds as the animals that mean the most to Josh? What does a bird represent?
3. On page 197, Teddi's grandmother says, "Sometimes it's not what we hold onto that shapes our lives but what we let go of." How does this apply to Teddi? To your own life?
4. Teddi finds a beautiful silk nightgown in her mother's dresser. Why do you think her mother kept it for so many years?
5. The novel is filled with colorful characters. Besides Teddi, who was your favorite and why?
6. Hoffman writes that the difficulty of returning home is that "a piece of us stays behind when we leave-a piece we can never reclaim, one that awaits our next visit and demands that we remember" (page12). Do you agree?
7. Teddi struggles to get her mother to see her for what she really is. Did she succeed? Did you have a similar situation with your own parents? With your own children?
8. Do you think that Josh killed the poacher?
9. Looking beyond the events of the novel, do you imagine that Teddi and Josh will be reunited?
10. In the hospital, Teddi nearly tells her mother that she loves her but decides against it. Why? If she had, how do you think her mother would have reacted?
11Why does Hoffman end the novel with the word "Menewa"?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Lord of Misrule
Jaimy Gordon, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307946737
Summary
Winner, 2010 National Book Award for Fiction
A brilliant novel that captures the dusty, dark, and beautiful world of small-time horse racing, where trainers, jockeys, grooms and grifters vie for what little luck is offered at a run-down West Virginia track.
Tommy Hansel has a plan: run four horses, all better than they look on paper, at long odds at Indian Mound Downs, then grab the purse—or cash a bet—and run before anyone’s the wiser. At his side is Maggie Koderer, who finds herself powerfully drawn to the gorgeous, used up animals of the cheap track. She also lands in the cross-hairs of leading trainer Joe Dale Bigg.
But as news of Tommy’s plan spreads, from veteran groom Medicine Ed, to loan shark Two-Tie, to Kidstuff the blacksmith, it’s Maggie, not Tommy or the handlers of legendary stakes horse Lord of Misrule, who will find what's valuable in a world where everything has a price. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 4, 1944
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Antioch College; M.A., Ph.D.,
Brown Univeristy
• Awards—National Book Award
• Currently—lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan
Jaimy Gordon is an American writer. She graduated from Antioch College in 1966, received an M.A. in English from Brown University in 1972, and earned Doctor of Arts in Creative Writing in l975, also from Brown.
She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she teaches in the MFA program of Western Michigan University. She is author of the underground fantasy classic Shamp of the City-Solo. Her fourth novel, Lord of Misrule, won the 2010 National Book Award for fiction. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Perhaps Lord of Misrule would not be so startling if Ms. Gordon's other books had been more widely read. But this novel is so assured, exotic and uncategorizable, with such an unlikely provenance, that it arrives as an incontrovertible winner, a bona fide bolt from the blue…Ms. Gordon is magically adept at fusing the banal and the mythic…She's also keenly attuned to all the aspects of carnality and power that infuse this story, from the way horses feel in human hands to the way Tommy uses his physical magnetism both to dominate Maggie and to use her as a tease for others.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Gordon has completely mastered the language of the racetrack, and formed it into an evocative and idiosyncratic style. Lord of Misrule...abounds with observations and aphorisms about horses, money and luck. It's replete with the rhythm and wisdom of this way of looking at life, but Gordon has thought so thoroughly about her characters that each voice dips into racetrack lingo in a distinctive way. It is an impressive performance…such a beautifully written novel that I wish I could say that every element works to perfection; I can't. But for that sense of being steeped in a specific and alien world, it is remarkable.
Jane Smiley - Washington Post
National Book Award-finalist Gordon's new novel begins and ends at a backwoods race track in early-1970s West Virginia, where horse trainer Tommy Hansel dreams up a scam. He'll run four horses in claiming races at long odds and get out before anyone realizes how good his horses are. But at a track as small as Indian Mound Downs, where everyone knows everybody's business, Hansel's hopes are quickly dashed. Soon his luminous, tragic girlfriend, Maggie, appears, drawing the eye of everyone, including sadistic gangster Joe Dale Bigg. Though Maggie finds herself with an unexpected protector in family gangster Two-Tie, even he can't protect her from her own fascination with the track and its misfit members. While Gordon's latest reaches for Great American Novel status, and her use of the colloquial voice perfectly evokes the time and place, constant shifts in perspective make the novel feel over-styled and under-plotted. And Maggie's supposed charisma clashes with her behavior, leaving the feeling that something's missing whereas Hansel is more witnessed than examined, his character developing almost entirely through the eyes of others, creating uncertainty that often borders on indifference.
Publishers Weekly
This is not the world of Seabiscuit or Secretariat, where the right horse winning the right race makes everything good; this is a goofered world ruled by misrule. But sometimes, as Gordon tells it, the smell of pine tar and horse manure can function like a “devil’s tonic.” Words can do that, too, as this nearly word-perfect novel makes abundantly clear. —Bill Ott
Booklist
A novel of luck, pluck, farce and above all horse racing—not at tony and elegant sites like Churchill Downs and Ascot but rather at a rinky-dink racetrack in Indian Mound Downs, W.Va. Gordon (Bogeywoman, 1999, etc.) clearly loves the subculture of grifters and ne'er-do-wells whose lives center on a venue that obviously has never and will never bring them success. Her lowlifes have names like Two-Tie, Medicine Ed, Kidstuff and Deucey, and they're capable of speaking a kind of racetrack patois occasionally reminiscent of Damon Runyon characters: "So I want you should write me a race, well, not me personally, fellow from Nebraska, kid I used to know back when—actually I used to know his mother...She was very good to me. Alas, I fear I did not return the favor like I should have." At the center of the novel is Tommy Hansel, a horse trainer with a get-rich-quick scheme that he feels cannot fail. He plans to enter "sure-fire" winners in claiming races, benefit from the long odds, then get out of town quickly. Nothing, of course, goes according to plan, especially since everyone seems on to his scheme, and the horses aren't as cooperative as Tommy would like them to be. Complicating the issue is the quirky, intelligent Maggie Koderer, new to the horse-race business but nonetheless Tommy's love. Maggie is college-educated but is drawn to the seamy underbelly of the track and the broken-down beauty of the horses. Gordon structures the narrative around the four horses, the last best hope being Lord of Misrule, and she seamlessly moves the reader from one narrative consciousness to another without being manipulative or intrusive. The writing about the races themselves is a tour de force of energy and esprit. By the end of the novel none of the characters quite have what they want, but most of them get what they deserve. Exceptional writing and idiosyncratic characters make this an engaging read.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What does Maggie’s arrival at Indian Mound Downs establish about the way things work at the track? What do Medicine Ed and Deucey’s reactions to Maggie demonstrate about the pecking order at the track?
2. Why do Ed and Deucey put up with the deprivations and humiliations of their daily routines? What comforts or satisfactions does hanging out at the track provide?
3. What aspects of Maggie’s past and character account for her attraction to Tommy? What qualities make him appealing to her? What are the implications of her recognition that “He wasn’t quite right in the soul, really” [p. 22]?
4. Deucey tells Maggie, “I wrote the book on two-faced false-hearted luck, girlie, anything you want to know about going it on your own at the races, come to me” [p. 23]. What roles does Deucey assume in Maggie’s life? What does she teach Maggie, either directly or by example, about being a woman in a man’s world?
5. In what ways does Medicine Ed embody the characteristics of racetrack habitués at every level, from owners to grooms, petty crooks to inveterate fans? What does he demonstrate about the opposing pulls of actual experience and the fantasies and hopes that shape our lives?
6. Gordon has discussed the similarity between Medicine Ed and Two-Tie, describing them as “lonely and childless old men deeply tired of the daily work they do, facing their last years without the protection of family” [National Book Foundation interview with Bret Anthony Johnston]. What reasons does Two-Tie offer for the way his life turned out? In what ways does his Jewish background shape his identity and influence his worldview?
7. At the beginning of the novel, Maggie projects a girlish innocence and an eagerness to experience life. How does she change over the course of the novel? What light do her musings at the end of the novel [p. 289-90] shed on what she has lost and gained? What do her reactions to Tommy’s deterioration reveal about the woman she has become?
8. In a review in The Washington Post [November 16, 2010] Jane Hamilton wrote, “[Gordon’s] four horse characters—Mr. Boll Weevil, Little Spinoza, Pelter and Lord of Misrule—are bursting with personality.” From their names to their histories to their performances in races, how does Gordon bring out the distinctive qualities of each horse? Does she avoid anthropomorphizing them? What does the novel show about the gap between human assumptions and the horses’ innate intelligence and their accommodations to the regimens and expectations imposed by humans?
9. One critic called Maggie’s “relationship with horses the most erotic one in the book” [Bob Hoover, Philly.com 11/27/10]. Do the descriptions of Maggie’s tending to the horses (pp. 110, 133, and 199, for example) support this judgment
10. Luck is a central theme in Lord of Misrule:
For Tommy, “[luck] came because you called to it, whistled for it, because it saw you wouldn’t take no for an answer” [p 22]. According to Maggie, “A person had to see himself, or herself, as lucky not just once in a while, but plugged into a steady current of luck, like an electrical appliance.... People who thought they couldn’t lose—Joe Dale Bigg, for one—were some kind of machinery” [p. 159].
How are these different approaches or concepts reflected in the actions taken by Tommy and Bigg? Are any of the characters able to resist or defeat the whims of luck and chance? If so, what allows them to do so?
11. Most of the novel is written in the third person. How does Gordon make the thoughts and the conversational styles of each character distinct? Discuss her use of racetrack slang and nicknames, invented words, and dialect in bringing to life an unfamiliar milieu and its denizens.
12. Why does Gordon switch to the second person in the chapters devoted to Tommy? What are the benefits and the limitations of this unusual narrative voice? Does it bring Tommy into sharper focus? How does his self-image differ from the perceptions of others and in what ways does it confirm them? What do the intimate tone, uninhibited language, and graphic sexual descriptions of these sections add to the novel?
13. Does the structure of the novel—the chapter-by-chapter focus on particular horses and races—enhance the reader’s involvement with the story? Does it help to illuminate the diverse factors that influence the characters’ actions? How does it affect the progress of the plot and the build-up to the final race?
14. Gordon weaves many literary and religious allusions into the story. The name of Hansel’s horse, the Mahdi (the redeemer of the world in Islamic religion), is one example; what other references can you identify? What literary motifs or narrative traditions are evoked in the accounts of the horses’ lineage [p. 114]; Tommy’s obsession with a long-lost twin [pp. 22, 160] and the “might-could-be twin brothers” Mr. Boll Weevil and the Mahdi [p. 43]; the description of Lord of Misrule [p. 217-219]; and Two-Tie’s relationships with Maggie and Donald?
15. Gordon’s writing style—her use of metaphor, poetic imagery, literary and religious allusions and references—is unusual in a novel about lowlifes and violent acts. Do you find the seemingly incompatible juxtaposition effective?
16. The world of thoroughbred horse racing has been the subject of several popular books and films, including Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling Seabiscuit. What does Lord of Misrule share with other depictions of racing you have read or seen? What new insights does it provide into the racing community?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Lord of the Flies
William Golding, 1954
Penguin Group USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399537424
Summary
William Golding's compelling story about a group of very ordinary small boys marooned on a coral island has become a modern classic. At first it seems as though it is all going to be great fun; but the fun before long becomes furious and life on the island turns into a nightmare of panic and death. As ordinary standards of behaviour collapse, the whole world the boys know collapses with them—the world of cricket and homework and adventure stories—and another world is revealed beneath, primitive and terrible.
Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, igniting passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. Though critically acclaimed, it was largely ignored upon its initial publication. Yet soon it became a cult favorite among both students and literary critics who compared it to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in its influence on modern thought and literature.
Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies has established itself as a true classic. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 19, 1911
• Where—Conwall, England, UK
• Death—near Truro, Cornwall
• Where—June 19, 1993
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Awards—Nobel Prize; Man Booker Prize; James
Tait Black Memorial Prize
Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. He was also awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book of the trilogy "To the Ends of the Earth."
In 2008, The Times (London) ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."
Early years
William Golding was born in his grandmother's house in Newquay, Cornwall, England, and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up at his family home in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father, Alec Golding, was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement). Alec Golding was a socialist with a strong commitment to scientific rationalism, and the young William and his elder brother Joseph attended the school where his father taught. His mother, Mildred, kept house and supported the moderate campaigners for female suffrage.
In 1930 Golding went to Oxford University as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English Literature. Golding took his B.A. (Hons) Second Class in the summer of 1934, and later that year his first book, Poems, was published in London through the help of his Oxford friend, the anthroposophist Adam Bittleston.
Golding married Ann Brookfield, an analytic chemist, in 1939. The couple had two children, Judy and David.
War service
Golding joined the Royal Navy in 1940. During World War II, Golding fought in the Royal Navy and was briefly involved in the pursuit and sinking of Germany's mightiest battleship, the Bismarck. He also participated in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, commanding a landing ship that fired salvoes of rockets onto the beaches, and then in a naval action at Walcheren in which 23 out of 24 assault craft were sunk. At the war's end, he returned to teaching and writing.
Writing
In September 1953, Golding sent a manuscript to Faber & Faber of London. Initially rejected by a reader there, the book was championed by Charles Monteith, then a new editor at the firm. He asked for various cuts in the text and the novel was published in September 1954 as Lord of the Flies. It was shortly followed by other novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and Free Fall.
Publishing success made it possible for Golding to resign his teaching post at Bishop Wordsworth's School in 1961, and he spent that academic year in the United States as writer-in-residence at Hollins College, near Roanoke, Virginia. Having moved in 1958 from Salisbury to nearby Bowerchalke, he met his fellow villager and walking companion James Lovelock. The two discussed Lovelock's hypothesis that the living matter of the planet Earth functions like a single organism, and Golding suggested naming this hypothesis after Gaia, the goddess of the earth in Greek mythology.
In 1970, Golding was a candidate for the Chancellorship of the University of Kent at Canterbury, but lost to the politician and leader of the Liberal Party Jo Grimond. Golding won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1979, and the Booker Prize in 1980. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, a choice which was, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ONDB), "an unexpected and even contentious choice, with most English critics and academics favouring Graham Greene or Anthony Burgess." He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.
Golding's later novels include Darkness Visible (1979), The Paper Men (1984), and the comic-historical sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, comprising the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989).
The ONDB asserts that "At the end of the twentieth century, Golding's reputation was at its highest in continental Europe, particularly in Belgium, Holland, Germany, and France."
Later years and death
In 1985, Golding and his wife moved to Tullimaar House at Perranarworthal, near Truro, Cornwall, where he died of heart failure, eight years later, on 19 June 1993. He was buried in the village churchyard at Bowerchalke, South Wiltshire (near the Hampshire and Dorset county boundaries). He left the draft of a novel, The Double Tongue, set in ancient Delphi, which was published posthumously. He is survived by his daughter, the author Judy Golding, and his son David, who still lives at Tullimaar House. (Adapted from Wikipedia..)
Book Reviews
(Books prior to the Internet have few, if any, mainstream reviews online. See Amazon or Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Since first published in 1954, Lord of the Flies has stood as a sort of Rorsach test. Some readers see it as a religious allegory between good and evil...others as a Freudian battle between id vs. superego...still others as a history of the rise of civilization. Finally, many see it as a commentary on the world's political institutions.Any, in fact all of those readings lend themselves to Golding's chilling tale of boys gone bad. Read more
LitLovers LitPicks - Dec. 2011
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Lord of the Flies:
1. Talk about the differences between the two main antagonists, Ralph and Jack. How are they different from one another, and what broad "types" of individuals do they represent?
2. In what way can Piggy with his eye glasses be seen as representing the rational, scientific aspects of society?
3. What role does the conch play? How does it represent a civilizing force?
4. What does the beast represent? How is it used by Jack to control the others? Are there parallels for "the beast" in the real world, the one outside of fiction?
5. What does Simon mean when he suggests that the beast is only the boys themselves?
6. Why do the littleuns choose to follow Jack and the hunters rather than Ralph? Is it because they feel safer with Jack's group, believing that Jack can protect them? Or do they enjoy what the hunters do?
