Fiction - Results from #1950

Mink River
Brian Doyle
Oregon State University Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780870715853

Summary
Like Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Brian Doyle's stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people.

In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There's a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime committed, and there's an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it's thinking.

It's the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
In addition to Mink River, Brian Doyle has published twelve books, including Grace Notes, Bin Laden's Bald Spot & Other Stories, Thirsty for the Joy: Australian and American Voices, and Epiphanies and Elegies. He edits Portland Magazine at the University of Portland.

Doyle’s essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion, American Scholar, and in newspapers and magazines around the world. His essays have also been reprinted in the annual Best American Essays, Best American Science & Nature Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Community is the beating heart of this fresh, memorable debut with an omniscient narrator and dozens of characters living in Neawanaka, a small coastal Oregon town. Daniel Cooney, a 12-year-old who wears his hair in three different-colored braids, has a terrible bike accident in the woods and is rescued by a bear. Daniel's grandfather, Worried Man, is able to sense others' pain even from a distance and goes on a dangerous mountain mission to track down the source of time with his dear friend, Cedar. Other key stories involve a young police officer whose life is threatened, a doctor who smokes one cigarette for each apostle per day, a lusty teenage couple who work at a shingle factory, and a crow who can speak English. The fantastical blends with the natural elements in this original, postmodern, shimmering tapestry of smalltown life that profits from the oral traditions of the town's population of Native Americans and Irish immigrants. Those intrigued by the cultural heritage of the Pacific Northwest will treasure every lyrical sentence.
Publishers Weekly

Stories that sing in many voices, "braided and woven…leading one to another," shape Doyle's debut novel.... Verdict: Award-winning essayist Doyle writes with an inventive and seductive style that echoes that of ancient storytellers. This lyrical mix of natural history, poetry, and Salish and Celtic lore offers crime, heartaches, celebrations, healing, and death. Readers who appreciate modern classics like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying will find much to savor here. Enthusiastically recommended. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Library Journal

The prosaic and the spiritual merge in a portrait of life in a small Oregon town. Doyle's debut novel makes heavy demands on the reader's capacity to suspend disbelief: In the Pacific Coast village of Neawanaka, a crow is an intimate confidante; a bear kindly steps in to save a human life; and the nature of time is somehow lurking in the nearby mountains.The humans who inhabit this place are earthbound folk, though, and Doyle's main point is to show how the mystical can influence otherwise ordinary lives.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Some have described the writing style in Mink River as: stream of consciousness, like a babbling brook, or a lullaby. What did you think of the style?

2. What are your thoughts on the structure of the story; did you like the alternating chapters, interwoven plot lines?

3. What role does the Oregon Coast play as a setting for the story? Is this setting essential? Why or why not?

4. What do you think of Cedar’s reply to No Horses about habits and people who helped him get through dark times? Based on your own life experiences, is there a piece of advice you’d add to what he says?

5. Which characters in the book show the “certain ferocious attention to things” that Cedar describes? What are some examples, and can you name ways this habit has helped those characters through dark times?

6. Story telling is an important activity for several characters in the book. Do you have stories within your own family that you have passed along? Why does the author seem to think that story telling is important?

7. How do you feel about how death of the various characters is portrayed in Mink River? Consider the characters’ types, how they died and how their experience just after death is described.

8. What did you think of Moses? Did you like the idea of a talking crow? What do you think of magical realism in general?

9. The Department of Public Works handled much more than city maintenance. Do you think there is a place for a department of public works of this nature within your own city?

10. Discuss the community of Neawanka: its strengths and weaknesses.

11. What do you think the source of Nora’s pain—she says it is “no hope”, what does she mean? Is her pain ever resolved?

12. Abuse is featured in the book, how do you think this difficult subject was handled?

13. Each character within the book is either struggling or searching. Choose a character and describe the struggle or search and describe also the resolution, if any.

14. How are music, art, and language important aspects of Mink River’s community?

15. Describe some of the themes presented in the book. Are there any that you relate to?

16. What do you think Worried Man will be able to offer his family and community as a result of his stroke?

17. Discuss the doctor’s life and his role in the community and his study of the Bible.

18. What happened when Sara’s baby first made a sound; what was the sound and what affect did it have on the family?

19. What was your reaction when Declan killed his cows? What did you think of the consequence, i.e. how the community responded?

20. Share any other impressions you have of the book. Does the author’s style remind you of any other authors? Does Mink River remind you of any other books?
(Questions courtesy of author and Oswego, Oregon, Public Library.)

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Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes
Kathleen West, 2020
Penguin Publishing
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780593098400

Summary
A wry and cleverly observed debut novel about the privileged bubble that is Liston Heights High—the micro-managing parents, the overworked teachers, and the students caught in the middle—and the fallout for each of them when the bubble finally bursts.

When a devoted teacher comes under pressure for her progressive curriculum and a helicopter mom goes viral on social media, two women at odds with each other find themselves in similar predicaments, having to battle back from certain social ruin.

Isobel Johnson has spent her career in Liston Heights sidestepping the community’s high-powered families.

But when she receives a threatening voicemail accusing her of Anti-Americanism and a liberal agenda, she’s in the spotlight.

Meanwhile, Julia Abbott, obsessed with the casting of the school’s winter musical, makes an error in judgment that has far-reaching consequences for her entire family.

Brought together by the sting of public humiliation, Isobel and Julia learn firsthand how entitlement and competition can go too far, thanks to a secret Facebook page created as an outlet for parent grievances.

The Liston Heights High student body will need more than a strong sense of school spirit to move past these campus dramas in an engrossing debut novel that addresses parents behaving badly and teenagers speaking up, even against their own families. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Kathleen West is a veteran middle and high-school teacher. She graduated with a degree in English from Macalester College and holds a Master's degree in literacy education from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Minneapolis with her hilarious husband, two sporty sons, and very bad goldendoodle. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
West’s humorous debut channels… competitive parenting and overblown school drama.… West successfully unpacks the problems of shaming and cancel culture with tight plotting and clean prose. [She] demonstrates a worthy talent for tragicomedy.
Publishers Weekly

The politics of high school…. Though the characterizations sometimes come a little too close to caricature, West has expertly captured the high school culture of today in a novel that is at times cringe-worthy and eventually hopeful. —Jane Jorgenson, Madison P.L., WI
Library Journal

A cutting and witty examination of modern parenting that excels in suburban relatability, West's debut novel will pique the curiosity of fans of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette.
Booklist

[S]harp, unflinching…. [H]igh school students… have to learn about kindness and mentoring, bullying and inappropriate behavior by judging their parents' and teachers' actions rather than those of their peers. An excellent, nuanced exploration of the world of high school.
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.)

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The Miracle at Speedy Motors (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series #9)
Alexander McCall Smith, 2008
Knopf Doubleday
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616880309

Summary
Investigating her latest case, Mma Ramotswe has to trek to a game preserve, where she rediscovers the breathtaking beauty of her beloved Botswana. She is there to uncover the truth about an elderly American traveller whose safari proved to be his last journey. What she discovers is a surprise to everyone concerned.

Meanwhile, problems are also brewing back at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency: Mma Makutsi has instituted the Complaint Half Hour in order to air her grievances—which works well for her until Mma Ramotswe decides to institute her own version. And life is no less complicated at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, where Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni—Mma Ramotswe’s estimable husband—has suddenly decided to mortgage the garage.

But without a doubt—and after several cups of bush tea—Precious Ramotswe will make sure, as only she can, that everything turns out as it should. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 24, 1948
• Where—Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)
• Education—Christian Brothers College; Ph.D., University
Edinburgh
• Honors—Commandre of the Order of the British Empire
(CBE); Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE)
• Currently—lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Alexander (R.A.A.) "Sandy" McCall Smith, CBE, FRSE, is a Rhodesian-born Scottish writer and Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. In the late 20th century, McCall Smith became a respected expert on medical law and bioethics and served on British and international committees concerned with these issues. He has since become internationally known as a writer of fiction. He is most widely known as the creator of the The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series.

Alexander McCall Smith was born in Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. His father worked as a public prosecutor in what was then a British colony. He was educated at the Christian Brothers College before moving to Scotland to study law at the University of Edinburgh, where he received his Ph.D. in law.

He soon taught at Queen's University Belfast, and while teaching there he entered a literary competition: one a children's book and the other a novel for adults. He won in the children's category, and published thirty books in the 1980s and 1990s.

He returned to southern Africa in 1981 to help co-found and teach law at the University of Botswana. While there, he cowrote what remains the only book on the country's legal system, The Criminal Law of Botswana (1992).

He returned in 1984 to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he lives today with his wife, Elizabeth, a physician, and their two daughters Lucy and Emily. He was Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh at one time and is now Emeritus Professor at its School of Law. He retains a further involvement with the University in relation to the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

He is the former chairman of the British Medical Journal Ethics Committee (until 2002), the former vice-chairman of the Human Genetics Commission of the United Kingdom, and a former member of the International Bioethics Commission of UNESCO. After achieving success as a writer, he gave up these commitments.