7. What do you feel Golding's vision of humanity is? Do you think he believes we born with an instinct for peace and cooperation...or for dominance and savagery? Does his vision accord with your own?
8. What do you think about the rules of civilization? Do they free us and enable us to rise to our best selves? Or do the rules constrain our bad nature that lie at the heart of ourselves?
9. What does hunting mean to Jack...at the beginning, and then later? What happens to his mental state after he kills his first pig?
10. What is ironic about the naval officer who arrives to "rescue" the boys? How does Ralph feel about returning to the safety of civilization? Why does he weep—is it relief, or something else?
m. Golding wrote his novel 10 years after the close of World War II and during the era of Communist containment. In what way does his book reflect the particular world politics of his time? Does the book have relevance today?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Lord of the Rings (50th Anniversary One Volume Edition)
J.R.R. Tolkien, 1937-49
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
1216 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780618640157
Summary
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
From Sauron's fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor, his power spread far and wide. Sauron gathered all the Great Rings to him, but always he searched for the One Ring that would complete his dominion.
When Bilbo reached his eleventy-first birthday he disappeared, bequeathing to his young cousin Frodo the Ruling Ring and a perilous quest: to journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom.
The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 3, 1892
• Where—Bloemfontein (Orange Free State), South Africa
• Raised—Sarehole, England, UK
• Death—September 2, 1973
• Where—Oxford, England, UK
• Education—B.A. and M.A., Oxford University 1919
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on the 3rd January, 1892 at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, but at the age of four he and his brother were taken back to England by their mother. After his father's death the family moved to Sarehole, on the south-eastern edge of Birmingham. Tolkien spent a happy childhood in the countryside and his sensibility to the rural landscape can clearly be seen in his writing and his pictures.
His mother died when he was only twelve and both he and his brother were made wards of the local priest and sent to King Edward's School, Birmingham, where Tolkien shine in his classical work. After completing a First in English Language and Literature at Oxford, Tolkien married Edith Bratt.
He was also commissioned in the Lancashire Fusiliers and fought in the battle of the Somme. After the war, he obtained a post on the New English Dictionary and began to write the mythological and legendary cycle which he originally called "The Book of Lost Tales" but which eventually became known as The Silmarillion.
In 1920 Tolkien was appointed Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds which was the beginning of a distinguished academic career culminating with his election as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.
Meanwhile Tolkien wrote for his children and told them the story of The Hobbit. It was his publisher, Stanley Unwin, who asked for a sequel to The Hobbit and gradually Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, a huge story that took twelve years to complete and which was not published until Tolkien was approaching retirement.
After retirement Tolkien and his wife lived near Oxford, but then moved to Bournemouth. Tolkien returned to Oxford after his wife's death in 1971. He died on 2 September 1973 leaving The Silmarillion to be edited for publication by his son, Christopher. (From Barnes & Noble, courtesy of HarperCollins, UK.)
Book Reviews
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a genuine masterpiece. The most widely read and influential fantasy epic of all time, it is also quite simply one of the most memorable and beloved tales ever told. Originally published in 1954, The Lord of the Rings set the framework upon which all epic/quest fantasy since has been built. Through the urgings of the enigmatic wizard Gandalf, young hobbit Frodo Baggins embarks on an urgent, incredibly treacherous journey to destroy the One Ring. This ring—created and then lost by the Dark Lord, Sauron, centuries earlier—is a weapon of evil, one that Sauron desperately wants returned to him. With the power of the ring once again his own, the Dark Lord will unleash his wrath upon all of Middle-earth. The only way to prevent this horrible fate from becoming reality is to return the Ring to Mordor, the only place it can be destroyed. Unfortunately for our heroes, Mordor is also Sauron's lair. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is essential reading not only for fans of fantasy but for lovers of classic literature as well
Barnes & Noble Reviews
Among the greatest works of imaginative fiction of the twentieth century.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
An extraordinary work — pure excitement
New York Times
A masterful story — an epic in its own way — with elements of high adventure, suspense, mystery, poetry and fantasy.
Boston Herald
One of the great fairy-tale quests in modern literature.
Time Magazine
A work of immense narrative power that can sweep the reader up and hold him enthralled for days and weeks.
The Nation
Discussion Questions
The Fellowhip of the Ring
1. "I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size)," wrote Tolkien to a correspondent in 1958. "I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated).... I like, and even dare to wear these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much." How would you describe the hobbits' way of life and behavior? How are they different from us, and how are they similar?
2. "I have, I suppose," wrote Tolkien in 1958, "constructed an imaginary time, but kept my feet on my own mother-earth for place.... Middle-earth is ... a modernization or alteration ... of an old word for the inhabited world of Men." How has Tolkien created a sense of an actual world with seemingly real landmarks and a credible imaginary history?
3. How is it significant that Gollum had been a hobbit before acquiring the Ring? To what degree can the Ring's powers be used for good or evil depending on the moral character of its bearer?
4. Gandalf tells Frodo, "But you have been chosen and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have" (p. 60). How are Frodo, Sam, and others called upon to use their "strength and heart and wits"?
5. How would you explain Sam Gamgee's determination to stay with Frodo no matter what? What qualities, talents, and shortcomings does Sam reveal as the journey continues, and how is he changed by his experiences?
6. Strider says of Gandalf that "this business of ours will be his greatest task" (p. 169). In what ways does this turn out to be true, and how is Gandalf himself unpredictably affected by "this business of ours"?
7. How do the Black Riders' methods of sensing their surroundings link them with evil and the dark and make them particularly terrifying? What do you think Strider means when, speaking of the Dark Riders, he tells the hobbits, "You fear them but you do not fear them enough, yet" (p. 162)?
8. After being wounded in his fight with the Black Rider, Frodo realizes "that in putting on the Ring he obeyed not his own desire but the commanding wish of his enemies" (p. 194). In what other instances do characters act against their own best interests?
9. "And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom," Gandalf proclaims to Saruman (p. 252). How does this idea manifest itself throughout The Lord of the Rings?
10. Saruman advises Gandalf that their best choice would be to join with the "new Power" that is rising so "to direct its course, to control it" (p. 253). To what extent is the main theme of The Lord of the Rings the uses, abuses, and consequences of power?
11. Elrond tells the Company: "The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere" (p. 262). How do Elrond's comments apply to the quest?
12. Why does Gandalf say that it would "be well to trust rather in friendship than to great wisdom" in deciding who should accompany Frodo (p. 269)? In what ways might friendship be more powerful than great wisdom?
13. Before the Lady Galadriel's gaze, each member of the Company felt "that he was offered a choice between a shadow full of fear that lay ahead, and something that he greatly desired" (pp. 348-9). Why might that choice be important for each?
14. Boromir argues that the Company's choice is between destroying the Ring and destroying "the armed might of the Dark Lord" (p. 360). Is his argument valid? To what extent does the completion of either task depend upon the completion of the other?
15. How would you characterize the conflict between Aragorn and Boromir? In what ways is that conflict important to our understanding of Aragorn and the purpose of his quest?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
_______________
The Two Towers
1. Aragorn says to Gimli, "We must guess the riddles, if we are to choose our course rightly" (p. 406). How does choosing the right course of action, in The Lord of the Rings and in life, depend upon guessing riddles correctly?
2. "Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?" Eomer asks. How would you explain Aragorn's response: "A man may do both" (p. 424)?
3. Merry and Pippin look back out of the shadows of Fangorn, "little furtive figures that in the dim light looked like elf-children in the deeps of time peering out of the Wild Wood in wonder at their First Dawn" (p. 449). How do the initial innocence and lasting hopefulness of the hobbits provide a balance to the more complex experience of men, the Elves' ancient knowledge, Gandalf's wisdom, and Sauron's evil?
4. Treebeard says of Saruman, "He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things"(p. 462). How does Tolkien illustrate the limitations and menace of technology and the benevolence and rewards of growing things?
5. "Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear," says Aragorn, "nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men" (p. 428). Why does the struggle between good and evil continue much the same from age to age, from place to place, and from one group to another?
6. If a wizard as wise and powerful as Saruman can be corrupted, what chance does anyone have against the forces of evil? How are Gandalf, Aragorn, Frodo, and others able to withstand the temptations and desires to which Saruman, Gollum, Wormtongue, and others succumb?
7. What does Treebeard mean when he says that "songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way" (p. 475)? To what extent might this be true of people in The Lord of the Rings?
8. "Often does hatred hurt itself," says Gandalf (p. 571). How might this be true of hatred and evil in the novel and in life?
9. What lineage does Faramir claim, and how is it related to Aragorn's? What other family pedigrees does Tolkien present, and why do you think family histories and ancestral lines are so important?
10. When Sam speaks about "the old tales and songs," what does he say characterizes the tales and songs that really matter? How does he distinguish between "the best tales to hear" and "the best tales to get landed in" (p. 696-7)?
11. What do you find characteristic of each dwelling and community in the various regions of Middle-earth? How is each specific in terms of its locale and the culture of its residents?
12. In what ways are Faramir and Gandalf alike? How is Sam's observation that Faramir reminds him of Gandalf supported by Faramir's actions and statements?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
_______________
The Return of the King
1. How are Gandalf's power, wisdom, and majesty manifested throughout the novel? How, and with what consequences, does he apply his powers in his relationships with the various other residents of Middle-earth?
2. How would you characterize the relationship between Faramir and his father, Denethor? What causes Denethor to be so critical of his son?
3. Éowyn protests to Aragorn, "All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house" (p. 767). What are Eowyn's and Aragorn's opposing views of a woman's duties and roles?
4. Why might "all great lords, if they are wise" use others as their weapons, as Denethor notes (p. 800)? What instances do you find in The Lord of the Rings and in our world of leaders using others to obtain their ends?
5. How would you describe "the joy of battle" that comes upon the Rohirrim as they advance on besieged Minas Tirith (p. 820)? What other instances of it occur in the novel? What might be the consequences of giving oneself up to "the joy of battle"?
6. Seeing the dead porter at the Closed Door, Gandalf exclaims of the Enemy, "Such deeds he loves: friend at war with friend; loyalty divided in a confusion of hearts" (p. 833). What other deeds and estrangements does the Enemy love, and how does each serve Sauron's purposes?
7. Mourning Theoden in the Houses of Healing, Merry apologizes for his sarcasm by saying, "But it is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than they mean. We fear to say too much. It robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place" (p. 852). What does he mean? At what other serious moments do the hobbits engage in humor?
8. "It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose," says Merry; "you must start somewhere and have some roots" (p. 852). How is this true of the hobbits and others?
9. Speaking of the Orcs, Frodo tells Sam, "The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own" (p. 893). Why is it significant that, while good can create "real new things," evil can merely counterfeit or mock creation?
10. When Sam sees the white star twinkling through the cloud-wrack above the Morgai, "the beauty of it smote his heart [and] the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing" (p. 901). In what ways is the Shadow of evil finally only "a small and passing thing"?
11. What does Gandalf mean when he tells the hobbits that they must settle the affairs of the Shire themselves? In what ways have they been "trained" for just that task, according to Gandalf, and in what ways have they "grown indeed very high" (p. 974)?
12. Just before Frodo boards the ship in the Grey Havens, he says to Sam, "It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them" (p. 1006). How is this true in the novel and in our own lives?
13. What kind of lives do you think Sam and Rosie, Merry, and Pippin have after Frodo and Gandalf's departure? What might be the significance of the novel's ending with Sam and Rosie enjoying the comfort and love of their new home (p. 1008)?
(Questions issued by Random House.)
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Losing My Identity
Rashmita Patel, 2014
New Generation Publishing
140 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781910394427
Summary
From Aloo Gobi to Matar Paneer, two sisters take the plunge to sort their love lives out when they both fall in love with a guy from a different culture. Kiran totally goes off the rails by leaving home to live with her so called boyfriend Ryan, but not all ends well when Kiran’s life turns sour with Ryan leaving her when she is pregnant and Kiran left to face the music.
Ash on the other end thinks she’s one who would never take the wrong path, ends up in a deep hole with a guy she meets up at college. At first Ash thinks he’s all wonderful until her parents find her a suitable rishta and she has to tell Rehaan that she can no longer keep their relationship going.
Her marriage to Aman is finalized and all is going as planned until Ash discovers that Aman her fiancé knows Rehaan. Again the awful nightmares begin for Ash as she starts to get freaked out about Rehaan shadowing her once more.
Ash finally gets the courage to tell Aman the truth about her relationship with Rehaan. The only thing left for Ash to do now is to see that her sister, Kiran who has helped her tremendously, attend her wedding but at the same time convince Mum and Dad that Kiran desperately needs their help and to bring her home once and for all. All ends well with Ash managing to score goals on all sides of the coin.
Author Bio
• Birth—May 10, 1971
• Where—Birmingham, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Central England
• Currently—lives in Birmingham, England
Rashmita's writing career began when she noticed that there was a gap in the market for Asian Teenage novels. She decided to write novels aiming at highlighting Asian characters.
Her first novel came out in 2006 called Tina 'n' Nikil—one sided-love which focused on arranged marriage. In 2008 she published her 2nd novel called Web of Lies: Priya Ki Kahani which looked at Asian Teenage Pregnancy, and her latest novel which came out in 2014 is called Losing My Identity which is based on mixed marriage and drugs. Rashmita is also a freelance journalist and school librarian. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Rashmita on Facebook.
Book Reviews
Losing My Identity is a gripping story about a conflicted young girl trying to fit her traditional values into a confusing, modern world. Passions run high in this dramatic yet believable tale. Complex and thought provoking, Losing My Identity will keep you hooked until the end.
Andrew Casey
Rashmita Patel’s Asian novels set to create waves. Rashmita Patel has had a love affair with books since her childhood. She wrote many short novels as a child and mastered the art of sticking and pasting pictures to make her books look real. Her dreams have started getting fulfilled and she has become a published author and appears on course of becoming a prolific novelist. She has already made her mark as a teenage fiction author. Rashmita Patel is doing a fabulous job and it seems a matter of time for her work to spread far and wide in the Asian communities all over the world. Her novels should also have considerable appeal in the massive South Asian market.
Jumbo Infomedia
I enjoyed reading your book aimed at teenagers. I think this book would attract a variety of teenage readers.
Prabha Patel, freelance educator, KS3 & KS4 teacher
Discussion Questions
1. How did Ash react when Kiri tells her that her boyfriend is white?
2. What did Ash mean when she said Kiri was Losing her Identity?
3. What was the family expecting from Kiri when she said she wanted to get married.
4. Why was Ash's mum and dad and brother all furious when Kiri mentioned that she was in love and wanted to get married to Robby?
5. Why was Ash unhappy when she picked up her exam results?
6. Why is Ash reluctant to go out with Rehaan when she falls in love with him?
7. What kind of a friend is Kelly from the way she behaves with Ash over her boyfriend?
8. What kind of life had Kiri had with Robby?
9. How do you think Ash must have felt when she finds out about Rehaan's involvement in drugs?
10. Why did Ash not tell anybody about Rehaan after finding out that he was involved in drugs?
11. Why do you think Ash told Aman about Rehaan?
13. Why did Ash want her family to forgive Kiri?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Lost & Found (Peaks Island Novel 1)
Jacqueline Sheehan
HarperCollins
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061128646
Summary
A poignant and unforgettable tale of love, loss, and moving on...with the help of one not-so-little dog.
Rocky's husband Bob was just forty-two when she discovered him lying cold and lifeless on Quitting her job, chopping off all her hair, she leaves Massachusetts—reinventing her past and taking a job as Animal Control Warden on Peak's Island, a tiny speck off the coast of Maine and a million miles away from everything she's lost.
She leaves her career as a psychologist behind, only to find friendship with a woman whose brain misfires in the most wonderful way and a young girl who is trying to disappear. Rocky, a quirky and fallible character, discovers the healing process to be agonizingly slow.
But then she meets Lloyd.