He was appointed a CBE in the December 2006 New Year's Honours List for services to literature. In June 2007, he was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws at a ceremony celebrating the tercentenary of the University of Edinburgh School of Law.

He is an amateur bassoonist, and co-founder of The Really Terrible Orchestra. He has helped to found Botswana's first centre for opera training, the Number 1 Ladies' Opera House, for whom he wrote the libretto of their first production, a version of Macbeth set among a troop of baboons in the Okavango Delta.

In 2009, he donated the short story "Still Life" to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project—four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. McCall Smith's story was published in the Air collection. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Before this touching case is solved—with the twist of folk humor that makes the whole series irresistible—there will indeed be miracles.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times

(Audio version.) This ninth "No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" novel is one of the strongest entries in a consistently strong series. Like its predecessors, it is a gentle, warmhearted mix of loosely interwoven narrative threads that reaffirm Botswana detective Precious Ramotswe's philosophy of serving others. The book also offers enough intrigue, mystery, and uncertainty to keep listeners guessing-particularly about what the title's "miracle" will be. The answer is at once surprising and wholly believable. As always, South African reader Lisette Lecat brings a perfect accent and intonation to her narration, making Smith's books a treat to hear. With a new BBC miniseries adapted from the novels coming to HBO, American interest in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency should soon be greater than ever.
Kent Rasmussen - Library Journal

(Starred review.) The ninth installment in McCall Smith’s beloved No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series finds Botswanan Precious Ramotswe musing upon more mysteries of life. —Allison Block
Booklist

Mma Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's foremost detective, witnesses a miracle, though not the one she was hoping for. In their deceptively quiet way, things are bustling at the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Mma Manka Sebina, an adopted woman from the village of Ootse who does not know her blood relatives, begs Mma Ramotswe: "Please find me a birthday, and find me some people." Mma Grace Makutsi, the formidable assistant who clearly has her heart set on becoming the No. 1 Agency's Chief Detective, arranges with her fiance Phuti Radiphuti, owner of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, to have a connubial bed-and what a bed!-delivered to her house. Mma Ramotswe's husband Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, the proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, is excited to hear Dr. Mwata suggest that, against all earlier medical opinion, he may be able to help the couple's foster daughter Motholeli to walk again. Although Motholeli has always accepted with rare grace the spinal injury that has kept her in a wheelchair, she can't keep herself from hoping too. The only cloud on the horizon is a series of spiteful anonymous letters in which Mma Ramotswe is warned: "Fat lady, you watch out!" If there are fewer funny moments than in Mma Ramotswe's previous cases (Good Husband of Zebra Drive, 2007, etc.), there's a deepening gravity and sweetness you won't find anywhere else in the genre.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions

1. After Mma Makutsi protests about the agency's address being “in care of” Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, Mma Ramotswe thinks about the meanings of the phrase. “Yes, we were all care of one another in the final analysis, at least in Botswana, where people looked for and valued those invisible links that connected people, that made for belonging” [p. 5]. Would you consider this idea central to the book? To which characters or events in the story does this phrase “in care of” seem most pertinent?

2. Mma Sebina comes to the agency in the hope that Mma Ramotswe will find her relatives: “Please find me a birthday, and find me some people” [p. 24]. So the novel begins like a Victorian orphan story—something like Jane Eyre—with a character seeking an identity. How else do the themes of family and identity arise in the novel?

3. Puso jumps out of the car when Mma Ramotswe mentions his Bushman background, of which he is ashamed [pp. 33–34]. She tells him, “You mustn't be cross with your mummy” [p. 35], and realizes she has called herself his mother for the first time. What progress does this family of two foster children and two nonbiological parents make throughout the course of the novel in strengthening their bonds of love and trust?

4. In Chapter Four, Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni discuss Mma Makutsi's impending marriage and the question of whether men should have to pay the bogadi for their wives [pp. 45-50]. What is unsettling for Mma Ramotswe about this conversation? What details help to create the quiet comedy of the situation?

5. In her visit to Mma Sebina's village, Mma Ramotswe tells the woman under the tree, “I am a lady first and then I am a detective. So I just do the things which we ladies know how to do—I talk to people and find out what has happened. Then I try to solve the problems in people's lives. That is all I do” [p. 71]. Is it true that Mma Ramotswe is “a lady first”? How relevant or necessary is the fact of her being a woman to her success in solving problems for people?

6. As in all of the books of this series, the land plays a silent but important role in the lives of the characters. Mma Ramotswe, watching rainclouds gather, thinks “we Batswana are . . . dry people, people who can live with dust and dryness but whose hearts dream of rain and water” [p. 76]. Why are conditions of the land and the weather so central for Mma Ramotswe? Is it ironic that the rainclouds, “stacked in towering layers; so sudden, so welcome” [p. 74], cause the disaster that befalls Mma Makutsi's new bed?

7. Mr. Polopetsi becomes a suspect in the case of the threatening letters. Does it seem that Mma Ramotswe has become less generous in her attitude toward him [pp. 89–90]? What character traits bring him under suspicion? When the writer of the threatening letters is revealed, Mma Ramotswe's assumption that the writer was a man [pp. 14–15] is proven wrong. Is it unusual that Mma Ramotswe was wrong in her thinking on this matter?

8. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni meets a doctor who promises him that Motholeli's paralysis can be reversed [p. 96]. What difficulties does this unexpected development cause for Mma Ramotswe? Why does she come up with the money, given her lack of faith in the treatment? How does she behave when Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni and Motholeli return home [p. 211]? What is exceptional about her handling of the whole predicament?

9. Why is Mma Makutsi reluctant to tell her fiancé the truth about what happened to the new bed? What does it suggest about their relationship that she doesn't feel she can tell him? Why is his eventual response surprising to her [p. 187]?

10. In most detective fiction, readers seek the identity of the criminal or the resolution of a mystery. Who are the criminals, and where is the mystery, in The Miracle at Speedy Motors? In what ways does Mma Ramotswe differ from most fictional detectives? How do plot and pace differ, and what unique features distinguish The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series from conventional mystery novels?

11. Reflecting upon Motholeli and the suffering of Africa in general, Mma Ramotswe considers that “fundamental unfairness seemed to be a condition of human life. . . . What could one say to the poor, who had only one life, one brief spell of time, and were spending their short moment of life in hardship? And what could she say to Motholeli?” [pp. 145–46]. Does she have words of comfort for Motholeli?

12. What qualities make Precious Ramotswe such an unusual person? How would you describe the quality of her insight or wisdom? Do you find her inspirational, and if so why?

13. In the delicate matter of the health of Mma Ramotswe's van, Mma Potokwane is uncertain of how truthful she can be. Do you agree with her list of the matters that, even between close friends, cannot be criticized [p. 148]?

14. Why is Mma Makutsi shocked at the letter Mma Ramotswe dictates for Violet Sephotho [pp. 202–03]? What do you think of Mma Ramotswe's resolution that “we must answer her hatred with love” [p. 204]?

15. What is puzzling about Mr. Sekape and his attitude toward his newly discovered sister? Why is he so excited if, as he says, he dislikes women [p. 184]? Once it turns out they are unrelated, does it seem likely that Mma Sebina will succeed in marrying him [pp. 207–08]?

16. What miracles does Mma Ramotswe observe, in place of the large miracle her husband has hoped for? What is the significance of the title [p. 213]?

17. A typographic design, repeating the word Africa, follows the novel's final sentence. How does this affect your reading of the ending, and what emotions does it express?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Miracle at St. Anna
James McBride, 2002
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616802714

Summary
Inspired by a historical incident that took place in the village of St. Anna di Stazzema in Tuscany and by the experiences of the famed Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Division in Italy during World War 11, Miracle at St. Anna is a singular evocation of war, cruelty, passion, heroism, and love. It is the story of four American soldiers, the villagers among whom they take refuge, a band of partisans, and an Italian boy, all of whom encounter a miracle — though perhaps the true miracle lies in themselves.

Traversing class, race, and geography, Miracle at St. Anna is above, all a hymn to the brotherhood of man and the power to do good that lives in each of us. It reveals a little-known but fascinating moment in history through the eyes and imagination of a gifted writer. Like The Color of Water, James McBride's stunning' first novel will change the way we perceive ourselves and our world. (From the publisher.)

Spike Lee directed a 2008 film adaptation of the book, starring Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, and Laz Alonso.

Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—New York, New York
• Education—Oberlin Conservatory of Music; M.A., Columbia
  University
• Awards—American Arts and Letters Richard Rodgers Award,
  1996; ASCAP Richard Rodgers Horizons Award, 1996;
  Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, 1997
• Currently—Bucks County, Pennsylvania, USA

James McBride's bestselling memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, explores the author's struggle to understand his biracial identity and the experience of his white, Jewish mother, who moved to Harlem, married a black man, and raised 12 children. His first novel, Miracle at St. Anna (film version by Spike Lee), followed a black regiment through turbulent events in Italy late in World War II. It was a book of considerable breadth and character diversity.

Readers may not know that the multitalented McBride has another dual identity: He's trained as a musician and a writer and has been highly successful in both careers.

After getting his master's degree in journalism from Columbia University at the age of 22, he began a career in journalism that would include stints as staff writer at the Boston Globe, People magazine, and the Washington Post. But McBride also loved writing and performing music, and at age 30, he quit his job as a feature writer at the Washington Post to pursue a music career in New York. After Anita Baker recorded a song he'd written, "Good Enough," McBride had enough contacts in the industry to spend the next eight years as a professional musician, writing, recording, and performing (he plays the saxophone).

He was playing tenor sax for jazz singer Little Jimmy Scott while he wrote The Color of Water "on airplanes and in hotels." Like the jazz music McBride plays, the book alternates voices, trading off between McBride's perspective and that of his mother. The Color of Water was a worldwide success, selling millions of copies and drawing high praise from book critics. "This moving and unforgettable memoir needs to be read by people of all colors and faiths," wrote Publishers Weekly. It now appears on reading lists at high schools and colleges around the country.

After the enormous success of The Color of Water, McBride felt some pressure to continue writing memoirs, or at least to continue with the theme of race relations in America. Instead, he turned to fiction, and although his second book draws part of its inspiration from family history, it isn't autobiographical. "My initial aim was to write a novel about a group of black soldiers who liberate a concentration camp in Eastern Europe," McBride explains on his web site. "I read lots of books and spent a lot of time researching the subject but soon came to the realization that I'm not qualified to write about the holocaust. It's too much." Instead, he recalled the war stories of his uncle and cousin, who served in the all-black 92nd Infantry Division, and began researching World War II in Italy—particularly the clashes between Italian Partisans and the German army.

The resulting novel, Miracle at St. Anna, is "an intricate mosaic of narratives that ultimately becomes about betrayal and the complex moral landscape of war" (the New York Times Book Review) and has earned high marks from critics for its nuanced portrayal of four Buffalo Soldiers and the Italian villagers they encounter. McBride, perhaps not surprisingly, likens writing fiction to playing jazz: "You are the soloist and the characters are the bandleaders, the Duke Ellingtons and Count Basies. They present the song, and you must play it as they determine.

Extras
• McBride has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Gary Burton, and the PBS television character Barney. He has also written the score for several musicals and currently leads a 12-piece jazz/R&B band.

• One of his most taxing assignments as a journalist was to cover Michael Jackson's 1984 Victory Tour for six months. "I thought I was going to lose my mind," he told USA Today.

• For a book fair, he performed with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band made up of writers including Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Ridley Pearson. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Following the huge critical and commercial success of his nonfiction memoir, The Color of Water, McBride offers a powerful and emotional novel of black American soldiers fighting the German army in the mountains of Italy around the village of St. Anna of Stazzema in December 1944. This is a refreshingly ambitious story of men facing the enemy in front and racial prejudice behind; it is also a carefully crafted tale of a mute Italian orphan boy who teaches the American soldiers, Italian villagers and partisans that miracles are the result of faith and trust. Toward the end of 1944, four black U.S. Army soldiers find themselves trapped behind enemy lines in the village as winter and the German army close in. Pvt. Sam Train, a huge, dim-witted, gentle soldier, cares for the traumatized orphan boy and carries a prized statue's head in a sack on his belt. Train and his three comrades are scared and uncertain what to do next, but an Italian partisan named Peppi involves the Americans in a ruthless ploy to uncover a traitor among the villagers. Someone has betrayed the villagers and local partisans to the Germans, resulting in an unspeakable reprisal. Revenge drives Peppi, but survival drives the Americans. The boy, meanwhile, knows the truth of the atrocity and the identity of the traitor, but he clings to Train for comfort and protection. Through his sharply drawn characters, McBride exposes racism, guilt, courage, revenge and forgiveness, with the soldiers confronting their own fear and rage in surprisingly personal ways at the decisive moment in their lives.
Publishers Weekly

Having conquered nonfiction with The Color of Water, which dwelled on the New York Times best sellers list for two years, journalist McBride takes a chance at fiction. He roots his novel in actual events, relating an encounter between the 92nd Division's Buffalo Soldiers and a little boy from a Tuscan village where a terrible massacre has occurred.
Library Journal

Although McBride touches on issues of race, atrocity, and evil, these diverse characters are able to transcend such human failings through love and faith. —Margaret Flanaga.
Booklist

McBride's careful treatment of the differences among his black characters and his measured understanding of the unsuspected perils of cross-cultural contact make the end of the book especially surprising. Schooled in hard lessons by the novel, readers may find its last pages anomalous and disappointing.
Stephanie Foote - Book Magazine

Italy, 1944. Credulous giant Sam Train, a rural Southern negro in the embattled 92nd Division of the US Army - strung out along the Cinquale Canal and ranged against Kesselring's 148th Brigade Division - is persuaded by smooth faux-preacher Bishop to rescue a young Italian child caught in the middle of a firestorm. Miraculously unharmed and convinced that God has made him invisible, Train disappears with the boy into the slopes of the Apuane Alps, reluctantly pursued by three members of his unit, and into an actual occurrence in the war: the massacre by German SS of the inhabitants of Sant'Anna Di Stazzema. This novel vibrates with tenderness and sorrow. Its prose is simple and often beautiful, told in an American vernacular which at its height attains the feel and quality of Ralph Ellison, and at its lowest ebb - infrequently, and all the more startling for its exception - a contrived Hollywood ring. It is a book which defies pigeonholing, ranging from unnecessary sentimentality to the absolutely startling - '... the man who was chocolate, the chocolate giant who wept tears of soda pop and made it his birthday just by turning his head'. This is writing which falls in places, but which carries itself, heedless of its own imperfections, with the energy and beauty of a song. Love, faith, brotherhood and equality ripple in the words: McBride, with fervour reminiscent of James Baldwin, constructs a narrative of humanity, struggling to create meaning from the vast forces of history.
Kirkus Reviews (UK)

Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think McBride chose to frame his WWII story with the post office episode that takes place in 1983? How does this narrative frame clarify or comment on the picture of the war it contains?

2. What knowledge of the African American experience in WWII did you bring to Miracle at St. Anna? How did reading the novel deepen your understanding of this aspect of the war?

3. In a fiery argument with Stamps, Bishop says, "So now the great white father sends you out here to shoot Germans so he can hang you back home for looking at his woman wrong.... The Negro don't have doodleysquat to do with this...this devilment, this war-to-free-the-world shit" [p. 147-9]. In what ways does the war reveal the racism and hypocrisy entrenched in American society? How are the black soldiers treated by their white commanders? How are they treated by the Italians? Is Bishop's cynicism justified?

4. Why does Train become so attached to the young Italian boy he rescues? What does the boy offer him that he's never had before? What does Train learn from him? Is the boy, as Train claims, "an angel"?

5. The novel is titled Miracle at St. Anna but several miracles occur in the book. Which of these is the miracle referred to in the title? What effects do these events have on those who experience them? Do you think McBride wants us to read them as divine manifestations of God's power or simply as remarkable occurrences?

6. Why does Rudolfo betray the Italian partisan hero Peppi, the "Black Butterfly"? What are the consequences of that betrayal? How is Rudolfo's treachery revealed?

7. Why does McBride tell the history of the statue's head that Train carries with him throughout the war? What does this history add to the story? Is it possible to read the entire novel as a complex elaboration of that statue's journey from a sixteenth-century marble mountain in Carrara, Italy, to late twentieth-century New York City?

8. In the Acknowledgments, McBride says that the book began when he was boy listening to his stepfather and step-uncles tell stories about the war. What struck him most forcefully was not the stories themselves but his Uncle Henry's pride in his service. In what ways does the novel—and its stories of the Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Division—reflect that pride?

9. Train, Stamps, Bishop, and Hector are four distinctive and vividly drawn characters. How are they different from one another? What varying attitudes do they have about the war? What larger themes does McBride address through the conflict between Bishop and Stamps?

10. In a moment of mistrust of the Italians, Hector thinks: "He was glad he didn't love anybody. It was easier, safer, not to love somebody, not to have children and raise kids in this crummy world where a Puerto Rican wants to kill an innocent woman for doing nothing more than trying to help him" [p. 138]. Why would Hector feel this way? In what sense is the entire novel about love and the risk of loving?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Miracle Creek
Angie Kim, 2019
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374156022

Summary
A thrilling debut novel for fans of Liane Moriarty and Celeste Ng about how far we’ll go to protect our families—and our deepest secrets.

My husband asked me to lie. Not a big lie. He probably didn’t even consider it a lie, and neither did I, at first …

In rural Virginia, Young and Pak Yoo run an experimental medical treatment device known as the Miracle Submarine—a pressurized oxygen chamber that patients enter for therapeutic "dives" with the hopes of curing issues like autism or infertility.

But when the Miracle Submarine mysteriously explodes, killing two people, a dramatic murder trial upends the Yoos’ small community.