A large black Labrador retriever, Lloyd enters Rocky's world with a primitive arrow sticking out of his shoulder. And so begins a remarkable friendship between a wounded woman and a wounded, lovable beast. As the unraveling mystery of Lloyd's accident and missing owner leads Rocky to an archery instructor who draws her in even as she finds every reason to mistrust him, she discovers the life-altering revelation that grief can be transformed...and joy does exist in unexpected places. (From the publisher.)Lost & Found is the first of Jacqueline Sheehan's two Peaks Island novels. Picture This (2012) is the sequel.
Author Bio
Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a fiction writer and essayist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, freelance photography, newspaper writing, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers.
Currently on the faculty of Writers in Progress and Grub Street in Massachusetts, she also offers international workshops on the combination of yoga and writing. She writes travel articles about lesser-known destinations and lives in Massachusetts.
Novels
Sheehan's books include Truth (2003), reissued as The Comet's Tale: A Novel About Sojurner Truth (2011); Now & Then (2009); two Peaks Island novels, Lost & Found (2007) and Picture This (2012); and, most recently, The Center of the World (2015). (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] contemporary tale of grief featuring Rocky Pelligrino, a woman reeling from her husband's death....[who] moves to Peak's Island, Maine.... Dog lovers will adore Sheehan's portrayal of Cooper, who, in contrast to all the human suffering, comprises the bright spot in a melancholy novel.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Lost & Found
1. Rocky finds that the usual platitudes about grief offer her no comfort. What are some of those platitudes...which we have all uttered to those suffering loss. In fact, what can we offer someone bereft of a loved one?
2. Describe Roxanne, or Rocky. How does she live up to her nickname? What finally enables her to gain enough composure to leave town and start again.
3. Other than Rocky (and Lloyd...we'll get to him later), which characters in Peak's Island do you most enjoy or find sympathetic—Melissa, Tess, Hill...?
4. Rocky recognizes in Melissa the type of young girl she avoided in her therapeutic practice. She sees Melissa as belonging to that "unhappy army of girls, defined by skin, bones and grit." Why did she avoid treating girls like Melissa, and what does her description of them—as bones and grit— mean?
5. Lloyd. Did you fall in love? What is it about dogs that makes them our soul mates and that enables them to heal desperately ill, troubled human beings? What is about Lloyd/ Cooper, in particular, that Rocky responds to, that helps her on her journey back to wholeness? Do other animals share dogs' therapeutic abilities?
6. Did you enjoy having the story narrated from Lloyd's point of view?
7. Discuss each of Rocky's new friends and the role each plays in her healing process. What does each of them have to offer? What does Rocky offer them in turn?
8. In the end, what does Rocky learn about her own capacity to move out of grief and reach for joy?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Lost and Found Bookshop
Susan Wiggs, 2020
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062914095
Summary
In this thought-provoking, wise and emotionally rich novel, bestselling author Susan Wiggs explores the meaning of happiness, trust, and faith in oneself as she asks the question, "If you had to start over, what would you do and who would you be?"
There is a book for everything…
Somewhere in the vast Library of the Universe, as Natalie thought of it, there was a book that embodied exactly the things she was worrying about.
In the wake of a shocking tragedy, Natalie Harper inherits her mother’s charming but financially strapped bookshop in San Francisco. She also becomes caretaker for her ailing grandfather Andrew, her only living relative—not counting her scoundrel father.
But the gruff, deeply kind Andrew has begun displaying signs of decline. Natalie thinks it’s best to move him to an assisted living facility to ensure the care he needs. To pay for it, she plans to close the bookstore and sell the derelict but valuable building on historic Perdita Street, which is in need of constant fixing.
There’s only one problem–Grandpa Andrew owns the building and refuses to sell. Natalie adores her grandfather; she’ll do whatever it takes to make his final years happy. Besides, she loves the store and its books provide welcome solace for her overwhelming grief.
After she moves into the small studio apartment above the shop, Natalie carries out her grandfather’s request and hires contractor Peach Gallagher to do the necessary and ongoing repairs. His young daughter, Dorothy, also becomes a regular at the store, and she and Natalie begin reading together while Peach works.
To Natalie’s surprise, her sorrow begins to dissipate as her life becomes an unexpected journey of new connections, discoveries and revelations, from unearthing artifacts hidden in the bookshop’s walls, to discovering the truth about her family, her future, and her own heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 17, 1958
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Awards—4 RITA Awards from Romance Writers of America: for Best Romance, Favorite Book of the Year, and twice for Best Short Historical; Holt Medallion; Career Achievement Award from Romance Times (twice)
• Currently—lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, USA
Susan Wiggs is an American author of historical and contemporary romance novels. She began writing as a child, finishing her first novel, A Book About Some Bad Kids, when she was eight. She temporarily abandoned her dream of being a novelist after graduating from Harvard University, becoming a math teacher instead . She continued to read, especially reveling in romance novels.
Writing
After running out of reading material one evening in 1983, Wiggs began writing again, using the working title A Book About Some Bad Adults. For three years Wiggs continued to write, and in 1987 Zebra Books published her first novel, a Western historical romance named Texas Wildflower. Her subsequent historical and contemporary romances have been set in a wide range of settings and time periods. Many of her novels are set in areas where she's lived or visited. She gave up teaching in 1992 to write full-time, and has since completed an average of two books per year.
In 2000, Wiggs began writing single-title women's fiction stories in addition to historical romance novels. The first, The You I Never Knew, was published in 2001. After writing mass-market original novels for several years, Wiggs made her hardcover debut in 2003 with Home Before Dark.
Many of her novels are connected, allowing Wiggs to revisit established characters. Her books have been published in many languages, including French, German, Dutch, Latvian, Japanese, Hungarian and Russian.
Recognition
Wiggs's books are frequently named finalists for the RITA Award, the highest honor given in the romance genre. She received the Romance Writers of America RITA Award for Best Romance of the year in 1993 for Lord of the Night. She won a second RITA in 2000 when The Charm School was named "Favorite Book of the Year."
She has also won the RITA in 2001 for Best Short Historical for The Mistress and, again, in 2006 for Lakeside Cottage. She has also been the recipient of the Holt Medallion, the Colorado Award of Excellnce, and the Peninsula Romance Writer's of America Blue Boa Award. Romantic Times has twice named her a Career Achievement Award winner.[4]
Personal
Wiggs lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington with her family. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/9/2012.)
Book Reviews
An unputdownable, true book lover's book that fans of women's fiction, slow-burning romance, and the novels of Nora Roberts and Kristin Hannah will love. —Debbie Haupt, St. Charles City-Cty. Lib. Dist., St. Peters, MO
Library Journal
A gentle love story perfect for anyone looking for love amid personal, family, and financial crises.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. After her mother dies, Natalie reflects: "No one knew what to say to people facing a grief so big and shocking. Natalie wouldn’t know, either." Is there a right thing to say in these moments? What would you do if Natalie were your friend?
2. "There was a book for everything. Somewhere in the vast Library of the Universe, as Natalie thought of it, her mom could find a book that embodied exactly the things Natalie was worrying about." Which books have helped you overcome difficult moments, or been a cure for your worries or caused a revelation in your life? How do books help the different characters in this novel?
3. At Blythe’s funeral her friend Frieda reads a passage from the children’s book Charlotte’s Web. If you could have any book be part of your memorial service, what would it be?
4. Natalie tells her mother that her schoolmates’ reaction to her non-traditional family—a single mother, grandfather, and grandfather’s Chinese girlfriend—make her feel like a"freak." How did growing up in this non-traditional family shape Natalie? How did being raised by a single father shape her mother Blythe’s life? What about Peach and Dorothy?
5. When Natalie finds out that her mother had taken a DNA test she thinks to herself: "Who were her ancestors? Oftentimes throughout her life, she’d felt like a stranger to herself.Was that the reason?" Does learning more about her family history—though the DNA test and other ways—help Natalie, or Grandy Andrew? Do you know anyone who has had a similar experience uncovering their family history, either by DNA tests or more traditional methods?
6. Blythe finds running the bookstore "a grand adventure" but Natalie’s corporate work at the winery: "…was the opposite of a grand adventure. But then she would remind herself about the steady salary, the benefits and pension plan, and decide it was all worthwhile.Stability had its price." Are you more of a Blythe or a Natalie in your approach to work?Does Natalie ultimately change her mind and come to accept the "grand adventure" of being a bookstore owner?
7. "Your mother used to say you’ll never be happy with what you want until you can be happy with what you’ve got," Cleo tells Natalie. Do you agree? What does Susan Wiggs say about happiness throughout this novel? What does it mean that Grandy Andrew’s book about his life is called "A Brief History of Happiness?"
8. When they find the military medal hidden in the store’s walls, Grandy insists that they return it to the owner’s heirs despite their shaky financial situation: "After learning of its value, Andrew had toyed for the briefest of moments with the notion of selling it. But there was no profit in keeping something that rightfully belonged to someone else."Would you have done the same?
9. When Trevor confesses the truth about his background to Natalie, admitting that he’s a"fraud" and a "hoax," she tells him "For what it’s worth, it wouldn’t have mattered…I love what you’ve done with your life. You turned it into something really beautiful." Would you have responded the same way? What did you think about Trevor once his deceptions had been revealed?
10. At the end of the novel, Susan Wiggs gives us an update on the characters’ lives. What do you think the future holds for Natalie and Peach? For Grandy Andrew? For the Lost and Found Bookstore itself?
11. Do you have a favorite local bookstore? What do you love about it?
(Questions issued by the publishers.)
12. WHAT IS IT ABOUT BOOKSTORES? Why do you think so many authors use them as settings for their novels? This is the 11th such book on LITLOVERS; here are the others:
Lost and Wanted
Nell Freudenberger, 2019
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385352680
Summary
An emotionally engaging, suspenseful new novel, told in the voice of a renowned physicist: an exploration of female friendship, romantic love, and parenthood--bonds that show their power in surprising ways.
Helen Clapp's breakthrough work on five-dimensional spacetime landed her a tenured professorship at MIT; her popular books explain physics in plain terms.
Helen disdains notions of the supernatural in favor of rational thought and proven ideas. So it's perhaps especially vexing for her when, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday in June, she gets a phone call from a friend who has just died.
That friend was Charlotte Boyce, Helen's roommate at Harvard. The two women had once confided in each other about everything--in college, the unwanted advances Charlie received from a star literature professor; after graduation, Helen's struggles as a young woman in science, Charlie's as a black screenwriter in Hollywood, their shared challenges as parents.
But as the years passed, Charlie became more elusive, and her calls came less and less often. And now she's permanently, tragically gone.
As Helen is drawn back into Charlie's orbit, and also into the web of feelings she once had for Neel Jonnal—a former college classmate now an acclaimed physicist on the verge of a Nobel Prizewinning discovery—she is forced to question the laws of the universe that had always steadied her mind and heart.
Suspenseful, perceptive, deeply affecting, Lost and Wanted is a story of friends and lovers, lost and found, at the most defining moments of their lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 21, 1975
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard Univeristy
• Awards—PEN/Malamud Award; Whiting Writer's Award; Guggenheim Fellowship
• Currently—lives in New York City (Brooklyn)
Nell Freudenberger is the author of three novels—Lost and Wanted (2019), The Newlyweds (2012), and The Dissident (2006). Her 2003 story collection, Lucky Girls, was winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” She lives in Brooklyn with her family. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Beautiful, startling, affecting.… Freudenberger joins [an] august tradition of yoking poetry to cutting-edge science. She navigates complicated concepts from physics with admirable clarity. This is a novel about female friendship begun in America in the 1990s, when women didn’t talk about sexual harassment and friends didn’t talk about race; when women (and especially women of color) were trying to build careers and no one was acknowledging how much harder it would be for them than for white men. Under such strain, the book seems to say, it’s incredible that women sustain any friendships at all. And yet in this novel, even the distance between Charlie and Helen is moving: the space that opens between them reverberates with what might have been. I was moved by intimacies near and far, real and imagined, lost and found..
Louisa Hall - New York Times Book Review
Dazzling, ingenious… a gorgeous literary novel about loss and human limitations. Over the months that follow her friend Charlie’s death Helen, a distinguished professor of physics at MIT, grapples with grief, midlife regrets and the disruptive possibility of life after death. Freudenberger dramatizes, through Helen, both the dawning awareness that life doesn’t always allow for second chances and the great midlife consolation prize: a greater appreciation for those chances—and people—one has been given. Helen’s thoughts meander from a wry social observation to a digression on physics to a heart-rending epiphany [and] the novel ends with its own version of a "big bang." Freudenberger has a penetrating imagination.
Maureen Corrigan - Washington Post
Insightful… a search for a ripple in space-time becomes a symbol of how lives are changed by forces we cannot see. Freudenberger relates the momentous discovery by physicists of a gravitational wave. What other wonders might we be missing simply because, for the moment, we lack the instruments to detect them? The phenomenon that troubles Lost and Wanted is life after death—an age-old concern viewed here [through] the narrator, an MIT physicist. This novel is smart about the ways that parents try to explain mortality to children—kids are usually patronized in works of fiction, but in this book they’re on equal footing with the adults, who have no clearer understanding of what awaits us after death than they do.
Wall Street Journal
Absorbing, intelligent, touching… a bittersweet love story about a lost friend, a missed romance, and an all-consuming career. Freudenberger deploys physics as a catalyst for new perspectives on time and our trajectories through it, rather than just metaphorical ballast. She balances the science with tender, convincing portraits of two kids. Enriched by multi-level discussions about the spacetime continuum, whether Einstein believed in God, uncertainty, gravity, and, most notably, the force we exert on each other, Lost and Wanted is a moving story about down-to-earth issues: an outstanding achievement.
NPR
What do physics and grief have in common? How can a scientist reckon with the inexplicable, for instance, the appearance of a ghost? These are but two of the big questions that power this intellectually rich and soulfully deep novel by one of our most talented fiction writers.
Oprah Magazine
What happens to our souls when we die? Does our consciousness leave a trace on earth? Freudenberger explores the complicated nature of friendship—especially the relationships that we form in youth, as we are trying to discover ourselves—and delves into the existential questions that plague physicists and laypeople alike.… Lost and Wanted is prescient [in] connecting scientific and metaphysical faith in things that cannot be seen with the naked eye.
Newsday
Freudenberger’s novel is set in a Boston that calls to mind Henry James country, a bastion of correctness and rational thought. It is all the more jarring, then, when Helen Clapp, a single mother and tenured chair in MIT’s physics department, receives a phone call and then text messages from the afterlife. Helen doesn’t write off the transmissions as a hoax—she sits tight and collects data, all the while conducting a meticulous reexamination of her long and bewildering relationship with her estranged best friend, Charlie, who moved to Hollywood after college and died from an autoimmune disease. The book takes up weighty themes such as grief and sexism in the worlds of academia and entertainment, peppering the narration with evocative asides on black holes and quantum entanglement.… The prose is enticing [on] friendship, that most unstable and mysterious of connections.
Vogue
An affecting female friendship tale—Charlie, glamorous and alluring, and Helen, cerebral and self-assured—that takes a turn for the otherworldly.
Entertainment Weekly
A truly lovely story about friendship.
Cosmopolitan
(Starred review) Freudenberger explores the convergence of scientific rationality and spirituality in this stunning portrayal of grief.… Helen’s journey… is about grief not only at the loss of her friend but also at the demise of countless possible futures. This is a beautiful and moving novel.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [M]agnificent… a warm and insightful look into human relationships and the mysteries of time. Refreshingly, the… [scientific] concepts that Freudenberger describes are integral to the plot. And the story takes unexpected turns on its way to a heartbreaking conclusion.
BookPage
(Starred review) Compelling, seductively poetic; deeply involving, suspenseful and psychologically lush.… Freudenberger is spellbinding in her imaginative use of particle physics as a mirror of human entanglement and uncertainty.
Booklist
(Starred review) Brimming with wit and intelligence and devoted to things that matter: life, love, death, and the mysteries of the cosmos. Nell Freudenberger is good at explaining physics, but her real genius is in the depiction of relationships.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What was your impression of Helen at the beginning of the novel as compared to the end? Even with her rare intellectual abilities, and her scientific ways of thinking, does she discover new things to learn, and new parts of herself, in response to Charlie’s death?