Who or what caused the explosion? Was it the mother of one of the patients, who claimed to be sick that day but was smoking down by the creek? Or was it Young and Pak themselves, hoping to cash in on a big insurance payment and send their daughter to college?

The ensuing trial uncovers unimaginable secrets from that night—trysts in the woods, mysterious notes, child-abuse charges—as well as tense rivalries and alliances among a group of people driven to extraordinary degrees of desperation and sacrifice.

Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek is a thoroughly contemporary take on the courtroom drama, drawing on the author’s own life as a Korean immigrant, former trial lawyer, and mother of a real-life "submarine" patient.

Both a compelling page-turner and an excavation of identity and the desire for connection, Miracle Creek is a brilliant, empathetic debut from an exciting new voice. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—?
• Where—Seoul, South Korea
• Raised—Korea and Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Standford University; J.D., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in northern Virginia

Angie Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, where she lived until preteens until the family moved to the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, in the U.S. She attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Following law school, Kim worked as a trial lawyer at Williams & Connolly, a law firm based in Washington, D.C.

In 2019 Kim published her first novel, Miracle Creek. Her stories have won the Glamour Essay Contest and the Wabash Prize in Fiction, and have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Salon, Slate, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Asian American Literary Review, and PANK.

Kim lives in northern Virginia with her husband and three sons. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Like a Law & Order episode tossed into an immigrant’s bildungsroman, Miracle Creek has the heart of a Celeste Ng novel and the pacing of a thriller.
Hillary Kelly - Vulture

This stunning debut by Angie Kim is both an utterly engrossing, nail-biter of a courtroom drama and a sensitive, incisive look into the experiences of immigrant families in America.
Nylon

Engrossing.… Miracle Creek turns a courtroom murder trial into a page-turning exploration of parenting, experimental therapies, and the emotional toil of immigration.
Elle

Clear your calendars, put your phones on airplane mode, and get ready to hear the sounds of your heartstrings being plucked! This stunning debut is a family drama, courtroom thriller, and a mystery, all of which add up to one of the most incredible novels of 2019.… My two-word review: Jaw. Dropping. I was absolutely floored by this book! Reading it felt like opening a present I had been hiding in my heart.
Liberty Hardy - Book of the Month Club

(Starred review) A stand-out, twisty debut . . . Kim, a former lawyer, clearly knows her stuff . . . a masterfully plotted novel about the joys and pains of motherhood, the trick mirror nature of truth, and the unforgiving nature of justice.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review) Kim effectively uses her background as a trial lawyer, skillfully crafting her narrative by interweaving the stories of her characters, each of whom speak for themselves as the story progresses toward a surprise ending. With touches of mystery, legal thriller, and character-driven storytelling, where nothing is ever quite as it seems, Kim's promising debut will certainly have readers looking forward to her next offering.
Library Journal

Powerful courtroom scenes invite comparisons to Scott Turow, but Kim’s nuanced exploration of guilt, resentment, maternal love, and multifaceted justice may have stronger appeal for readers.
Booklist

With so many complications and loose ends, one of the miracles of the novel is that the author ties it all together and arrives at a deeply satisfying―though not easy or sentimental―ending. Intricate plotting and courtroom theatrics, combined with moving insight into parenting special needs children and the psychology of immigrants, make this book both a learning experience and a page-turner. Should be huge.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In the opening chapter of Miracle Creek, Young Yoo narrates her version of events on the evening of the HBOT explosion. What is the effect of this first-person narrative compared with the rest of the book, which is written in the third person? What are the details in Young’s story that create suspense? What does Young know that hints at the truth about what happened? What information is she missing?

2. Abe Patterley, the prosecuting attorney, calls Dr. Matt Thompson as his first witness against Elizabeth Ward. What dual purpose does Matt’s testimony serve? What does it reveal about Matt—what he believes about the effectiveness of HBOT and how he came to be undergoing treatments,as well as his personal life? What is Matt afraid of divulging in court?

3. What are some of the differences between American and Korean culture that the book explores? How are these experienced by Matt and Janine? By the Yoo family? How are the Korean characters stereotyped by others? How do they defy stereotype?

4. As the trial proceeds, the defense and prosecuting attorneys attempt to re-create the time line leading to the explosion. What are some of the lies and false assumptions contained in the testimony of witnesses and experts? What is the circumstantial evidence that led to Elizabeth’s arrest? How does each of the lawyers try to inﬂuence the jury?

5. Autism is diagnosed on a spectrum with a wide variation in symptoms, as evidenced by TJ Kozlowski and Henry Ward. In Miracle Creek, the mothers of autistic children are portrayed as having a wide range of beliefs about treatments for their children. What do Kitt, Elizabeth, and Ruth Weiss each believe about treatments? What are the circumstances of Kitt’s and Elizabeth’s lives that inﬂuence their behavior?

6. On the day of the explosion, as well as during the trial, many of the characters make decisions that ultimately change the course of their lives. What are some of these decisions? How might things have turned out differently if, for example, Matt hadn’t bought cigarettes, or Janine hadn’t gone to see Mary?

7. Pak Young is described as a "wild goose father," a man who remains in Korea to work while his wife and children move abroad for better education. Pak will make any sacrifice for Mary. Who are the other fathers in the story and what are their relationships with their wives and children? What is the picture of fatherhood that emerges?

8. What is the reality of being the mother of a special needs child? How do Elizabeth, Teresa, and Kitt each cope with the daily demands of care giving? Where do they find support? What are their relationships with each other? Elizabeth, in particular, devotes herself to Henry. What is her motivation for constantly seeking new therapies, some of which are painful and possibly harmful? How does Kitt feel about Elizabeth’s treatment of Henry? What does Elizabeth realize as she watches the video of Henry? Why does she take the drastic action she takes at the end of the novel?

9. Several small and seemingly insignificant objects are important to the development of the book’s characters and the unfolding of the plot—for example, Janine’s wok and the balloons. What are some of the others and the purposes they serve?

10. Each of the main characters feels guilty about something he or she did or failed to do. Why is Young relieved on the first day of the trial when the judge announces, "Docket number 49621,Commonwealth of Virginia versus Elizabeth Ward"? What are Pak and Young, Matt and Janine,hiding from Abe Patterley? At the book’s conclusion, is there anyone who can be described as completely innocent? Did any good come of the tragedy?

11. What brought Young and Pak from Seoul to Baltimore and, ultimately, to Miracle Creek? What is Young’s first impression of the United States and its citizens? How were the Yoo family’s expectations of America different from the realities? How were Young, Pak, and Mary different as individuals and as a family before they immigrated?

12. As Day Three of the trial ends, Young and Matt are each determined to learn the truth about what their spouses have been hiding. What has Young discovered that causes her to doubt Pak? Why does Pak continue to lie to her? What has Matt discovered about Janine? What lies do Matt and Janine persist in telling each other?

13. On Day Four of the trial, Abe introduces as evidence "a blow-up of notepad paper, phrases scrawled everywhere," taken from Elizabeth’s house after the explosion. In particular, there are five phrases on the page, highlighted in yellow: I can’t do this anymore; I need my life back; It needs to end TODAY!!; Henry = victim? How?; and NO MORE HBOT, which has been circled several times. What was Elizabeth’s frame of mind when she wrote these notes to herself? What is the truth about the last day of Henry’s life?

14. Shannon and Abe appear to be skillful and highly ethical attorneys. In order to do their jobs, they have no choice but to believe their witnesses as they build their cases. Do either of them doubt any of the information they’ve been given? What tactics do each of them use to inﬂuence the jury? Which one of them seems closer to winning the case when Elizabeth’s disappearance puts an end to the trial?

15. What is the chain of events that turns Mary’s teenaged feelings of anger and humiliation into the actions she takes on the night of the explosion? How does Pak rationalize his plan for saving her? Should Matt and Janine have been held accountable for how they treated her?

16. Were you surprised to discover the identity of the person who set the fire? Do you view what that person did as murder? Was that person’s sentence fair? How about the sentences of the others?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Miranda and Caliban
Jacqueline Carey, 2017
Tom Doherty Assoc.
pp. 352
ISBN-13: 9780765386793

Summary
A lovely girl grows up in isolation where her father, a powerful magus, has spirited them to in order to keep them safe.

We all know the tale of Prospero's quest for revenge, but what of Miranda? Or Caliban, the so-called savage Prospero chained to his will?

In this incredible retelling of the fantastical tale, Jacqueline Carey shows readers the other side of the coin—the dutiful and tenderhearted Miranda, who loves her father but is terribly lonely.

And Caliban, the strange and feral boy Prospero has bewitched to serve him. The two find solace and companionship in each other as Prospero weaves his magic and dreams of revenge.

Always under Prospero’s jealous eye, Miranda and Caliban battle the dark, unknowable forces that bind them to the island even as the pangs of adolescence create a new awareness of each other and their doomed relationship.