2. What do you think brought Charlie and Helen together as friends in the first place? How did they learn to speak the same language, despite their different interests and backgrounds? And does this change, when Charlie passes away?
3. Describe the process by which Helen chose Jack’s father. Were you surprised by her preferences in the sperm donor, and what she values in Jack based on his father’s traits (including how different some of them are from her own)?
4. When Helen and Neel create the Clapp-Jonnal model at Harvard, she describes feeling…
the way people describe falling in love but it was so much better than the reality of that. The model gave me a kind of happiness that didn’t depend upon anyone else; it could be carried with you. I thought that this was what religious faith must be like, the peace in knowing that there was something beyond the world you knew, and that your own inner experience would indeed endure (42).
How does this reflect Helen’s own understanding of the limits of human knowledge?
5. Each of the three main characters—Helen, Charlie, and Neel—have their own feelings of not fitting in somehow. How does being different from others people bring these people toward one another? Consider also what Helen says about how, unlike herself, her friends weren’t "finding that their own ideas shifted under the influence of powerful fields created by two equally magnetic friends" (63–64). What does this suggest about Helen’s confidence in her own powers of attraction and influence on others?
6. Charlie comes from an affluent black family, with highly-educated parents, in Boston; Helen grew up in a middle-class white family in Los Angeles. Each of them ends up settling in the opposite city, on opposite coasts. How have both women sought to move away from their upbringings in adulthood? How do their family backgrounds—and the colors of their skin—continue to influence their lives they live?
7. What was your initial reaction to the messages Helen receives from Charlie’s phone? If you were Helen, how would you react? Do you think that her response to Simmi’s confession reflects relief or disappointment? And what was your own response to the story’s answer to that mystery?
8. Compare the children’s understanding of death and higher powers with that of the adults in the novel. Which kind of faith proves more accurate, and how might you see the children’s perspective influencing the adults’—and vice versa?
9. Charlie characterizes lupus as a disease that "basically rewires your neural pathways, so that your brain is getting messages that your body hurts when it really shouldn't doesn’t" (169). How is this reflected in what happens leading up to and after her death?
10. Many in her circle were alarmed and upset by Charlie’s decision to end her own life, especially her parents. Discuss the echoes of this decision on her family and her circle overall. Do you think she did the right thing?
11. There are many different kinds of love in the novel. Where are the lines drawn among certain kinds of love—romantic, platonic, unconditional—and when, if ever, does love become dangerous? Helen and Neel vacillate between romantic attraction and another kind of force-field. Discuss what happens to each of them at the end of the novel and whether it seems satisfying to them both to remain friends with a history. What do you think is surprising, if anything, about the fact that both Neel and Terrence are attractive to Helen?
12. Charlie’s experience with Pope radically changes the course of her time at Harvard, her career, and her friendship with Helen. How would someone in her situation react in today’s environment, perhaps especially on a highly-charged college campus? What did you think about the way Helen, years later, gets involved?
13. Neel comes back to Boston as part of the LIGO team, which is well on its way to making a huge discovery. How does the LIGO research on gravitational waves impact Neel and Helen’s careers—and also their relationship? Consider Helen’s comment that she is "betting on the idea that LIGO would record not only the gravitational waves from colliding black holes, but from pairs of neutron stars, exploding in what is called a kilonova" (115). Do you think that Helen and Neel’s professional rivalry is healthy or even productive?
14. At the end of the novel, after Terrence and Simmi leave the Boston area and the LIGO scientists win the Nobel Prize, Helen reflects that "to understand more of our cosmology, we’re going to have to admit that there may be laws so different from the ones we know, so seemingly counterintuitive, that it will take all our imagination to uncover them" (3157). Is there anything that Helen does know more definitively, after all she experienced? Have her own expectations of her life’s work, as a scientist, mother, and friend, changed?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Lost Art of Mixing
Erica Bauermeister, 2013
Penguin Group (USA)
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399162114
Summary
Erica Bauermeister returns to the enchanting world of The School of Essential Ingredients in this luminous sequel.
Lillian and her restaurant have a way of drawing people together. There’s Al, the accountant who finds meaning in numbers and ritual; Chloe, a budding chef who hasn’t learned to trust after heartbreak; Finnegan, quiet and steady as a tree, who can disappear into the background despite his massive height; Louise, Al’s wife, whose anger simmers just below the boiling point; and Isabelle, whose memories are slowly slipping from her grasp. And there’s Lillian herself, whose life has taken a turn she didn’t expect.
Their lives collide and mix with those around them, sometimes joining in effortless connections, at other times sifting together and separating again, creating a family that is chosen, not given. A beautifully imagined novel about the ties that bind—and links that break—The Lost Art of Mixing is a captivating meditation on the power of love, food, and companionship. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Pasadena, California, USA
• Education—Ph.D., University of Washington
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington
In her words:
I was born in Pasadena, California in 1959, a time when that part of the country was both one of the loveliest and smoggiest places you could imagine. I remember the arching branches of the oak tree in our front yard, the center of the patio that formed a private entrance to our lives; I remember leaning over a water faucet to run water across my eyes after a day spent playing outside. It’s never too early to learn that there is always more than one side to life.
I have always wanted to write, but when I read Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” in college, I finally knew what I wanted to write – books that took what many considered to be unimportant bits of life and gave them beauty, shone light upon their meaning. The only other thing I knew for certain back in college, however, was that I wasn’t grown up enough yet to write them.
So I moved to Seattle, got married, and got a PhD. at the University of Washington. Frustrated by the lack of women authors in the curriculum, I co-authored 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide with Holly Smith and Jesse Larsen and Let’s Hear It For the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14 with Holly Smith. In the process I read, literally, thousands of books, good and bad, which is probably one of the best educations a writer can have. I still wrote, but thankfully that material wasn’t published. I taught writing and literature. I had children.
Having children probably had the most dramatic effect upon how I write of anything in my life. As the care-taker of children, there was no time for plot lines that couldn’t be interrupted a million times in the course of creation. I learned to multi-task, and when the children’s demands were too many, we created something called the “mental hopper.” This is where all the suggestions went — “can we have ice cream tonight?” “can we take care of the school’s pet rat over the summer?” “can I have sex at 13?” The mental hopper was where things got sorted out, when I had time to think about them. What’s interesting about the mental hopper is that when something goes in there, I can usually figure out a way to make it happen (except sex at 13).
And that is how I write now. All those first details and amorphous ideas for a book, the voices of the characters, the fact that one of them loves garlic and another one flips through the pages of used books looking for clues to the past owner’s life, all those ideas go in the mental hopper and slowly but surely they form connections with each other. Stories start to take shape. It’s a very organic process, and it suits me. So when people say being a mother is death for writers, I disagree. Yes, in a logistical sense, children can make writing difficult. In fact, I don’t think it is at all coincidental that my first novel was published after both my children were in college. But I think differently, I create the work I do, because I have had children.
It’s been more than thirty years since I first read Tillie Olsen. My children are now mostly grown. I’ve been married for three decades to the same man; I’ve lived in Italy; I’ve stood by friends as they faced death. I’ve grown up a bit, and I’ve returned, happily and naturally, to fiction.
Novels
The first result was The School of Essential Ingredients, a novel about eight cooking students and their teacher, set in the kitchen of Lillian’s restaurant. It’s about food and people and the relationships between them – about taking those “unimportant” bits of life and making them beautiful. The response to School has been a writer’s dream; the book is currently being published in 23 countries and I have received letters and emails from readers around the world.
My second novel, Joy For Beginners came out two years later (see how much more quickly you can write when the children are in college?). Joy For Beginners follows a year in the life of seven women who make a pact to each do one thing in the next twelve months that is new, or difficult, or scary – the twist is that they don’t get to choose their own challenges. It has been a marvelous experience to watch this book become a catalyst for readers and entire book clubs, and to read the letters of those who have decided to change their lives or who have simply gained insight through the characters.
My third novel was published in early 2013. The Lost Art of Mixing returns to some of the characters from The School of Essential Ingredients whose stories simply weren’t finished (although I have to say, even I was surprised to learn where those stories went). It begins one year later, and throws four completely new characters into the mix, in an exploration of miscommunication, serendipity, ritual, and (well, of course) food. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Harrowing and graceful at once, this is some of Bauermeister's strongest writing.
Seattle Times
Erica Bauermeister's characters are alive and savory as the food she describes so well... Most chapters in The Lost Art of Mixing could stand independently, but blended together, they make a memorable novel. The Seattle author reminds us how the rituals surrounding food sustain us emotionally and spiritually by giving us opportunities to gather as family and community, sharing more fully in one another's lives by taking the time to break bread together.
Portland Oregonian
In her sequel to The School of Essential Ingredients, Bauermeister picks up the threads of many of the characters first brought together in Lillian’s cooking classes, adding a few new stories to the mix. Here we follow Al, the restaurant’s accountant, soothed by numbers and flavors but unable to connect with Louise, his wife of 29 years; Chloe, the young sous-chef made timid by a failed relationship; Isabelle, the elderly woman with whom Chloe lives, struggling against the onset of Alzheimer’s; and Finnegan, the impossibly tall dishwasher taking his first stab at independence. Lillian remains a sort of mythic background figure, although her unexpected pregnancy tests her and the touchy relationship she’s having with Tom, a widower. Bauermeister weaves these individual stories in and among one another, but never stays with one character long enough for the reader to grow very attached, robbing each of depth. Still, Bauermeister’s prose is strong, particularly when it comes to food, and her novel brings to life the adage “be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.”
Publishers Weekly
A Seattle chef and her circle of friends cope with life's pivotal moments. In this follow-up to The School of Essential Ingredients (2009), Chef Lillian continues to run her small restaurant, which has become a hub for people in transition. In what is essentially a collection of linked stories...the narrative, carried by so many disparate points of view, never quite comes into focus. So robust and resilient are Bauermeister's characters that readers may wish she had challenged them with thornier dilemmas.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. At the beginning of the book, there is a quote by Aesop: “Every truth has two sides.” What do you think is the importance of that quote to the novel as a whole?
2. At first glance, Al appears to be a staid accountant, comfortable with numbers and order, never doing anything unexpected. And yet, he engages in a secretive and odd behavior: masquerading as a published author at nearby bookstores. Why does he do this? Did you find this strange or understandable?
3. Consider the relationships between Isabelle, her children Abby and Rory, and her grandson, Rory. How do their familial ties differ from relationships that are based on friendship or love, such as Isabelle’s bond with Chloe or Lillian?
4. In her family, Abby is regarded as the responsible one, a wet blanket who focuses on obligations instead of fun. Is this characterization fair? How does Abby see herself? What stereotypes or roles have been assigned to you that aren’t entirely accurate?
5. Chloe and Finnegan’s relationship is rife with false starts, progress forward, and then backward slides. What about their individual personalities prevents them from connecting at first?
6. Each chapter takes you deep into the perspective of a different character. How did this structure influence your views of the characters? Did your feelings about any of the protagonists change when you entered his or her point of view?
7. Think about the various rituals that take place in the novel—for instance, Chloe’s walk with the empty suitcase, or Isabelle’s birthday celebration. What is the importance of these rituals? What rituals do you practice in your own life, and what meaning do they hold for you?
8. What role do Finnegan’s blue notebooks play in his life? What do you think it means to him when he hands Isabelle her book to keep?
9. Tom’s character is struggling with a great loss, and his lingering sadness in many ways impedes his new relationship with Lillian. How did you feel about his emotional journey? What allowed him finally to move on?
10. In the novel, as in real life, a deeper issue often underlies a superficial conflict. What do lightbulbs mean to Louise? And to Al?
11. The author has referred to The Lost Art of Mixing as a series of dominoes, each character tipping another (or others) forward, often unknowingly. How does Louise and Abby’s near miss at the intersection factor into the lives of the other characters? What might this say about life in general?
12. Which was your favorite character in the book, and why? Who did you relate to the most?
(Questions from author's website.)
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau
Michael Zapata, 2020
Hanover Square Press
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781335010124
Summary
The mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New Orleans.
In 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau writes a science fiction novel. The novel earns rave reviews, and Adana begins a sequel.
Then she falls gravely ill. Just before she dies, she destroys the only copy of the manuscript.
Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather’s home when he discovers a mysterious manuscript written by none other than Adana Moreau.
With the help of his friend Javier, Saul tracks down an address for Adana’s son in New Orleans, but as Hurricane Katrina strikes they must head to the storm-ravaged city for answers.
What results is a brilliantly layered masterpiece—an ode to home, storytelling and the possibility of parallel worlds. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Michael Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction, the City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program award and a Pushcart nomination.
As an educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing dropout students. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa and has lived in New Orleans, Italy and Ecuador. He currently lives in Chicago with his family. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Instead of using a story-within-a-story framework (think Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love), or an entangled symmetry (David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas), Zapata layers his worlds flat atop one another. The reader has to hunt for traces of communication between story lines…. When Zapata… favors people over events, their stories come alive…. Through the allegory of the multiverse, Zapata reinterprets… the gulf between universes of human experience.
Will Chancellor - New York Times Book Review
[S]edate and ruminative… imbued with a fairy-tale vibe…. Overlaying the deftly conjured 20th- and 21st-century settings and events is a sense of eternality, of archetypes and mythic patterning… [and] Zapata’s own evident love… of science fiction…. Zapata’s carefully crafted prose oscillates between matter-of-fact and lyrically poetic, a tonal range that provides a very pleasant reading experience. Also stuffed, not inelegantly, between the microcosmic doings are several larger incidents that limn the bloody and brutal history of the two centuries, including South American totalitarianism, European pogroms and the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.
Paul Di Filippo - Washington Post
[B]ig-hearted…. Full of stories within stories, Zapata builds his layers with a light touch…. Politically engaged, the book is deeply critical of betrayals and injustices of all kinds and in all parts of the globe, reckoning unsparingly with humanity’s hard-wired propensity both to destroy and to self-destruct…. Remarkably, Zapata’s tone is frequently gently or even absurdly comic and his sensibility is one of great love for human beings and for life itself. This seeming contradiction operates as the central tension that animates the entire novel…. [A] jubilant and generous story-teller.
Kathleen Rooney - Chicago Tribune
Smart and heart-piercing, Lost Book is a story of displacement, erasure, identity, mythology, and the ability of literature to simultaneously express and transcend our lives—not to mention reality…. Zapata tackles huge feelings and ideas… [but] makes it look effortless…. [His] multilayered concepts—most prominently, the theory of multiple worlds—underscore his more immediate themes of family, diaspora, and the sway that patterns hold over our lives…. Zapata illuminates the reality-inventing power of storytelling itself.
Jason Hellor - NPR
[A] stirring debut…. Zapata expertly blends the drama of the lost manuscript with the on-the-ground chaos and tumult caused by the storm.… [His] marriage of speculative and realist styles makes for a harrowing, immersive tale.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [R]eaders will be mesmerized by the unraveling of how the protagonists’ lives interconnect.... The story-within-a-story structure might lose some…. However, patient readers will be rewarded with an illuminating work.... A heady literary and genre-bending novel.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Zapata spins an iridescent web of grief, loss, and memory… an enchanting blend of history, science, and fairy tale.… [U]nforgettable characters… preserve "lost worlds" in the stories they tell and by "reading" the night sky…. A lush, spellbinding tale.
Booklist
Two strangers are unknowingly connected by a rare manuscript.… Zapata’s debut novel is a wonderful merging of adventure with thoughtful but urgent meditations on time, history, and surviving tragedy.… A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Lost Catacomb
Shifra Hochberg, 2014
Enigma Press
358 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780615975696
Summary
An intoxicating blend of Vatican thriller and heart-rending love story, The Lost Catacomb's multiple timeline moves seamlessly across the centuries, from the early Roman Empire to the present and to World War II, where it explores the motif of loss—lost lovers, lost identity, and lost treasures—against the backdrop of the Holocaust in Italy.
At its center is Nicola Page, a beautiful young art historian who flies to Rome to assess a newly discovered catacomb of enigmatic provenance. Its magnificent frescoes hold the clues to a centuries-old murder and the existence of a fabled treasure from the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Assisted by a handsome Italian archaeologist, Nicola is quickly drawn into a tangled web of intrigue and peril, masterminded by a powerful priest who is determined to destroy those who would reveal the dark secrets of the past.