Miranda and Caliban is bestselling fantasy author Jacqueline Carey’s gorgeous retelling of The Tempest. With hypnotic prose and a wild imagination, Carey explores the themes of twisted love and unchecked power that lie at the heart of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, while serving up a fresh take on the play's iconic characters. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth— October 9, 1964
• Where—Highland Park, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Lake Forest College
• Awards—Locust Award-Best First Novel
• Currently—lives in western Michigan

Jacqueline Carey is the author of the New York Times bestselling Kushiel's Legacy series, beginning with Kushiel's Dart, Kushiel's Chosen and Kushiel's Avatar, The Sundering epic fantasy duology, postmodern fables "Santa Olivia" and "Saints Astray," and the Agent of Hel contemporary fantasy series. Carey lives in west Michigan. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
(Starred review.) Carey turns Shakespeare’s Tempest on its head…with this brilliant deconstruction.… The foreordained pattern of the play mixes beautifully with Carey’s intricate characterization and eye for sensory detail, building mercilessly to dazzling, and devastating, tragic effect.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) In this stand-alone, Carey evokes the same stunning worldbuilding and imagery of her "Kushiel's Legacy" and "Sundering" series, as she stirs new emotions from an old story and reveals another side to Shakespeare's epic play.
Library Journal

Infused with dark magic, broken trust, and lost innocence.… Miranda and Caliban, both narrators with distinct voices, are given rich inner lives through Carey’s delicate, sensitive portrayal.
Booklist

[A]n eye-opening…back story of Shakespeare's The Tempest as a tale of star-crossed lovers. [Carey]…transforms the largely passive Shakespearean Miranda into a dutiful yet dignified and ultimately tragic figure.… Intriguing and impressive.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use these LitLovers talking points to help start your discussion for Miranda and Caliban…then take off on your own:

1. While it's not necessary, it would be helpful to read The Tempest by Shakespeare to determine how Jacqueline Carey has reimagined the original. If you are all ready familiar with the play, what alterations has Carey made in the bard's characters and plot.

2. How do you describe Miranda? Does her dutifulness to her father make her seem passive to you?

3. Talk about Prospero, the island's god-like character, who in Shakespeare's play is kind and wise. How does Carey portray him in her version? In what way does Prospero view his daughter as a tool for his own purposes? How is he blinded by prejudice to Caliban?

4. Given his bestial appearance and behavior, what attracts Miranda to Caliban? What does she see in him at first, which, of course, later blossoms under her tutelage. What does she learn from Caliban about her father and his plans for her?

5. What is Prospero motivations for capturing and civilizing Caliban? What are his intentions for the boy?

6. Discuss the role of vengeance in this story?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Mirror & the Light (Wolf Hall Trilogy, 3)
Hilary Mantel, 2020
Henry Holt & Co.
748 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780805096606

Summary
“If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?”

With The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with her peerless, Booker Prize-winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.

She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.

—The story begins in May 1536—
Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner.

As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour.

Cromwell, a man with only his wits to rely on, has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to the breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. All of England lies at his feet, ripe for innovation and religious reform.

But as fortune’s wheel turns, Cromwell’s enemies are gathering in the shadows. The inevitable question remains: how long can anyone survive under Henry’s cruel and capricious gaze?

Eagerly awaited and eight years in the making, The Mirror & the Light completes Cromwell’s journey from self-made man to one of the most feared, influential figures of his time.

Portrayed by Mantel with pathos and terrific energy, Cromwell is as complex as he is unforgettable: a politician and a fixer, a husband and a father, a man who both defied and defined his age.. (From the publisher.)

Wolf Hall, the first book in Mantel's trilogy was published in 2009; the second volume, Bring Up the Bodies came out in 2012. Both books won the Man Booker Prize.

Author Bio
• Birth—July 6, 1952
• Where—Glossop, Derbyshire, England, UK
• Education—University of Sheffield
• Awards—(See below)
• Currently—lives in England

Hilary Mary Mantel CBE* is an English novelist, short story writer and critic. Her work, ranging in subject from personal memoir to historical fiction, has been short-listed for major literary awards.

Mantel's best known work is her Wolf Hall Trilogy, 2009-2020. She won the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, the series' first volume, and won the prize a second time in 2012 for the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. (Mantel thus became the first British writer and the first woman to win the Man Booker Prize more than once.) The Mirror and the Light, the trilogy's final installment, came out in 2020.

Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, the eldest of three children, and was brought up in the Derbyshire mill village of Hadfield, attending the local Roman Catholic primary school. Her family is of Irish origin but her parents, Margaret and Henry Thompson, were born in England. After losing touch with her father at the age of eleven, she took the name of her stepfather, Jack Mantel. Her family background, the mainspring of much of her fiction, is explained in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost.

Mantel attended Harrytown Convent in Romiley, Cheshire, and in 1970 went to the London School of Economics to read law. She transferred to the University of Sheffield and graduated as Bachelor of Jurisprudence in 1973. After graduating she worked in the social work department of a geriatric hospital, and then as a saleswoman. In 1974 she began writing a novel about the French Revolution, which was later published as A Place of Greater Safety.

In 1977 she went to live in Botswana with her husband, Gerald McEwen, a geologist, whom she had married in 1972. Later they spent four years in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia—a memoir of this time, Someone to Disturb, has been published in the London Review of Books. During her twenties she suffered from a debilitating and painful illness. This was initially diagnosed as a psychiatric illness for which she was hospitalised and treated with anti-psychotic drugs. These produced a paradoxical reaction of psychotic symptoms and for some years she refrained from seeking help from doctors. Finally, in Africa, and desperate, she consulted a medical text-book and realised she was probably suffering from a severe form of endometriosis, a diagnosis confirmed back in London. The condition and necessary surgery left her unable to have children and continued to disrupt her life, with continued treatment by steroids radically changing her appearance. She is now patron of the Endometriosis SHE Trust.

Novels
Her first novel, Every Day is Mother's Day, was published in 1985, and its sequel, Vacant Possession, a year later. After returning to England, she became the film critic of The Spectator and a reviewer for a number of papers and magazines in Britain and the United States.

Her novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), which drew on her first-hand experience in Saudi Arabia, uses a threatening clash of values between the neighbours in a city apartment block to explore the tensions between Muslim culture and the liberal West.

Her Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize-winning novel Fludd is set in 1956 in a fictitious northern village called Fetherhoughton, centring on a Roman Catholic church and a convent. A mysterious stranger brings about transformations in the lives of those around him.

A Place of Greater Safety (1992) won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award, for which her two previous books had been shortlisted. A long and historically accurate novel, it traces the career of three French revolutionaries, Danton, Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, from childhood to their early deaths during the Reign of Terror of 1794.

A Change of Climate (1994), set in rural Norfolk, explores the lives of Ralph and Anna Eldred, as they raise their four children and devote their lives to charity. It includes chapters about their early married life as missionaries in South Africa, when they were imprisoned and deported to Bechuanaland, and the tragedy that occurred there.

An Experiment in Love (1996), which won the Hawthornden Prize, takes place over two university terms in 1970. It follows the progress of three girls—two friends and one enemy—as they leave home and attend university in London. Margaret Thatcher makes a cameo appearance in this novel, which explores women’s appetites and ambitions, and suggests how they are often thwarted. Though Mantel has used material from her own life, it is not an autobiographical novel.

Her next book, The Giant, O'Brien (1998), is set in the 1780s, and is based on the true story of Charles O'Brien or Byrne. He came to London to earn money by displaying himself as a freak. His bones hang today in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. The novel treats O'Brien and his antagonist, the Scots surgeon John Hunter, less as characters in history than as mythic protagonists in a dark and violent fairytale, necessary casualties of the Age of Enlightenment. She adapted the book for BBC Radio 4, in a play starring Alex Norton (as Hunter) and Frances Tomelty.

In 2003, Mantel published her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, which won the MIND Book of the Year award. That same year she brought out a collection of short stories, Learning To Talk. All the stories deal with childhood and, taken together, the books show how the events of a life are mediated as fiction. Her 2005 novel, Beyond Black, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Set in the years around the second millennium, it features a professional medium, Alison Hart, whose calm and jolly exterior conceals grotesque psychic damage. She trails around with her a troupe of 'fiends', who are invisible but always on the verge of becoming flesh.

The long novel Wolf Hall, about Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell, was published in 2009 to critical acclaim. The book won that year's Man Booker Prize and, upon winning the award, Mantel said, "I can tell you at this moment I am happily flying through the air." Judges voted three to two in favour of Wolf Hall for the prize. Mantel was presented with a trophy and a £50,000 cash prize during an evening ceremony at the London Guildhall. The accounted for 45% of the sales of all the nominated books. On receiving the prize, Mantel said that she would spend the prize money on "sex and drugs and rock' n' roll".

The sequel to Wolf Hall—Bring Up the Bodies—was published in 2012, also to wide acclaim. It won the 2012 Costa Book of the Year and the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Mantel is working on the third novel of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, called The Mirror and the Light.