And as Nicola uncovers layer after layer of this deadly past, she is brought face to face with shocking facts about her own family history—facts that will forever change the course of her life.
Author Bio
• Birth—December 13, 1949
• Where—Detroit, Michigan, USA
• Education—Ph.D., New York University
• Currently—lives in Jerusalem, Israel
Shifra Hochberg, who received her Ph.D. in English literature from New York University, has published over 20 academic essays, mainly in the field of nineteenth-century fiction and feminist literary theory. She currently teaches at Ariel University in Israel and makes her home in Jerusalem.
In the course of writing The Lost Catacomb, Shifra visited Italy 14 times, making on-site visits to all locations in the novel and meeting with families of Italian Holocaust survivors. She was also privileged to view a special collection of Jewish catacomb artifacts at the Vatican Museum that is normally closed to visitors. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Shifra on Facebook.
Book Reviews
A marvelous book--thrilling and literary. A compelling depiction of the Vatican, with its profound mysteries and troubling ties to the Holocaust, riveting action, and a tender love story that will appeal to a wide audience.
Aryeh Lev Stollman, author of The Far Euphrates and The Illuminated Soul
I was impressed by the extensive on-site research [Hochberg] conducted.... The Lost Catacomb is a thoughtful and erudite yet fast-moving thriller about archaeological and personal discoveries. At its center is Nicola Page, an American art historian with Italian roots who is brought to Rome to examine the provenance of a newly uncovered catacomb; at the same time, she hopes to uncover long-buried secrets about her family.
Sarah Johnson - Reading the Past
[F]ast-moving, fascinating.... Hochberg is...a master storyteller in the way that, from the beginning, she drops little hints of what is to come in the book—such as references to the Nazi era. For anyone interested in historical fiction, the troubled history of Jews in Italy, art history, and above all, the great Eternal City of Rome, The Lost Catacomb is a valuable treasure in itself.
Raanan Geberer - Reader's Favorite
Discussion Questions
1. What are the thriller elements in The Lost Catacomb and how are they given literary resonance?
2. How does the search for the provenance of an ancient catacomb become a metaphor for the personal issues that Nicola faces?
3. How do the three central love stories echo and reinforce each other?
4. Discuss the two major metaphors in the novel--the stars and the myth of Andromeda.
5. Which of the three female figures in the love stories do you identify with the most and why?
6. Discuss the thematic relevance of the epigraphs that precede each section of the novel.7. What did you learn about the history of Italian Jewry that you were unaware of before you read The Lost Catacomb?
7. How do you feel about the implications of the relationship of the Vatican with the Nazis during World War Two as depicted in the novel?
8. What literary allusions and subtexts did you find in the novel and how do they enrich the text?
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9. Discuss the theme of loss in the novel. Which plot elements does it include?
(Discussion questions courtesy of the author.)
Lost Children Archive
Valeria Luiselli, 2019
Knopf Doubleday
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525520610
Summary
An emotionally resonant, fiercely imaginative new novel about a family whose road trip across America collides with an immigration crisis at the southwestern border—an indelible journey told with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity.
A mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home.
Why Apaches? asks the ten-year-old son. Because they were the last of something, answers his father.
In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an "immigration crisis": thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States, but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way.
As the family drives—through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas—we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.
They are led, inexorably, to a grand, harrowing adventure—both in the desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.
Told through several compelling voices, blending texts, sounds, and images, Lost Children Archive is an astonishing feat of literary virtuosity. It is a richly engaging story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most.
With urgency and empathy, it takes us deep into the lives of one remarkable family as it probes the nature of justice and equality today. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 16, 1983
• Where—Mexico City, Mexico
• Education—B.A., National Autonomous University of Mexico; Ph.D., Columbia University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Valiera Luiselli is a Mexican-born author and academic, who lives in the United States. Her most recent novel Lost Children Archive was published in 2019.
Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Africa. She has since lived in the U.S., Costa Rica, South Korea, India, Spain, and France. After earning a B.A. in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Luiselli moved to New York City to dance.
After a time, Luiselli returned to academia, studying Comparative Literature at Columbia University and completing her Ph.D. Currently, she lives in New York City, where she teaches literature and creative writing at Hofstra University. She also collaborates as a writer with a number of art galleries and has worked as a librettist for the New York City Ballet.
Writing and recognition
Luiselli is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks (2013) and the internationally acclaimed novel Faces in the Crowd (2012), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her novel The Story of My Teeth (2015) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Best Fiction and the Azul Prize in Canada.
Her most recent nonfiction book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions (2017), was described by the Texas Observer as "the First Must-Read Book of the Trump Era." It was also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.
In 2014 Luiselli was the recipient of the National Book Foundation "5 under 35" award. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s and The New Yorker. (From various online sources including Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/7/2019.)
Book Reviews
Engrossing…brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising—a passionately engaged book [with] intellectual amplitude and moral seriousness, [and] a beautiful, loving portrait of children and of the task of looking after them. It is a pleasure to be a part of the narrator’s family; just as pleasurable is the access we gain to the narrator’s mind—a comprehensive literary intelligence.… Luiselli [is] playful and brave.
James Wood - The New Yorker
A highly imaginative, politically deft portrait of childhood within a vast American landscape—a rollicking tale that contains within it an extremely disciplined exercise in political empathy. Luiselli takes the minds of children seriously, and the reader witnesses their intelligent eyes and ears recording each detail of the borderlands and registering the full terror of them. Luiselli braids and reworks disparate texts….[Characters’] experiences overlap to create a patchwork representation of how America might see itself. The novel’s most thrilling section [is] a single sentence sustained for some twenty pages near the end, which remains measured and crystalline, expertly controll[ed]…. Luiselli shows the reader something she wouldn’t normally see, and also maps the past onto the present in ways that can reveal hidden contours in both.
Lidija Haas - Harper’s
(Starred review) Luisell's powerful, eloquent novel… demonstrates how callousness toward other cultures erodes our own. Her superb novel makes a devastating case for compassion by documenting the tragic shortcomings of the immigration process (31 photos).
Publishers Weekly
The shifting sensibility from observer to child to child migrant gradually pulls readers inside the migrants' nightmare journey to create a story that, if fragmented, feels both timely and intelligent. —Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
(Starred review) Poignant, intense, keenly timely.… [P]olitically relevant. Stories of Latin American asylum seekers and the disappeared Apaches overlap and converge.… This is one of few novels that… conveys the urgency of this unsettling situation.
Booklist
(Starred review) Remarkable, inventive.… As the novel rises to a ferocious climax, Luiselli thunderously, persuasively insists that reckoning with the border will make deep demands of our emotional reserves. A powerful border story, at once intellectual and heartfelt.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Whom do you immediately associate with the "lost children" of the title? How many layers of getting lost appear throughout the novel, and is it always/only children who are lost?
2. What are some of the reasons behind the family’s trip to Apacheria? Discuss the parents’ separate and combined work projects and their expectations for what will happen to the family once they reach their destination.
3. What is the difference between a documentarian and a documentarist? How do the two forms of study, observation, interpretation, and synthesis make their way into the story of the family and the structure of the novel itself?
4. Can you identify the source(s) of conflict between the husband and wife? Which memories of their early life together and time at home with the children, as well as how they respond to the children during the car ride, suggest why they might not be able (or willing) to stay together?
5. The wife/mother is the arguably the primary narrator of the novel, and it’s through her that we understand the goings-on of the trip. Does she prove herself a reliable narrator, and if not, what are her biases in telling this story?
6. The seven boxes in the family’s trunk each belong to a different family member. Do you think you could identify the owner of each box based solely on its contents? What does this suggest about how the characters know one another, and also about how they chose to represent themselves in what they packed for the trip? Consider the wife’s question, "How many possible combinations of all those documents were there? And what completely different stories would be told by their varying permutations, shufflings, and reorderings?" (57).
7. Maps, news clippings, sound recordings, photographs, books, poems, loose notes—these are some of the items that appear in the boxes/text. The family also listens to music, and to audiobooks, in the car. How does having different media contribute to the polyphony of the novel? What do these documents suggest about whether the characters can, or cannot, know a definitive "truth"?
8. For most of the book the four family members don’t have first names, except their chosen Apache names: Swift Feather, Papa Cochise, Lucky Arrow, and Memphis. How are these names more or less representative of their identities in this time period, and to what degree are they chosen or given? How do they ultimately help unite the family when they’re separated, literally and figuratively?
9. How do the stories of Manuela’s daughters and the children on the plane motivate the mother on her journey and in her work?
10. What are the most memorable and significant stops the family makes along the way? How do they reinvent themselves in various situations, and what does this flexibility in their identity suggest both about their bonds and about America today?
11. Consider the repeated stories that are told and read throughout the novel: Geronimo’s fall, Elegies for Lost Children, "Space Oddity," Lord of the Flies, etc. How do they overlap with and inform the narrative of the novel? Do these connections influence your understanding of the novel as an "archive" in and of itself?
12. Although "the boy" is biologically related to his father and "the girl" to her mother, what connects the boy to the mother in the novel? Describe their bond, including how they test and support each other along this journey, and how they share space as.
13. How do the sections in Part II and Part III narrated from the boy’s point of view reflect or shift the mother’s point of view? Reading his interpretation of the events she narrated, did you find any holes, gaps, or misunderstandings in what she knew about him and Memphis—or (potentially surprising) similarities?
14. How does the boy’s voice differ from the mother’s, besides the obvious differences of their age and life experience? Consider his reliance on his camera, the Polaroids in his box, and the stream-of-consciousness narrative in the "Echo Canyon" chapter.
15. What are the children’s ideas about what it will mean to be lost, and how do they each work to stay together even when they’re forced apart? In this sense, are they more in control of their memories—that is, are they more or less "lost"—than their parents?
16. By the end of the novel, has the meaning of "home" changed for the characters? What are some of the ways home was lost, found, and reimagined?
17. The author offers a Works Cited at the end of the book to describe the various references and allusions she draws upon throughout the novel. How does this information change your understanding of what is fact versus fiction, and of the ways stories get passed down among works of art over time? After reading Luiselli’s description of her methodology, would you describe her as a documentarian or a documentarist?
18. The novel draws upon a number of real-life current events and stories about the immigration crisis in the United States. How did you feel about the way this situation was presented? Does the author’s referencing of so many histories and time periods, and narratives of displacement, create a more universal portrayal of being uprooted or without a country? Have you ever felt a similar kind of displacement?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Lost City Radio
Daniel Alarcon, 2007
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060594817
Summary
For ten years, Norma has been the voice of consolation for a people broken by violence. She hosts Lost City Radio, the most popular program in their nameless South American country, gripped in the aftermath of war. Every week, the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios listen as she reads the names of those who have gone missing, those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Loved ones are reunited and the lost are found. Each week, she returns to the airwaves while hiding her own personal loss: her husband disappeared at the end of the war.
But the life she has become accustomed to is forever changed when a young boy arrives from the jungle and provides a clue to the fate of her long-missing husband.
Stunning, timely, and absolutely mesmerizing, Lost City Radio probes the deepest questions of war and its meaning: from its devastating impact on a society transformed by violence to the emotional scarring each participant, observer, and survivor carries for years after. This tender debut marks Alarcón's emergence as a major new voice in American fiction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1977
• Where—Lima, Peru
• Reared—Birmingham, Alabama, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University; M.A. Iowa Writers'
Workshop.
• Awards—Fulbright Scholarship; Guggenheim Fellowship;
Lannan Fellowship
• Currently—lives in Oakland, California, USA
Daniel Alarcon’s work has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere, and anthologized in Best American Non-Required Reading 2004 and 2005. His non-fiction has appeared in Salon.com and Eyeshot, and he is Associate Editor of the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra. He edited a portfolio for the magazine A Public Space on the writing of Peru. He is a former Fulbright Scholar to Peru.
Alarcon, a native of Peru, was raised, from the age of 3, in Birmingham, Alabama, U.S. and is an alumnus of Indian Springs School in Shelby County, Alabama. He holds a bachelors degree in anthropology from Columbia University and a masters from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has studied in Ghana and taught in New York City.
His first book War by Candlelight was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. He was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, nominated "One of 21 Young American Novelists" under 35 by Granta magazine.
His debut novel, Lost City Radio, was published in 2007. Both his books have been translated into Spanish. Lost City Radio will be also published in French and Italian in 2008.
Daniel Alarcon lives in Oakland, California, where he is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College.(From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
This book ... lacks the dramatic punch of [his previous] stories.... He never establishes a solid relationship between the story and [the omniscient] narrator, who becomes increasingly intrusive. The first third of the book is evenhanded, allowing various characters to come forward. But the final parts capriciously switch point of view within chapters, sections, even paragraphs....This tactic diffuses the impact of the war...on which the plot hinges.... The final half of the book is marred by dull descriptions ... that lapse into sentimentality (“Norma smiled at him, and she looked like sunshine”), as well as stylistic tics in which fragments echo sentences. Still, there’s enough here to confirm that Alarcón is talented—and wise—beyond his years, that he remains intent on challenging himself and his readers.
Sarah Fay - New York Times Book Review
Daniel Alarcón's thoughtful, engaging first novel is set in a fictitious South American country where the reader will immediately recognize fragments of recent history in Argentina, Chile and...Peru. No name is ever given to the country: Alarcon means the novel to be a fable about civil wars and their repercussions, rather than an account of a specific war within a specific place.... Alarcon ... express[es], eloquently and exactly, the self-destructiveness of violent insurgency and official retaliation. The victims are the people whom the revolution ostensibly aims to serve. This has been true in just about every actual country in Latin America, as it is true in the fictional one that Alarcón has invented. Lost City Radio is a fable for an entire continent, and is no less pertinent in other parts of the world where different languages are spoken in different climates but where the same ruinous dance is played out.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post
Set in a fictional South American nation where guerrillas have long clashed with the government, Alarcon's ambitious first novel (after the story collection War by Candlelight) follows a trio of characters upended by civil strife. Norma, whose husband, Rey, disappeared 10 years ago after the end of a civil war, hosts popular radio show Lost City Radio, which reconnects callers with their missing loved ones. (She quietly entertains the notion that the job will also reunite her with her missing husband.) So when an 11-year-old orphan, Victor, shows up at the radio station with a list of his distant village's "lost people," the station plans a special show dedicated to his case and cranks up its promotional machine. Norma, meanwhile, notices a name on the list that's an alias her husband used to use, prompting her to resume her quest to find him. She and Victor travel to Victor's home village, where local teacher Manau reveals to Norma what she's long feared—and more. Though the mystery Alarcón makes of the identity of Victor's father isn't particularly mysterious, this misstep is overshadowed by Alarcon's successful and nimbly handled portrayal of war's lingering consequences.
Publishers Weekly
Often compared to the work of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, Alarcón's harrowing tale of the breakdown of a society and the emotional price paid by its survivors will undoubtedly haunt you long after you've turned the last page.
Bookmarks Magazine
(Starred review.) Writing rapturously and elegiacally of the wildness in both jungle and city, creating indelible images that concentrate the horrors of war, and unerringly articulating the complex feelings of individuals caught in barbaric and senseless predicaments, Alarcon reaches to the heart of our persistent if elusive dream of freedom and peace. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
The Lost Girls of Paris
Pam Jenoff, 2019
Park Row
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780778330271
Summary
A remarkable story of friendship and courage centered around three women and a ring of female secret agents during World War II.
1946, Manhattan
One morning while passing through Grand Central Terminal on her way to work, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench.
Unable to resist her own curiosity, Grace opens the suitcase, where she discovers a dozen photographs—each of a different woman. In a moment of impulse, Grace takes the photographs and quickly leaves the station.
Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a network of female secret agents who were deployed out of London during the war. Twelve of these women were sent to Occupied Europe as couriers and radio operators to aid the resistance.
But they never returned home, their fates a mystery.