She is also working on a short non-fiction book called The Woman Who Died of Robespierre, about the Polish playwright Stanisława Przybyszewska. Mantel also writes reviews and essays, mainly for the Guardian, London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. The Culture Show programme on BBC 2 broadcast a profile of Mantel on 17 September 2011.

In September 2014, in an interview published in the Guardian, Mantel confessed to fantasizing about the murdering of Margaret Thatcher in 1983, and fictionalized the event in a short story called "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: 6 August 1983." That story became the title story in her 2014 collection.

Awards
1987 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize
1990 Southern Arts Literature Prize for Fludd
1990 Cheltenham Prize for Fludd
1990 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for Fludd
1992 Sunday Express Book of the Year for A Place of Greater Safety
1996 Hawthornden Prize for An Experiment in Love
2003 MIND Book of the Year for Giving Up the Ghost (A Memoir)
2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall
2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Wolf Hall
2010 Walter Scott Prize for Wolf Hall
2012 Man Booker Prize for Bring Up the Bodies
2012 Costa Book Awards (Novel) for Bring Up the Bodies
2012 Costa Book Awards (Book of the Year) for Bring Up the Bodies
2013 David Cohen Prize

She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2006 Birthday Honours and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to literature.(Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/13/2014.)

*Commander of the British Empire

Book Reviews
It is impossible not to admit that this final volume… becomes woefully labored. Thomas Cromwell is a marvelous prism and a phenomenally round character, but by the time we’ve had 1,700 pages of him, he is drastically overdetermined.… The Wolf Hall trilogy is probably the greatest historical fiction accomplishment of the past decade; the first two volumes both won Man Booker Prizes. But after Bring Up the Bodies the enterprise, like Henry, has put on weight and self-importance. The final book feels heavier with food and custom and ceremony; catalogs of saints' relics, clothing and wedding presents.… After the vast and painstaking narrative that has preceded them, the book’s final 75 pages may actually feel rushed, but the speed is artistically appropriate to the abruptness of the matter.
Thomas Mallon - New York Times Book Review

Wolf Hall, a decade ago, was a sensational character study that electrified an often-visited slice of history. The Mirror & the Light marks a triumphant end to a spellbinding story.
NPR

Breathtaking…. The plot here is shaped as meticulously as any thriller…. With this trilogy, Mantel has redefined what the historical novel is capable of…. Taken together, her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century. Someone give the Booker Prize judges the rest of the year off. Stephanie Merritt - Guardian (UK)

Majestic and often breathtakingly poetic…. What The Mirror & the Light offers―even more than the two previous volumes―is engulfing, total sensory immersion in a world…. As with the most powerful and enduring historical fictions, the book grips the reader most tightly when, as is often the case, the writing comes as close to poetry as prose ever may.
Simon Schama - Financial Times (UK)

A masterpiece…. A novel of epic proportions [that is] every bit as thrilling, propulsive, darkly comic and stupendously intelligent as its predecessors…. The trilogy is complete and it is magnificent.
Alexandra Harris - Guardian (UK)

This is rich, full-bodied fiction. Indeed, it might well be the best of the trilogy simply because there is more of it, a treasure on every page…. The brisk, present-tense narration makes you feel as though you are watching these long-settled events live, via a shaky camera phone…. Mantel has… elevated historical fiction as an art form…. At a time when the general movement of literature has been towards the margins, she has taken us to the dark heart of history
London Times (UK)

Hilary Mantel has written an epic of English history that does what the Aeneid did for the Romans and War and Peace for the Russians…. As Cromwell approaches his end, cast off by an ungrateful master, Mantel pulls together the strands of his life into a sublime tapestry.
Telegraph (UK)

Cromwell is a character for the ages…. The stunning success of the novels is in large part the result of Ms. Mantel’s skill in fashioning a voice and persona that, while never anachronistic, make Cromwell seem eerily contemporary…. Mantel’s genius is to make his 16th-century instincts, such as a willingness to decapitate anyone standing in his path, seem as plausible as his more familiar qualities.
Economist (UK)

Another masterpiece of historical fiction…. The Mirror & the Light is superb, right to the last crimson drop…. A complex, insightful exploration of power, sex, loyalty, friendship, religion, class and statecraft…. A stunning conclusion to one of the great trilogies of our times.
Independent (UK)

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The Mirror Thief
Martin Seay, 2016
Melville House
592 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1612195599

Summary
Set in three cities in three eras, The Mirror Thief calls to mind David Mitchell and Umberto Eco in its mix of entertainment and literary bravado.

The core story is set in Venice in the sixteenth century, when the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world's most wondrous inventions: the mirror.

An object of glittering yet fearful fascination—was it reflecting simple reality, or something more spiritually revealing?—the Venetian mirrors were state of the art technology, and subject to industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide.

But for any of the development team to leave the island was a crime punishable by death. One man, however—a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose—has a scheme he thinks will allow him to outwit the city's terrifying enforcers of the edict, the ominous Council of Ten . . .

Meanwhile, in two other Venices—Venice Beach, California, circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today—two other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret . . .

All three stories will weave together into a spell-binding tour-de-force that is impossible to put down—an old-fashioned, stay-up-all-night novel that, in the end, returns the reader to a stunning conclusion in the original Venice . . . and the bedazzled sense of having read a truly original and thrilling work of art. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1992
• Where—Katy, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., Trinity University; M.A., Queens University of Charlotte
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois

Martin Seay is the author of The Mirror Thief, his debut novel, published in 2016.

Martin grew up in Katy, Texas, a suburb of Houston. He graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio and lived in Austin, Texas, for a time. When he met Kathleen Rooney, an author and poet, they married, and the two moved around the country, living in Washington, D.C., New England, and Tacoma, Washington, eventually settling in Chicago. For a number of those years, Martin worked as a bookseller for a national chain. Since 2007, he has been the executive secretary for the Village of Wheeling, a suburb of Chicago. (Adapted from The Little Red Reviewer.)

Book Reviews
Audaciously well written...the book I was raving about to my friends before I'd even finished it.... while this novel seems on the surface to be a bit like Cloud Atlas (multiple perspectives, Russian doll structure), it’s more heartfelt, deeper, less of a pastiche. The book—in the end long, frustrating and slow—becomes a mirror....[but] does not contain [many] of... its own questions. This is not The Da Vinci Code for intellectuals. It’s more like “Howl” translated into Latin and then back again. Over 600 pages. It’s amazing.
Scarlett Thomas - New York Times Book Review

[A] wondrous debut, a deliciously intricate, centuries-spanning tripartite tale of money and mysticism.... Mr. Seay has conjured his own kind of sorcery, a sophisticated thriller that keeps the pages turning even as it teases the mind.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal

Transfixing.... The Mirror Thief is a startling, beautiful gem of a book that at times approaches a masterpiece.
Michael Schaub - NPR

Compared recently to the work of David Mitchell, Seay’s big, genre-ish The Mirror Thief is actually better than most novels by that author.
Flavorwire

Hugely entertaining.
Daily Mail (UK)

A bold American debut...hypnotic.... Frequently reminiscent of the ominous historical bulletins of Don DeLillo … with a plusher, plumper register, more redolent of Umberto Eco …Seay is clearly a writer of exceptional and eclectic intelligence. The Mirror Thief is always highly admirable.
Guardian (UK)

The weirdest and most ambitious novel of 2016 thus far...a literary, speculative, mystical masterwork.
Chicago Review of Books

(Starred review.) A true delight, a big, beautiful cabinet of wonders that is by turns an ominous modern thriller, a supernatural mystery, and an enchanting historical adventure story.... A splendid masterpiece, to be loved like a long-lost friend, an epic with near-universal appeal.
Publishers Weekly

A 600-page thrill ride across three centuries and two continents.... Part crime thriller and part meditation on poetry, with unexpected plot twists and references to famous figures as diverse as the French dramatist Antonin Artaud and Jay Leno.... An impressive feat of imagination.
Bookpage

(Starred review.) Grandly entrancing.... Shimmering with intimations of Hermann Hesse, Umberto Eco, and David Mitchell, Sheay’s house-of-mirrors novel is spectacularly accomplished and exciting.
Bookbrowse

Seay’s great challenge is ...[met with] varying degrees of success; often the story seems an exercise in stringing together index-card notes on various arcane subjects, and while the book is well-written...it still feels undercooked.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
The publishers have yet to issue discussion questions, so use our LitLovers talking points to help kick off a discussion for The Mirror Thief...then take off on your own:

1. The Mirror Thief contains three separate stories in three distinct time periods. Which of the stories most engaged you—and which characters? Which least engaged you?

2. Discuss how the three plot strands come together at the end. Does the author succeed in weaving the them seamlessly? Does he tie all the knots or leave some loose ends, questions that remain unanswered? Can you explain how the three sections finally link up?

3. How do mirrors function in this complicated novel, both as a metaphor and as a structuring device? An easy one, for instance—in a book with "mirror" in the title, one of the main characters is named Glass.

4. Stanley sees Adrian Welles's book of poetry as perhaps somewhat "goofy" with a hint of "Dungeons & Dragons about it." Stanley, on the other hand, is obsessed with it; for him it is a "map that will take him [to another world], a password that will unfasten the locks. How do each man's views reflect the essence of who he is? What do you think of the book?

5. Do you find the author's philosophizing a bit heavy? Does it bog the book down? Or do his ideas enhance the book for you and lend it intellectual heft?

6. Why is Bingo a fascist game?

7. One of the book's characters makes this observation about books and authors:

[B]ooks always know more than their authors do. They are always wiser. This is strange to say, but it's true. Once they are in the world, they develop their own peculiar ideas.

What might he mean by that remark? And does it pertain to The Mirror Thief—both versions: the book within the book, as well as the book in you hands.

8. Another character remarks:

It is a rare rhetorical gift that permits a man to speak knowledgeably about a topic and still deliver his audience into a state of enriched confusion. At times I think this skill chiefly defines the profession of magus.

Is the Martin Seay, the author, taking a sly poke at his own book? Does The Mirror Thief leave you in a "state of enriched confusion"?

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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The Mirrored World
Debra Dean, 2012
HarperCollins
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061231452

Summary
A breathtaking novel of love, madness, and devotion set against the extravagant royal court of eighteenth-century St. Petersburg, Russia.

Xenia is an eccentric dreamer when she falls in love with a charismatic singer in the Imperial choir. Though they adore each other, their happiness is overshadowed by the demands of the royal court, and by Xenia's obsession to have a child. When a tragic vision comes true, she withdraws into grief and undergoes a profound transformation, giving her possessions to the poor. Then, one day, she vanishes.

Years later, dressed in the tatters of her husband's mil-itary uniform, Xenia is discovered tending the paupers of St. Petersburg's slums. Revered as a soothsayer and a healer, she is feared by Empress Catherine, who perceives her deeds as a rebuke.

In this elegant tale, Dean reimagines the life of Xenia of St. Petersburg, one of Russia's most mysterious and beloved holy figures. It is an evocative exploration of the blessings of long and loyal friendship, the limits of reason, and the true costs of loving deeply. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1958-1959
• Where—Seattle, Washington, USA
• Education—B.A., Whitman College; M.F.A.,
University of Oregon
• Awards—Nelson Bentley Prize-Fiction
• Currently—lives in Miami, Florida

Debra Dean worked as an actor in New York theater for nearly a decade before opting for the life of a writer and teacher. She and her husband now live in Miami, where she teaches at the University at Miami. (From the publisher.)

More
Debra Dean was born and raised in Seattle. The daughter of a builder and a homemaker and artist, she was a bookworm but never imagined becoming a writer. “Growing up, I read Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jane Austen, the Brontes. Until after I left college, I rarely read anyone who hadn’t been dead for at least fifty years, so I had no model for writing books as something that people still did. I think subconsciously I figured you needed three names or at the very least a British accent.”

At Whitman College, she double-majored in English and Drama and graduated in 1980. “If you can imagine anyone being this naïve, I figured if the acting thing didn’t work out, I’d have the English major to fall back on.” After college, she moved to New York and spent two years at The Neighborhood Playhouse, a professional actor’s training program. She worked in the New York and regional theatre for nearly a decade and met her future husband when they were cast as brother and sister in A.R. Gurney’s play The Dining Room. “If I’d had a more successful career as an actor, I’d probably still be doing it because I loved acting. I understudied in a couple of long-running plays, so I was able to keep my union health insurance, but the business is pretty dreadful. When I started thinking about getting out, I had no idea what else I might do. What I eventually came up with was writing, which in many ways was a comically ill-advised choice because the pitfalls of writing as a career are nearly identical to acting. One key difference, though, is that you don’t have to be hired first before you can write. Another big advantage is that you don’t need to get facelifts or even be presentable: most days, I can wear my ratty old jeans and t-shirts and not bother with the hair and make-up.”

In 1990, she moved back to the northwest and got her MFA at the University of Oregon. She started teaching writing and publishing her short stories in literary journals. “Everyone told me I needed to either get a PhD or write a novel, and logically they were right, but —well, as I’ve mentioned - I have no instinct for doing the smart thing.” The Madonnas of Leningrad, it turns out, was begun as a short story and when she realized that the short form wouldn’t contain the story, she put it back in the drawer for a few years.

“In retrospect, I’m very grateful for my circuitous journey, that I wasn’t some wunderkind. I like to think I have more compassion now and a perspective that I didn’t have when I was younger.” (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
In Debra Dean’s skilled hands, history comes alive.... Though the world she creates is harsh and cold at times, it is the warmth at its center—the power of love—that stays with you in the end.
Miami Herald

In her excellent second novel, The Mirrored World, Debra Dean has composed a resonant and compelling tale.... Dean’s writing is superb; she uses imagery natural to the story and an earlier time
Seattle Times

In her second novel (after The Madonnas of Leningrad), Dean returns to Russia to reimagine the intriguing life story of St. Xenia, as seen through the eyes of the fictional narrator, Dashenka. A terrible fire in 1736 in St. Petersburg forces a young Xenia; her sister, Nadya; and their mother to seek refuge in Dasha’s childhood home. The girls grow up together and are ushered into society the same year. Soon after, Xenia falls in love with Col. Andrei Petrov and the two wed. Dasha is not so lucky, but is kindly welcomed into Xenia’s house, where she witnesses Xenia unravel, first over her difficulty in conceiving, then the deaths of her only baby and husband. When an unstable Xenia begins to relinquish her worldly possessions, Dasha becomes concerned, and Xenia suddenly disappears, only to resurface years later as a saint to the poor—much to the chagrin of the royals. For those familiar with the story of St. Xenia, this is a gratifying take on a compelling woman. For others, Dean’s vivid prose and deft pacing make for a quick and entertaining read.
Publishers Weekly

Xenia, a patron saint of St. Petersburg, is the inspiration for this melancholy novel depicting the lives of three girls in the 18th-century "Venice of the North." Nadya marries an older suitor and lives a stuffy, bourgeois life. Dasha, the narrator, marries a musico, an Italian eunuch who performs in the Imperial choir. Their life is unconventional and sad. Xenia marries Andrei, a handsome officer who sings in the same choir. Their grand passion ends abruptly with his death in a drunken fall. In her grief, Xenia becomes a Holy Fool living on the streets and ministering to the poor and afflicted. Verdict: Dean made a skyrocketing literary debut with The Madonnas of Leningrad and follows up with a meditative spiritual saga that honors its subject with an artful recreation of Xenia's era. Subtle period details and dramatic facts of the 18th century enliven this fictional biography though the stories move along at a stately processional pace. —Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA
Library Journal

Dean’s novel grows more profound and affecting with every page.
Booklist

From Dean (Confessions of a Falling Woman, 2008, etc.), a lightly fictionalized retelling of the life of the Eastern Orthodox St. Xenia, who left her comfortable home in 18th-century Russia to live as a "holy fool" among the poor. Xenia's cousin, Dasha, who grew up with Xenia and her older sister, Nadya, narrates Xenia's history. From an early age, Xenia clearly has an independent spirit. She is an eccentric who cannot help showing her often-passionate feelings about the world around her without restraint. She also has dreams that are particularly vivid and can "see" what others cannot.... The novel follows the factual particulars, but Dasha's narration remains at such a formal remove that readers never experience what makes Xenia tick as a saint or a woman.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The novel opens with a striking dream. What is its portent?

2. Talk about Xenia as a child, a wife, and a widow. What adjectives would you use to describe her? Was she too sensitive for the difficulties of the material world? How does Xenia compare to her sister, Nadya and her cousin, Dasha?

3. Talk about Xenia's relationship with her husband, Andrei. Can someone love too much? Is love itself a form of madness?

4. What about Dasha and Gaspari's relationship? What are the most important components of a successful marriage? Is passion necessary?

5. What are your impressions of life in eighteenth-century Tsarist Russia? How does Debra Dean bring this time and place to life?

6. After Andrei's death, Xenia tells Dasha, "I have let people starve that I might wear that lace. But I shall be naked before God." Was Xenia right to feel guilty over her privilege while so many of her fellow citizens starved?

7. Is Xenia blessed by God, or is she mentally disturbed, driven mad by inconsolable grief? Is it "crazy" for a person to give up all material possessions as she did?

8. Was there anything that Dasha or anyone could have done to help Xenia or was her transformation the true purpose of her life? Do you think Xenia found peace in her transformation?

9. Compare the Tsarist Russia of Xenia's time with our world and our own society. Despite the obvious differences, do you see any similarities?

10. How would a person like Xenia be viewed today? Is most of the modern world too cynical to believe in miracles? Do you believe in miracles? Xenia has become one of Russia's most revered saints. What makes someone a saint? What do you think of Xenia?

11. What are the challenges and rewards of long friendship? Have you had a friend who changed dramatically, and how did you handle that?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Mischling
Affinity Konar, 2016
Little, Brown and Co.
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316308106

Summary
One of the most harrowing, powerful, and imaginative books of the year" (Anthony Doerr) about twin sisters fighting to survive the evils of World War II.