Setting out to learn the truth behind the women in the photographs, Grace finds herself drawn to a young mother turned agent named Marie, whose daring mission overseas reveals a remarkable story of friendship, valor and betrayal.
Vividly rendered and inspired by true events, New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff shines a light on the incredible heroics of the brave women of the war and weaves a mesmerizing tale of courage, sisterhood and the great strength of women to survive in the hardest of circumstances. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., George Washington University; M.A., Cambridge University; J.D., University of Pennsylvania
• Currently—lives in Cherry Hill, New Jersey
Pam Jenoff was born in Maryland and raised outside Philadelphia. She attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge University in England.
Upon receiving her master's in history from Cambridge, she accepted an appointment as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army. The position provided a unique opportunity to witness and participate in operations at the most senior levels of government, including helping the families of the Pan Am Flight 103 victims secure their memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, observing recovery efforts at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing and attending ceremonies to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of World War II at sites such as Bastogne and Corregidor.
Following her work at the Pentagon, Pam moved to the State Department. In 1996 she was assigned to the U.S. Consulate in Krakow, Poland. It was during this period that Pam developed her expertise in Polish-Jewish relations and the Holocaust. Working on matters such as preservation of Auschwitz and the restitution of Jewish property in Poland, Pam developed close relations with the surviving Jewish community.
Pam left the Foreign Service in 1998 to attend law school and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She worked for several years as a labor and employment attorney both at a firm and in-house in Philadelphia and now teaches law school at Rutgers.
Pam is the author of The Kommandant's Girl, which was an international bestseller and nominated for a Quill award, as well as The Diplomat's Wife, The Ambassador's Daughter, Almost Home, A Hidden Affair and The Things We Cherished.
She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and three children. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[The] emotional profundity [of The Orphan's Trail] is sadly lacking in Jenoff’s latest.… Jenoff has at her disposal a great, mostly untold story of heroism and espionage, both about the woman who trained an elite force of operatives and then spent years looking for them after their death, and also about what it was like to be one of those women, but the result has all of the tension of a Hallmark card. This is a slight re-telling of a remarkable story and an unusual slip-up from the dependable Jenoff.
USA Today
Jenoff brings serious girl power to this story of brave women and the war.
Cosmopolitan
A portrait of sisterhood, courage, and drama. A must-read.
Glamour
[A] fast-paced novel… Jenoff allows [her characters]distinct personalities to shine. This is a mesmerizing tale full of appealing characters, intrigue, suspense, and romance.
Publishers Weekly
[P]assion and heartache greet the brave patriot. Verdict: Jenoff weaves the stories of three remarkable women in this fast-paced title that boasts an intriguing plot and strong female characters. —Laura Jones, Argos Community Schs., IN
Library Journal
[A] gripping WWII-era tale…. Jenoff breathes life into the tale of a committed “Band of Sisters” who displayed boundless courage in the face of historically dire circumstances, creating a compelling and exciting read.
Booklist
Jenoff's wartime chronology is blurred by overly general date headings… and confusing continuity. Sparsely punctuated by shocking brutality and defiant bravery, the narrative is, for the most part, flabby and devoid of tension.… A sadly slapdash World War II adventure.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for THE LOST GIRLS OF PARIS ... and then take off on your own:
1. What possesses Grace Healy to open the suitcase at Grand Central and abscond with the photos? Would you have done so?
2. What do we learn about Eleanor Trigg, who initially was a secretary at SOE? Why is she given the responsibility to put together the spy team—what qualifies her in terms of experience and character? (Eleanor is based on the real life of Vera Atkins: see below.)
3. What does Eleanor look for in her recruits? Why does she select each of the women she does?
4. Talk about the training process for the women and the rigors involved. Would you have made the grade? What would have been most difficult for you?
5. What about Marie, whose point of view we follow? During training, she has trouble mastering a number of the tasks, so much so that she would appear unqualified. Where you surprised at her later accomplishments?
6. The story has three different points of view and moves back and forth through time. Did you appreciate the shifting perspectives and chronology? Or was it difficult to follow at times?
7. Why do you think the romance between Marie and Julian is limited to eye contact and fleeting glances. Would you have preferred to have more of their relationship develop on the page, rather than off (not counting his profession of love much later in the book)?
8. Of the 12 women selected, do you have a favorite; do some impress you more than others?
9. Most of all, talk about the incredible courage all of these women possessed—and the horrific, life-threatening dangers they faced.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Consider two nonfiction works on Britain's female spies:
• Helms, Sarah. A Life in Secret: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII. Knopf Doubleday (2006).
• Loftis, Larry. Code Name: Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became World War II's Most Highly Decorated Spy. Gallery Books (2019)
The Lost Girls of Rome
Donato Carrisi, 2013
Little, Brown and Co.
4342 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316246798
Summary
A grieving young widow, seeking answers to her husband's death, becomes entangled in an investigation steeped in the darkest mysteries of Rome.
Sandra Vega, a forensic analyst with the Roman police department, mourns deeply for a marriage that ended too soon. A few months ago, in the dead of night, her husband, an up-and-coming journalist, plunged to his death at the top of a high-rise construction site. The police ruled it an accident. Sanda is convinced it was anything but.
Launching her own inquiries, Sanda finds herself on a dangerous trail, working the same case that she is convinced led to her husband's murder. An investigation which is deeply entwined with a series of disappearances that has swept the city, and brings Sandra ever closer to a centuries-old secret society that will do anything to stay in the shadows. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 25, 1973
• Where—Italy
• Education—law and criminology
• Awards—Premio Bancarella; Prix Livre de Poche; Prix SNCF du polar;
Premio Letterario Massarosa; Premio Camaiore di Letteratura Gialla;
• Currently—lives in Rome, Italy
Donato Carrisi studied law and criminology before he began working as a writer for television. The Whisperer (2009), Carrisi's first novel, won five international literary prizes, has been sold in nearly twenty countries, and has been translated into languages as varied as French, Danish, Hebrew and Vietnamese. Carrisi lives in Rome. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Carrisi takes an unsparing look at the nature of evil and guilt in this fascinating, if meandering, thriller. Sandra Vega, a forensic photographer with the Milan police, refuses to believe the official ruling that her photojournalist husband David Leoni’s death five months earlier was accidental.... [S]hifts between past and present make the complex plot, which moves at a halting pace, hard to follow.... [A] surprising climax.
Publishers Weekly
Multiple story lines weave a complicated web in this psychological thriller from Italian author Carrisi. Forensic analyst Sandra Vega...receives a phone call insinuating that her photographer husband's death may not have been the unfortunate accident she believes it to be.... Verdict: With a lot of separate subplots, intricate details, and twists, this novel has plenty for readers to follow, but those who can keep up will be rewarded with a satisfying conclusion. —Madeline Solien, Deerfield P.L., IL
Library Journal
.
Masterful. With each chapter, THE LOST GIRLS OF ROME jumps from one plotline to the next, back and forth between the present and one year ago. Carrisi uses this device to full advantage, building suspense to almost unbearable (and perhaps supernatural) levels, all the way to a truly surprising ending.
Bruce Tierney - BookPage
A secret sect worthy of a Dan Brown novel, the penitenzieri are a group of rogue Catholic clergymen who...mete out justice on their own.... Could this be the story that forensic analyst Sandra Vega’s journalist-husband was working on when he died?... This multilayered thriller was a best-seller in the author’s native Italy, but, while it may attract attention here, readers are likely to come away something short of satisfied. —Karen Keefe
Booklist
(Starred review.) With references to the Monster of Florence, a medieval serial murderer, and a secret Vatican sect, Carrisi's second literary thriller draws readers into a labyrinth of evil. In his derelict Rome villa, Jeremiah Smith lies comatose, "Kill Me" carved in his chest. The emergency responder physician begins working and then sees evidence that Smith is her twin sister's killer. With that, Carrisi's noir narrative descends into surrealism, soon drawing in Sandra Vega, police forensic analyst.... A powerful psychological drama.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.
Lost Hearts in Italy
Andrea Lee, 2006
Random House
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812971132
Summary
The Italian phrase Mai due senza tre–“never two without three”–forms the basis of Andrea Lee’s spellbinding novel of betrayal. Sophisticated and richly told, Lost Hearts in Italy reveals a trio caught in the grip of desire, deception, and remorse.
When Mira Ward, an American, relocates to Rome with her husband, Nick, she looks forward to a time of exploration and awakening. Young, beautiful, and in love, Mira is on the verge of a writing career, and giddy with the prospect of living abroad.
On the trip over, Mira meets Zenin, an older Italian billionaire, who intrigues Mira with his coolness and worldly mystique. A few weeks later, feeling idle and adrift in her new life, Mira agrees to a seemingly innocent lunch with Zenin and is soon catapulted into an intense affair, which moves beyond her control more quickly than she intends.
Her job as a travel writer allows clandestine trysts and opulent getaways with Zenin to Paris, Monte Carlo, London, and Venice, and over the next few years, now the mother of a baby daughter, she struggles between resisting and relenting to this man who has such a hold on her. As her marriage erodes, so too does Mira’s sense of self, until she no longer resembles the free spirit she was on her arrival in the Eternal City.
Years later, Mira and Nick, now divorced and remarried to others, look back in an attempt to understand their history, while a detached Zenin assesses his own life and his role in the unlikely love triangle. Each recounts the past, aided by those witness to their failure and fallout.
An elegant, raw, and emotionally charged read, Lost Hearts in Italy is a classic coming-of-age story in which cultures collide, innocence dissolves, and those we know most intimately remain foreign to us. (From the publisher.
Author Bio
• Birth— N/A
• Where—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Turin, Italy
Andrea Lee was born in Philadelphia and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University. She is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, and her fiction and nonfiction writing has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine and New York Times Book Review. She is the author of Russian Journal, the novel Sarah Phillips, and the short story collection Interesting Women. She lives with her husband and two children in Turin, Italy. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The fall from innocence of Americans abroad is a Jamesian theme, but here the Grand Tour has been replaced by international finance and the naïfs are married Harvard grads, posted to Rome. The husband, the scion of a shabby but genteel New England clan, disdains his Wasp heritage and worships his black wife; she is drawn to a predatory Italian, a “peasant” who has bullied his way to the helm of a corporate empire. The adultery plays out in first-class airport lounges and ornate hotel rooms, and Rome reprises its traditional role as the city of dissolution, “rich and coarse at the same time, like a mixture of sackcloth and brocade.” In chillingly urbane prose, Lee takes the full measure of her characters’ folly, as they prove faithless not only to each other but to themselves.
The New Yorker
Two handsome young Americans marry, move to Rome, and pursue interesting careers while having a daughter. The wife, Mira, also pursues an enigmatic affair with coarse and calculating upstart Zenin, a toy-manufacturing billionaire. As readers know from page one, the marriage has failed painfully, with Mira having gone on to marry an Italian named Vanni and given birth to two sons. Meanwhile, embittered ex-husband Nick lives in London with his new wife and their two daughters. Because Mira is African American and Nick old-line (if not rich) New England, the failure of their relationship also seems like a failure of ideals. The novel treads between the 1980s and the mid-2000s, as Mira and Nick's daughter heads to Harvard, alma mater of her parents. The portraits are incisive, the cultural insights fresh, and the deliquescent prose a pleasure to read, yet the novel can seem static. With so much foretold, there's little sense of revelation, and though one can applaud Lee (Russian Journal) for her restrained approach, what reasons seem to surface for Mira's deserting Nick just don't add up for this reviewer. One can't turn down Lee's first novel in 20 years, but if delicious it's still a puzzle. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Andrea Lee has created complex characters who have multifaceted emotions and motives–Zenin shows both coldness and tenderness, Nick is caring and bitter, Mira both loves and betrays. Which character do you identify most with, and which do you find most and least sympathetic?
2. When Zenin invites Mira on his yacht, she surprises herself and Zenin with her sudden forward behavior. Lee describes the moment as Mira “struggling not against him but against something in herself” (40). What motivation lies behind her action, and what effect does it have on both of them? What emotions are Mira grappling with?
3. When Zenin invites Mira on his yacht, she surprises herself and Zenin with her sudden forward behavior. Lee describes the moment as Mira “struggling not against him but against something in herself” (40). What motivation lies behind her action, and what effect does it have on both of them? What emotions are Mira grappling with?
4. How would you characterize the bond between Mira and Zenin? Is it mainly comprised of physical attraction, or is it a power struggle? Do you believe they love each other? Discuss how their relationship progresses over the course of the novel.
5. Discuss the theme of displacement—geographical, racial, and romantic—in Lost Hearts in Italy. Explore the ways Mira, Zenin, Nick, and other characters are foreigners.
6. Zenin is a character who doesn’t lack material goods, women, family, or career success, yet he lives in “a dark world of things lacking.” What is missing in his life? Do you think it is possible for Zenin to ever be content?
7. Dreams make frequent appearances throughout Lost Hearts in Italy. What is their purpose, and what insight do they shed?
8. The second time Mira goes to meet Zenin, she “feels as if she has come to the center of her life, to the center of a wood in which all the leaves on the trees are eyes. Or to the hidden center, the secret heart she has been searching for in the labyrinth of Rome” (116). What is Mira’s epiphany here?
9. When Nick finds out about Mira’s infidelity, he states that she’s lost her country now. What does his statement mean? What do you think is the point when Mira has gone too far for her marriage to remain salvageable?
10. What is the significance of the Bangladesh woman, Roushana, in Chapter 27? Compare and contrast her with the other women in the novel.
11. Nick has a theory that the more foreign places you live in, the less you absorb. Do you agree with this opinion? What have your traveling experiences been in relation to his statement?
12. How have Mira, Zenin, and Nick changed by the end of Lost Hearts in Italy, besides losing their naivete? In which ways are they more content, and how do they remain unfulfilled?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II
Mitchell Zuckoff, 2011
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061988349
Summary
In 1945, twenty-four American servicemen and women boarded a plane to see “Shangri-La,” a beautiful valley deep within Dutch New Guinea. But when the plane crashed, only three pulled through to battle for survival.
Emotionally devastated and badly injured, the trio faced certain death. Caught between spear-carrying tribesmen and enemy Japanese, they trekked down the jungle-covered mountainside and straight into superstitious natives rumored to be cannibals.
Drawn from interviews, Army documents, photos, diaries, and original film footage, Lost in Shangri-La recounts this true-life adventure for the first time. Mitchell Zuckoff reveals how the trio traversed the jungle; how brave Filipino-American paratroopers risked their lives to save the survivors; how a native leader protected the Americans; and how a cowboy colonel attempted an untried rescue mission to get them out.
A riveting work of nonfiction that brings to life an odyssey at times terrifying, enlightening, and comic, Lost in Shangri-La is a thrill ride from beginning to end. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—N/A
• Education—M.A., University of Missouri
• Awards—Distinguished Writing Award from the American
Society of Newspaper Editors; Livingston Award for
International Reporting; Heywood Broun Award; Public
Service Award from the AP Managing Editors
• Currently—lives in Newton, Massachusetts, USA
Mitchell Zuckoff is a professor of journalism at Boston University. He is the author of Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II (2011); Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (2009); Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend (2005) and Choosing Naia: A Family's Journey (2002); He is co-author with Dick Lehr of Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (2003).
His magazine work has appeared in The New Yorker, Fortune and elsewhere. As a reporter at the Boston Globe, Zuckoff was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for investigative reporting. He received the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Livingston Award for International Reporting, the Heywood Broun Award, and the Associated Press Managing Editors' Public Service Award.
Zuckoff received a master’s degree from the University of Missouri and was a Batten Fellow at the Darden School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Zuckoff (Ponzi's Scheme) skillfully narrates the story of a plane crash and rescue mission in an uncharted region of New Guinea near the end of WWII. Of the 24 American soldiers who flew from their base on a sightseeing tour to a remote valley, only three survived the disaster, including one WAC. As the three waited for help, they faced death from untreated injuries and warlike local tribesmen who had never seen white people before and believed them to be dangerous spirits. Even after a company of paratroopers arrived, the survivors still faced a dangerous escape from the valley via "glider snatch." Zuckoff transforms impressive research into a deft narrative that brings the saga of the survivors to life. His access to journal accounts, letters, photos, military records, and interviews with the eyewitnesses allows for an almost hour-by-hour account of the crash and rescue, along with vivid portraits of his main subjects. Zuckoff also delves into the Stone Age culture of the New Guinea tribesmen and the often humorous misapprehensions the Americans and natives have about each other. In our contemporary world of eco-tourism and rain-forest destruction, Zuckoff's book gives a window on a more romantic, and naïve, era.
Publishers Weekly
Zuckoff presents an engaging story about the survival and ultimate rescue of three American service people who crashed in the dense jungles of New Guinea toward the end of World War II. While that is exciting enough in its own right, what makes Zuckoff's story an essential read is the interaction between these survivors and the indigenous tribe they encountered after crashing. Humorous and at times dangerous misunderstandings arose between the Americans and the indigenous people during the 46-day ordeal in the jungle. The tribe had never encountered white people before and assumed their "guests," including a young female WAC corporal, were spirits whose arrival fulfilled a prophecy of the end of the world. In a sense, this prophecy was true as after the rescue and the war, the Americans, Europeans, and Indonesians returned and changed the way of life that these tribes had followed for centuries. Verdict: This excellent book will be enjoyed by anyone who loves true adventure stories of disaster and rescue such as Alfred Lansing's Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. —Michael Farrell, Reformed Theological Seminary Lib., Oviedo, FL
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Lost in Shangri-la:
1. What would it feel like to be dropped, literally, from the mid-20th century into the stone age? How would you cope? Had you survived the crash of the Gremlin, what would be most difficult for you—pain, lack of food and water, personal hygiene, fear, waiting...and waiting for rescue?
2. Do the Americans find Eden when they crash into the jungle of New Guinea? What role does war play in the Dani tribal culture? If you've ever read The Lord of the Flies, is there a strange parallel here?
3. What are the attitudes of the Dani islanders and Americans toward one another? In what way do those attitudes change...or do they? Discuss what happens when the paratroopers arrive to set up camp.
4. The Dani had a myth that one day pale spirits would descend from the sky...and nothing would ever be the same. Were the natives better off after their brush with the modern world...or not?
5. Author Zuckoff traces the lives of the crash survivors in later years. How were their lives affected by their month in the jungle?
6. Zuckoff provides a great deal of historical exposition—on military gliders, the WACs in World War II, and the native islanders' customs and warfare? Was the background material interesting? If so, what did you find most enlightening? Or is it "information overload," a distraction from what might have been a more dramatic, sharply focused narrative?
7. Trapped in such an isolated location, waiting for a way out, there is little to keep the survivors occupied. Many spend their time wishing they were somewhere else. Yet, later, one of the survivors said the experience was one of the highlights of his life. How might you have felt? How difficult would it be for you to pass the time?
8. Question #7 brings up the age old query: if you were shipwrecked on a desert (or jungle) island what would you wish to have with you (aside from the basic necessities of life)?
9. Who among the victims, survivors, native hosts, rescuers do you admire? Or find most interesting?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Lost Lake
Sarah Addison Allen, 2014
St. Martin's Press
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250019820
Summary
The first time Eby Pim saw Lost Lake, it was on a picture postcard. Just an old photo and a few words on a small square of heavy stock, but when she saw it, she knew she was seeing her future.
That was half a life ago. Now Lost Lake is about to slip into Eby’s past. Her husband, George, is long passed. Most of her demanding extended family are gone. All that’s left is a once-charming collection of lakeside cabins succumbing to the Southern Georgia heat and damp, and an assortment of faithful misfits drawn back to Lost Lake year after year by their own unspoken dreams and desires. It’s not quite enough to keep Eby from calling this her final summer at the lake, and relinquishing Lost Lake to a developer with cash in hand.
Until one last chance at family knocks on her door.
Lost Lake is where Kate Pheris spent her last best summer at the age of twelve, before she learned of loneliness and heartbreak and loss. Now she’s all too familiar with those things, but she knows about hope, too, thanks to her resilient daughter, Devin, and her own willingness to start moving forward. Perhaps at Lost Lake her little girl can cling to her own childhood for just a little longer… and maybe Kate herself can rediscover something that slipped through her fingers so long ago.
One after another, people find their way to Lost Lake, looking for something that they weren’t sure they needed in the first place: love, closure, a second chance, peace, a mystery solved, a heart mended. Can they find what they need before it’s too late?
At once atmospheric and enchanting, Lost Lake shows Sarah Addison Allen at her finest, illuminating the secret longings and the everyday magic that wait to be discovered in the unlikeliest of places. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Katie Gallagher
• Birth—ca. 1972
• Where—Ashville, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina, Asheville
• Currently—lives in Asheville, North Carolina
Garden Spells didn't start out as a magical novel," writes Sarah Addison Allen. "It was supposed to be a simple story about two sisters reconnecting after many years. But then the apple tree started throwing apples and the story took on a life of its own... and my life hasn't been the same since."
North Carolina novelist Sarah Addison Allen brings the full flavor of her southern upbringing to bear on her fiction—a captivating blend of fairy tale magic, heartwarming romance, and small-town sensibility.
Born and raised in Asheville, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Allen grew up with a love of books and an appreciation of good food (she credits her journalist father for the former and her mother, a fabulous cook, for the latter). In college, she majored in literature—because, as she puts it, "I thought it was amazing that I could get a diploma just for reading fiction. It was like being able to major in eating chocolate."
After graduation in 1994, Allen began writing seriously. She sold a few stories and penned romances for Harlequin under the pen name Katie Gallagher; but her big break occurred in 2007 with the publication of her first mainstream novel, Garden Spells, a modern-day fairy tale about an enchanted apple tree and the family of North Carolina women who tend it. Booklist called Allen's accomplished debut "spellbindingly charming," and the novel became a BookSense pick and a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection.
The Sugar Queen followed in 2008, The Girl Who Chased the Moon in 2009, The Peach Keeper in 2011; and Lost Lake in 2014. Allen's 2015 novel First Frost returned to some of her charaters in Garden Spells.
Since then, Allen has continued to serve heaping helpings of the fantastic and the familiar in fiction she describes as "Southern-fried magic realism." Clearly, it's a recipe readers are happy to eat up as fast as she can dish it out.
Extras
From a 2007 Barnes and Noble interview:
• I love food. The comforting and sensual nature of food always seems to find its way into what I write. Garden Spells involves edible flowers. My book out in 2008 involves southern and rural candies. Book three, barbeque. But, you know what? I'm a horrible cook.
• In college I worked for a catalog company, taking orders over the phone. Occasionally celebrities would call in their own orders. My brush with celebrity? I took Bob Barker's order.
• I was a Star Wars fanatic when I was a kid. I have the closet full of memorabilia to prove it — action figures, trading cards, comic books, notebooks with ‘Mrs. Mark Hamill' written all over the pages. I can't believe I just admitted that.
• While I was writing this, a hummingbird came to check out the trumpet vine outside my open window. I stopped typing and sat very still, mesmerized, my hands frozen on the keys, until it flew away. I looked back to my computer and ten minutes had passed in a flash.
• I love being a writer.
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
Every book I've ever read has influenced me in some way. Paddington Bear books and Beverly Cleary in elementary school. Nancy Drew and Judy Blume in middle school. The sci-fi fantasy of my teens. The endless stream of paperback romances I devoured as I got older. Studying world literature and major movements in college. Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I'm a work in progress. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Allen is the master of magical details and plots that combine a fairy-tale sensibility with character-driven pathos. This imaginative, lyrical novel is an intricate web of magical misfits, Southern gothic charm and the power of new possibilities, both romantic and redemptive.
NPR
It is always a pleasure to read Allen’s work. Her signature magical touches are something readers anticipate. They will not be disappointed with this story…There’s nothing like a little "Allen magic" sprinkled on a book to make it a fascinating reading experience to be savored.
Wichita Falls Times Record News
Allen's work is such a treat…Like a cook who seasons just so, she adds flavor but not too much, and serves a satisfying literary meal without making you overstuffed…Lost Lake is a delightful way to spend some time this winter.
Durham Herald-Sun
A romantic and dreamy story of love and second chances.
Asheville Citizen-Times
Sarah Addison Allen delivers a feel-good story with touches of magic.
Entertainment Weekly
All of the magic of Allen's previous books is present in this latest treasure, a feast of words. The author has the ability to capture the soul of her characters and make them relatable to every reader. This is a story of love, loss, grief, and starting over—it is truly a treat to be savored.
Romantic Times Book Reviews
Charming, bittersweet and ultimately hopeful, Lost Lake is a treat for fans of Addison's previous novels or those who simply love a good Southern story.
Shelf Awareness
[A] widow and her daughter find healing at a quirky summer resort.... The overused family business–versus-developers trope doesn’t particularly add to the story, and Allen’s trademark mystical touches are not as effective as usual, but her eccentric cast of characters and charming Southern setting will win readers over.
Publishers Weekly
A year after her husband's death...Kate and her eight-year-old daughter Devin leave the confines of Atlanta to explore Lost Lake in Suley, GA, and oh the adventures they have! A collection of quirky characters, all with wisdom to share, bring this story to life, and none shy away from the chance for even greater personal growth —Stacey Hayman, Rocky River P.L., OH
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A surefire star of feel-good fiction, Allen always manages to nimbly mask her potent messages of inspiration and romance beneath her trademark touches of mirth and magic, but this endearing tale of surprising second chances may just be her wisest work yet. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
Old wrongs are righted for a motley community of Southerners in this latest, semienchanted novel.... Tragic pasts abound...and each lakegoer is haunted to a different extent. It's clear from the beginning that healing is on the horizon for everyone. Light, sweet and sparkly.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The title of this book is Lost Lake, and the theme of loss runs throughout the entire narrative.
What did you think the titular lake’s name meant when you started reading the book, and did
that idea change for you over the course of the book?
2. Storytelling plays a large role in the lives of many of the characters in this story—and Kate, a
born storyteller, has the power to alter Wes’s perspective about his sad and troubled past just
through one powerful retelling. Who else tells themselves stories about their history, and do
you think all their stories are true?
3. Eby’s falling-down resort attracts misfits of all kinds, some more likable than others. Which
characters did you find the most endearing? And which, inversely, alienated you? Were there
others who won you over by the novel’s end?
4. Sarah Addison Allen writes a sort of everyday magic into her stories that sets her apart, and it
seems to touch every character in a different way. Lisette experiences a heartbreaking sort of
magic, in the haunting companion who shares her kitchen and her silence. Devin, meanwhile,
experiences a haunting of sorts too—but one that feels far more innocent and hopeful. Why do
you think these two characters are the ones to experience ghosts firsthand? What sets them
apart from their compatriots at the lake?
5. Other characters, like Kate and Eby, experience their life’s magic as a sort of enchantment,
unpredictable and yet not unpleasant. Did that carry over to you as you were reading it? Did
the characters’ easy acceptance of day-to-day magical happenings make it easier for you to
believe in them too?
6. The art from the postcards of Lost Lake hold great meaning to those who see them. Would any
of them make you want to visit Eby’s home? What did you think of the last one that shows a
young and in love Eby and George? Were they pictured the way you’d visualized them?
7. What was your view of Wes before you read the letter he finally shared with Kate? How did that
change when you learned what he had done all those years ago?
8. The women in Kate’s extended family are all too experienced with widowhood. Eby calls it the
"Morris curse." But all of the widows react very differently to their tragedies. What is it about
some of the Morris women that makes them especially vulnerable to losing themselves in grief?
What, do you think, would have happened to Kate and Devin had Kate never ‘woken up’ from
her own sorrow?
9. Eby says that if "we measured life in the things that almost happened, we wouldn’t get
anywhere." Do you agree? You may wish to talk about your own fateful "almosts" as well.
10. At the end of the book, Eby is bound for Europe again, traveling for the first time since her
honeymoon. What do you think draws her back there, and what do you imagine she might send
or bring home from her travels?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Lost Man
Jane Harper, 2019
Flatiron Books
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250105684
Summary
Two brothers meet in the remote Australian outback when the third brother is found dead, in this stunning new standalone novel from Jane Harper
Brothers Nathan and Bub Bright meet for the first time in months at the remote fence line separating their cattle ranches in the lonely outback.
Their third brother, Cameron, lies dead at their feet.
In an isolated belt of Australia, their homes a three-hour drive apart, the brothers were one another’s nearest neighbors. Cameron was the middle child, the one who ran the family homestead. But something made him head out alone under the unrelenting sun.
Nathan, Bub and Nathan’s son return to Cameron’s ranch and to those left behind by his passing: his wife, his daughters, and his mother, as well as their long-time employee and two recently hired seasonal workers.
While they grieve Cameron’s loss, suspicion starts to take hold, and Nathan is forced to examine secrets the family would rather leave in the past. Because if someone forced Cameron to his death, the isolation of the outback leaves few suspects.
A powerful and brutal story of suspense set against a formidable landscape, The Lost Man confirms Jane Harper, author of The Dry and Force of Nature, is one of the best new voices in writing today. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1979-80
• Where—Manchester, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Kent (Canterbury, England)
• Currently—lives in St. Kilda, Victoria, Australia
Jane Harper is an Englisn-born, partially Australian-raised writer, now living in Australia. She is the author of The Dry (2016/2017), Force of Nature (2018), and The Lost Man (2019)—all crime novels set in Australia.
Jane was born in Manchester, England, but her family moved to a subrub of Melbourne, Australia, where she lived till she was six. The family then returned to England, and Jane attended the University of Kent where she earned her B.A., in History and English.
Her first job out of school was as a journalist (yes, she actually had to pass a qualifying exam). She first worked for the Darlington & Stockton Times and, later, as senior news editor for the Hull Daily Mail, both papers in Yorkshire, England.
But Australia beckoned, and in 2008 Jane returned to her early childhood stromping grounds, again working in journalism—first for the Geelong Advertiser, then in 2011 for the Herald Sun in Melbourne.
After she had a short story accepted for inclusion in the annual Fiction Edition of The Big Issue (Melbourne), Jane turned to fiction writing in a serious way. In 2014, she signed up for a 12-week online creative writing course. The story she submitted for acceptance into the program turned out to be the beginning of her novel, The Dry. By the end of the three months, Jane had her first draft of the novel.
Making this almost a fairytale come true, Jane felt confident enough to enter the novel's third draft in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. It won the $15,000 prize in May, 2015, and Pan Macmillan paid a non-specified “six-figure” sum for a three-book deal.
Jane and her husband live in St. Kilda, outside of Melbourne, with their daughter. Jane now writes fiction full time. (Adapted from the author's website and news.com.au.)
Book Reviews
Harper's books succeed in part because she conveys how even now, geography can be fate. Heat and empty space in her work defeat modernity, defeat logic, technology and even love, throwing us back upon our irreducible selves. By the time she reveals the (brilliantly awful) back story about Nathan's banishment from the few human comforts of Balamara—the pub, for example—the reader feels frantic for their restoration. The final pages of The Lost Man are somewhat predictable, but Harper is skillful enough, a prickly, smart, effective storyteller, that it doesn't matter. She's often cynical, but always humane. Book by book, she's creating her own vivid and complex account of the outback, and its people who live where people don't live.
Charles Finch - New York Times Book Review
If you liked The Dry, you'll love it. The Lost Man is an even better book, gripping right to the end. This terrific piece of outback noir opens with the discovery of a body.… Harper… paints the menacing landscape brilliantly. The book's title could easily relate to several of the male characters. This engrossing novel will have you thinking long after you've turned the last page.
Melbourne Herald Sun (Aus)
Fabulously atmospheric, the book starts slowly and gradually picks up pace towards a jaw-dropping denouement.
Guardian (UK)
Her best yet; it's certainly one of the finest novels of any sort, not only within the genre, that I've read in many moons.… Harper adroitly blends the tension and brisk pace of a thriller with the psychological acuity and stylish prose of literary fiction.
Irish Independent
Engrossing…Storytelling at its finest.
Associated Press
Nothing about this novel is predictable. The characters are compelling, the plot is thrilling and the ending is so very satisfying. There’s something special about getting to the end of a book and figuring out the mystery. You’ll be left feeling content, a little shocked and desperate for more.
Marie Claire (Aus)
[A] crime masterpiece. The landscape and culture of this remote Australian territory are magnificently evoked as a story of family secrets unfolds. Rarely does a puzzle so complicated fit together perfectly—you’ll be shaking your head in amazement.
People
A nuanced but pulse-pounding thriller set in the heart of the Australian Outback, where two brothers find their sibling dead.
Entertainment Weekly
Harper’s sinewy prose and flinty characters compel, but the dreary story line may cause some readers to give up before the jaw-dropping denouement.
Publishers Weekly
[T]he Australian landscape looms large, and it's difficult to imagine the events in this novel playing out the same way anywhere else. Verdict: Even if readers guess why Cam died, they're likely to be kept guessing the how and the who until the end. —Stephanie Klose
Library Journal
The atmosphere is so thick you can taste the red-clay dust, and the folklore… adds an additional edge to an already dark and intense narrative. [A] surprising ending… reveals how far someone will go to preserve a life worth living in a place at once loathed and loved.
Booklist
★ [A] masterful narrative… in the middle of a desolate landscape… where the effects of long-term isolation are always a concern. The mystery… will leave readers reeling, and the final reveal is a heartbreaker. A twisty slow burner by an author at the top of her game.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our GENERIC MYSTERY QUESTIONS to start a discussion for THE LOST MAN … then take off on your own:
GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers
1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?
2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?
3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?
4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?
5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.
- Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
- Are they plausible or implausible?
- Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?
6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?
7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?
- Is the conclusion probable or believable?
- Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
- Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
- Perhaps it's too predictable.
- Can you envision a different or better ending?
8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?
9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?
(Generic Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Lost Memory of Skin
Russell Banks, 2011
HarperCollins
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061857638
Summary
Suspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the center of Russell Banks’s uncompromising and morally complex new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known in his new identity only as the Kid, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders.
Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid, despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent, trapped by impulses and foolish choices he himself struggles to comprehend. Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies. A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research on homelessness and recidivism among convicted sex offenders. The two men forge a tentative partnership, the Kid remaining wary of the Professor’s motives even as he accepts the counsel and financial assistance of the older man.
When the camp beneath the causeway is raided by the police, and later, when a hurricane all but destroys the settlement, the Professor tries to help the Kid in practical matters while trying to teach his young charge new ways of looking at, and understanding, what he has done. But when the Professor’s past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men’s relationship shifts.
Suddenly, the Kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision.
Long one of our most acute and insightful novelists, Russell Banks often examines the indistinct boundaries between our intentions and actions. A mature and masterful work of contemporary fiction from one of our most accomplished storytellers, Lost Memory of Skin unfolds in language both powerful and beautifully lyrical, show-casing Banks at his most compelling, his reckless sense of humor and intense empathy at full bore.
The perfect convergence of writer and subject, Lost Memory of Skin probes the zeitgeist of a troubled society where zero tolerance has erased any hope of subtlety and compassion—a society where isolating the offender has perhaps created a new kind of victim. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 28, 1940
• Where—Newton, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—University of North Carolina
• Awards—John Dos Passos Award for Fiction
• Currently—lives in upstate New York
Russell Banks was raised in a hardscrabble, working-class world that has profoundly shaped his writing. In Banks's compassionate, unlovely tales, people struggle mightily against economic hardship, family conflict, addictions, violence, and personal tragedy; yet even in the face of their difficulties, they often exhibit remarkable resilience and moral strength.
Although he began his literary career as a poet, Banks forayed into fiction in 1975 with a short story collection Searching for Survivors and his debut novel, Family Life. Several more critically acclaimed works followed, but his real breakthrough occurred with 1985's Continental Drift, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel that juxtaposes the startlingly different experiences of two families in America. In 1998, he earned another Pulitzer nomination for his historical novel Cloudsplitter, an ambitious re-creation of abolitionist John Brown.
Since the 1980s, Banks has lived in upstate New York—a region he (like fellow novelists William Kennedy and Richard Russo) has mined to great effect in several novels. Two of his most powerful stories, Affliction (1990) and The Sweet Hereafter (1991), have been adapted for feature films. He has also received numerous honors and literary awards, including the prestigious John Dos Passos Prize for fiction. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] major new work…destined to be a canonical novel of its time…it delivers another of Mr. Banks's wrenching, panoramic visions of American moral life…This book expresses the conviction that we live in perilous, creepy times. We toy recklessly with brand-new capacities for ruination. We bring the most human impulses to the least human means of expressing them, and we may not see the damage we do until it becomes irrevocable. Mr. Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear on illuminating this still largely unexplored new terrain.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
This is bleak stuff, with flashes of humor that land like sparks on dry grass, and also pretty fascinating. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Banks may be the most compassionate fiction writer working today, and the Kid is only his most recent lens into the souls of seemingly decent men who do terribly indecent things out of ignorance, thirst and desperation in a deeply uncaring world. Balancing impressively on a moral tightrope, Banks never absolves the Kid of his actions even as he sympathizes with him.
Helen Schulman - New York Times Book Review
[L]ike so much else Banks has written, this novel is ambitious and often compelling—a book that works with important ideas about the way we're reshaping our lives in the Internet age, while being reshaped ourselves, spiritually, sexually.
Sue Miller - Washington Post
Lost Memory of Skin...may be [Banks] boldest imaginative leap yet into the invisible margins of society...a haunting book, made so by the fraught, enigmatic relationship of the Professor and the Kid. The contradictions that seem to split the Kid—his obsession with sex but innocence of it, for instance—are never resolved. Mr. Banks in not an apologist, only an observer; he has brought the novelist's magnifying glass to bear on figures we otherwise try hard not to notice.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
For his latest novel, the acclaimed author of Cloudsplitter and The Sweet Hereafter again takes inspiration from a sanctuary of sorts. "The Kid," a young sex offender, lives with other registered offenders (including a disgraced state senator) in a makeshift camp beneath a Florida causeway based on a real colony that was shut down in 2010. After a police raid, the Kid meets "the Professor," a pompous, rotund man claiming to be researching homelessness. He wants to study—and cure—the Kid in order to prove his theories about society. But just as the study commences, the Professor, claiming that his life is in danger because of past work as a government spy, turns the tables, paying the Kid to interview him instead. Bloated and remarkably repetitive, this is more a collection of ideas and emblems than a novel. Though the Kid remains mostly opaque, he's a sympathetic character, but the nature of his crime, once revealed, lets Banks off the hook and simplifies rather than complicates matters. Banks continually refers to the Professor's weight and mental superiority, the latter a contrivance allowing for long rhetorical passages into the nature of man, sexual obsession, pornography, truth, and commerce that come as no surprise. Most frustrating is Banks's almost pathological restating of his characters' traits and motives, resulting in a highly frustrating novel in desperate need of an editor.
Publishers Weekly
From his makeshift tent in the shantytown under the causeway, the Kid can see the sun rise over the city of Calusa and feel the Atlantic breeze riffling the royal palm fronds. But the dichotomy between paradise and the squalor of the encampment is not lost on him. The only area within the city limits that is more than 2500 feet from a school, park, or library, the causeway bridge shelters homeless sex offenders on probation with nowhere else to go. Living in anonymity, the damaged group runs the gamut from a politician with a penchant for little girls to this lonely, asocial boy, whose only sexual relationship took place in an Internet chat room. When the Professor arrives to interview the Kid for a sociological study, the Kid wants to trust the man, and we hope he'll be saved through human interaction. But the Professor has his own demons. Verdict: Multiaward winner Banks (Affliction) has written a disturbing contemporary novel that feels biblical in its examination of good and evil, penance and salvation, while issuing a cri de coeur for penal reform. The graphic language may be off-putting for some but necessarily advances the theme of illusion vs. reality in the digital world. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Banks is in top form in his seventeenth work of fiction, a cyclonic novel of arresting observations, muscular beauty, and disquieting concerns… a commanding, intrepidly inquisitive, magnificently compassionate, and darkly funny novel of private and societal illusions, maladies, and truths.
Booklist
Banks (The Reserve,2008, etc.) once again explores the plight of the dispossessed, taking a big risk this time by making his protagonist a convicted sex offender. He hedges his bets slightly: The Kid is a 22-year-old who got jailed for showing up at a 14-year-old girl's house,,,, Though there's plenty of plot, including a hurricane and a dead body fished out of a canal, the slow growth of the Kid's self-knowledge and his empathy for others is the real story, offering the only ray of hope in an otherwise bleak consideration of a broken society and the damaged people it breeds. Intelligent, passionate and powerful, but very stark indeed.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Lost Memory of Skin (Caution: PLOT SPOILERS ahead):
1. What do you make of the Kid? Do you find him sympathetic or unlikable? What is the nature of his sex offense? Does the punishment fit the crime?
2. What role did the Kid's mother play in his life and developing sex addiction? To what degree is she responsible or not responsible?
3. What is the symbolic significance of the Adam and Eve story? How does the story of Eden and the serpent tie into the Kid's sojourn in the Panzecola Swamp?
4. How do you feel about the Professor? In what ways is he similar to the Kid (starting with the fact that their last names are the same)? Is it difficult for you to get beyond his size to find him sympathetic—does his weight affect how you view him? Why might the author have chosen to create the Professor as an obese character?
5. Gloria, the Professor's wife, suggests that sex offenders are "just programmed to do what they do. You know, hardwired." The Professor disagrees, responding:
If, as it appears, the proportion of the male population who commit these acts has increased exponentially in recent years...then there's something in the wider culture itself that has changed..., and these men are like the canary in the mine shaft.... [It's] as if their social and ethical immune systems, the controls over their behavior, have been somehow damaged or compromised (p.125-hardcover).
Later, we learn that the Professor intends to cure the Kid of his pedophilia....
He intends to cure the Kid by changing his social circumstances. By giving him power. Autonomy. He believes that one's sexual identity is shaped by one's self-perceived social identity, that pedophilia...is about not sex, but power...about one's personal perception of one's power (p. 159-hardcover).
—Who do you think is correct? Is the Professor correct in his belief that pedophilia is a societal condition and curable? Or is Gloria correct in that pedophilia is hardwired into the brain and incurable?
6. What is the ongoing significance of Captain Kydd's treasure map? What is the Professor's purpose in telling the Kid about the buried treasure...and why does he provide him with a phony map?
7. Why do you think the Professor estranged from his parents? Why does he turn away at the last moment when he has driven all night to see them?
8. What symbolic role does weather play in this novel, especially the hurricane?
9. Do you believe the Professor's story? Do you believe he is murdered...or that he commits suicide? Does it matter? Why do you think the author has left his death an open question?
10 . The Writer tells the Kid whether something is true, or not, doesn't matter:
What you believe matters, however. It's all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don't believe something is true simply because you can't logically prove what's true, you won't do anything. You won't be anything (p. 398-hardcover).
a) Do you agree with the Writer's philosophy? Or are you skeptical—like the Kid, who says, "If everything's a lie, then nothing's true."
b) Where do you think Russell Banks comes down on the question? In other words, does the weight of the novel suggest that the Writer or the Kid is correct?
11. Why does the Kid shy away from, even reject, Dolores's maternal kindness?
12. What role do pets play in this novel? Why is the Kid so devoted to them? Is there a difference between his attachment to Iggy at the beginning...and Annie and Einstein later on?
13. What is the significance of the book's title?
14. Why are the three main characters referred to as the Kid, the Professor, the Writer—their names aren't used, although the secondary characters are named.
15. Why does the Kid return to the Causeway at the end? And why does he decide to move his tepee out of the light and closer to the overhang of the Causeway?
16. The kid makes a distinction between shame and guilt. He comes to the conclusion that he is guilty but that he need not feel shame. Talk about his distinction. Do you agree with his assessment?
17. Should the Kid have returned the money to the Professor's wife or not? Did learning, later, that the Professor left the family well provided for affect your answer?
18. What revelation does the Kid undergo at the end of the novel. What future do you see for him?
19. Some reviewers claim that Banks hedges the very issue he wants to explore in his book by not making his protagonist a hardcore sex offender—that, because the Kid has engaged in a lighter offense, the author hasn't truely grappled with the hard issue of habitual sex offenders. What do you think?
20. Has your understanding, or your opinion, of sex offenders changed after reading Lost Memory of Skin? Is their position as society's untouchables fair or unfair, deserved or undeserved?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Lost Night
Andrea Bartz, 2019
Crown/Archetype
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525574712
Summary
What really happened the night Edie died? Years later, her best friend Lindsay will learn how unprepared she is for the truth.
In 2009, Edie had New York’s social world in her thrall.
Mercurial and beguiling, she was the shining star of a group of recent graduates living in a Brooklyn loft and treating New York like their playground.
When Edie’s body was found near a suicide note at the end of a long, drunken night, no one could believe it. Grief, shock, and resentment scattered the group and brought the era to an abrupt end.
A decade later, Lindsay has come a long way from the drug-addled world of Calhoun Lofts. She has devoted best friends, a cozy apartment, and a thriving career as a magazine’s head fact-checker.
But when a chance reunion leads Lindsay to discover an unsettling video from that hazy night, she starts to wonder if Edie was actually murdered—and, worse, if she herself was involved.
As she rifles through those months in 2009—combing through case files, old technology, and her fractured memories—Lindsay is forced to confront the demons of her own violent history to bring the truth to light. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Andrea Bartz is a Brooklyn-based journalist and coauthor of the blog-turned-book Stuff Hipsters Hate, which The New Yorker called "depressingly astute."
Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, Martha Stewart Living, Redbook, Elle, and many other outlets, and she's held editorial positions at Glamour, Psychology Today, and Self, among others. (From the publisher .)
Book Reviews
[A]ccomplished debut…. As the story hurtles toward its dramatic conclusion, Lindsay realizes she can’t trust anyone, especially not herself. Fans of psychological thrillers will want to see more from this talented newcomer.
Publishers Weekly
★ [A] captivating psychological suspense novel full of moving pieces and is expertly paced. The tension is unmatched as the pieces fall into place, but not without the protagonist second-guessing herself.… [A] whip-smart and mysterious read.
Library Journal
★ A riveting debut with, yes, an echo of The Girl on the Train.
Booklist
[A]s much a portrait of post-recession Brooklyn hipster ennui as it is a thriller… also a reminder of how insufferable hipsters could be.… Readers nostalgic for… Molly-fueled ragers should enjoy the world Bartz creates here; those looking for a terse thriller might turn elsewhere
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Lindsay begins investigating Edie’s death after her catch-up dinner with Sarah. Would you have done the same or let sleeping dogs lie? What do you make of Lindsay’s compulsion to dig into Edie’s old case after so much time had gone by?
2. What made Edie so enchanting to Lindsay and the other residents at Calhoun Lofts?
3. How do Lindsay’s scattered memories contribute to the story? Did you feel she was a reliable narrator?
4. Which of the characters did you feel most connected to?
5. Do you think Edie was a good friend?
6. Why do you think Lindsay isolated herself from the rest of the group after Edie’s death?
7. Calhoun Lofts becomes a character in the story as much as any of the other people. Describe the effect the book’s setting had on you.
8. What do you make of Lindsay’s friendship with Tessa?
9. When Lindsay reveals what really happened during the Warsaw Incident, we learn about one of her most shameful secrets. Did it change how you thought of her? Why?
10. As the narrator, Lindsay is constantly picking apart and commenting on the social dynamics at play around her—trying to understand people’s motivations and intentions. Did you find that commentary relatable? What did it tell you about her character?
11. As Lindsay compares everyone’s recollections of what happened in 2009, she realizes there are many different interpretations of the same reality. Have you ever remembered a shared experience very differently from someone else? What happened?
12. Were you surprised by the ending? What did you think had actually happened to Edie?
13. Throughout the narrative, technology serves as both a memory aid and a marker for how different things are today vs. ten years ago. How do you use technology to document your life? How would you feel if, ten years from now, you could no longer access the photos and posts you took today?
14. The Lost Night is set in the present but centers on Lindsay’s life as a twentysomething, when she was out on her own with a new set of friends for the first time. How does her experience compare to that period in your life?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)