Pearl is in charge of: the sad, the good, the past.

Stasha must care for: the funny, the future, the bad.

It's 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood.

As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain.

That winter, at a concert orchestrated by Mengele, Pearl disappears. Stasha grieves for her twin, but clings to the possibility that Pearl remains alive.

When the camp is liberated by the Red Army, she and her companion Feliks—a boy bent on vengeance for his own lost twin—travel through Poland's devastation. Undeterred by injury, starvation, or the chaos around them, motivated by equal parts danger and hope, they encounter hostile villagers, Jewish resistance fighters, and fellow refugees, their quest enabled by the notion that Mengele may be captured and brought to justice within the ruins of the Warsaw Zoo.

As the young survivors discover what has become of the world, they must try to imagine a future within it.

A superbly crafted story, told in a voice as exquisite as it is boundlessly original, Mischling defies every expectation, traversing one of the darkest moments in human history to show us the way toward ethereal beauty, moral reckoning, and soaring hope. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1978
• Where—raised in California
• Education—B.A., San Francisco State University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Affinity Konar was raised in California. She studied fiction at San Francisco State University and received her M.F.A. at Columbia University.

While writing her 2016 novel, Mischling, she worked as a tutor, proofreader, technical writer, and editor of children's educational workbooks. Her first book, The Illustrated Version of Things, was published in 2009

Konar is of Polish-Jewish descent and currently lives in Los Angeles, California. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
…Ms. Konar makes the emotional lives of her two spirited narrators piercingly real, as they recount, in alternating chapters, the harrowing story of their efforts to survive…What is most haunting about the novel is Ms. Konar's ability to depict the hell that was Auschwitz, while at the same time capturing the resilience of many prisoners, their ability to hang on to hope and kindness in the face of the most awful suffering—to remain, in [Elie] Wiesel's words, humane "in an inhumane universe."
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

There is a reason Mengele’s experiments are rarely discussed. Even in the context of the Holocaust, they are almost unspeakably horrible. Konar’s novel takes an unorthodox, though not unprecedented, approach to these horrors: She describes them beautifully, lyrically, in the language of a fable. Mischling is not for everyone, not least because it is excruciating to read about such pain. I do not remember the last time I shed so many tears over a work of fiction. And it will surely offend those who still chafe at the idea of fictionalizing the Holocaust. But readers who allow themselves to fall under the spell of Konar’s exceptionally sensitive writing may well find the book unforgettable.
Ruth Fanklin - New York Times Book Review

In alternating chapters, the girls chronicle their diametrically opposed mechanisms for coping with the horrors they experience.... Konar unveils Mengele’s atrocities gradually and only in glimpses.... It gets much worse before it gets better.... The novel’s second half takes place after the camp’s liberation. Konar constructs a sinuous plot from the chaos of the postwar landscape. The faster pace frees her from the burden of having the children quite so lyrically narrate their own suffering.... Readers will have varying levels of credulity about 12-year-olds, even precocious ones, forming such perceptions while being starved and tortured.
Lisa Zeidner - Washington Post

Konar does not dwell on the horrors, but she does not stint on them either.... But the gruesome plot detail leads to the biggest narrative chance Konar takes: to continue the twins’s story after the liberation of Auschwitz. She follows each to a semi-happy ending in Poland.... That Stasha can express that possibility feels hopeful and extraordinary.... I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to read a happy ending...when, in the balance of history, so many were slaughtered.
Rachel Shtier - Boston Globe

Horrible and beautiful.... It seems a refutation of Theodor Adorno's famous pronouncement that: "After Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric." Konar's novel is filled with exquisitely crafted phrases.... Nevertheless, the aesthetic achievement of Mischling cannot redeem the world after Auschwitz. It merely illuminates it, woefully, brilliantly.
Steven G. Kellman - USA Today

(Stared review.) Without sentimentality, Konar’s gripping novel explores the world of the children who were the subjects of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s horrifying experiments at Auschwitz.... Konar makes every sentence count; it’s to her credit that the girls never come across as simply victims.... This is a brutally beautiful novel.
Publishers Weekly

(Stared review.) Titled after the pejorative Nazi German word for "mixed blood,"...this searing work deepens our understanding of the Holocaust. It is highly recommended for that reason and for its stunningly original approach to a subject that would be too awful to read about if rendered in straightforward prose. —Edward B. Cone, New York
Library Journal

(Stared review.) Fiction of rare poignancy—and astonishing hope.... An unforgettable sojourn of the spirit.
Booklist

Konar is clearly most interested in language, in metaphor and invention. Surely, there are readers who will appreciate this. Some, though, might find that the poetry puts too much distance between the reader and the reality of Auschwitz. Konar approaches a difficult subject with artistic ambition.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion of Mischling...then take off on your own :

1. How did you experience this novel? Was it overly gruesome, or did you find rays of hope by the end?

2. Mischling has generated a fair amount of comment by reviewers who have difficulty accepting Affinity Konar's beautiful prose. There is a sense that her poetic writing masks, even separates readers from facing, the horror of Mengele's Zoo. A couple of reviewers mention a famous pronouncement by German philosopher Theodor Adorno in 1949: "after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric." What do you think? Is it immoral to write so poetically about such barbarous actions? Or is Konar's writing a way for us to bear witness to events that are otherwise too terrible to describe and read about?

3. Talk, if you can bear to, about Mengele. How do you come to grips with his monstrosity? How does Mengele eventually die?

4. What about Stasha and Pearl? How do they support one another? How are they alike (aside from appearance) and how do they differ? Consider, especially, their diametrically opposed coping mechanisms.

5. In the twins' narrations, were you able to discern whether they were recounting dreams or suffering hallucinations as a result of Mengele's injections?

6. The children in the Zoo are asked to call Mengele "Uncle Doctor." How does Stasha, in particular, perceive his occasional kindness and at other times his acts of viciousness?

7. What about Dr. Miri and the role she plays? As a Jew, she is wracked by guilt over the surgery she performs in Mengele's Zoo. What is her choice—does she have any? Is it possible to justify her participation in the horrors of Auschwitz?

8. What else do readers learn about the larger world of Auschwitz, which the children hear through gossip?

9. Before handing over her two girls, Pearl and Stash's Mama tells Mengele that Stasha has an imagination. What role does imagination play as a survival tool? By the novel's end, Stasha says emphatically: "I wanted the death of my imagination more than anything. It had no place in this world after war." Is she right? Could her imagination ever offer solace again?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Misfortune of Marion Palm
Emily Culliton, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524731908

Summary
A wildly entertaining debut about a Brooklyn Heights wife and mother who has embezzled a small fortune from her children's private school and makes a run for it, leaving behind her trust fund poet husband, his maybe-secret lover, her two daughters, and a school board who will do anything to find her.

Marion Palm prefers not to think of herself as a thief but rather "a woman who embezzles."

Over the years she has managed to steal $180,000 from her daughters' private school, money that has paid for European vacations, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and perpetually unused state-of-the-art exercise equipment.

But, now, when the school faces an audit, Marion pulls piles of rubber-banded cash from their basement hiding places and flees, leaving her family to grapple with the baffled detectives, the irate school board, and the mother-shaped hole in their house.

Told from the points of view of Nathan, Marion's husband, heir to a long-diminished family fortune; Ginny, Marion's teenage daughter who falls helplessly in love at the slightest provocation; Jane, Marion's youngest who is obsessed with a missing person of her own; and Marion herself, on the lam—and hiding in plain sight.
(From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Emily Culliton is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver for fiction and earned her MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was born and raised in Brooklyn. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Half of the delight in Emily Culliton's wholly delightful debut novel…lies in the way the book, like its title character, defies expectations at every turn…A theft, a fugitive: The plot, taken together with the novel's short, immersive chapters and the escalating risks that confront Marion and her family, locates The Misfortune of Marion Palm somewhere on the thriller continuum. It would make good airplane reading—or motel reading, for readers who link Marion's name and her swag to Psycho. But the book is also sunnier than that suggests, part satire and part Odyssey into the humbler precincts of Brooklyn…And through it all we get the spunky, homely, larcenous Marion, who in her temperament if not her background is like a…cousin to Bernadette Fox, the exasperated Seattle housewife of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, who also ditches her family. All of this makes for a witty, sneakily feminist kind of crime story.
Gregory Cowles - New York Times Book Review

Talk about getting away from it all. Marion Palm has pocketed $180,000 from her daughters' school coffers and gone on the lam, no disguise necessary. 'A homely woman,' she thinks to herself, 'is an invisible thing.' But what is her plan, and is she ever coming back? A whip-smart, thoroughly original debut (A Summer's Best Books).
People

(Starred review.) Culliton’s wonderful and sharp debut novel invites readers into the mind and motivations of an unlikable and remarkable woman.… Culliton’s prose is effortless and wickedly clever; its ability to condone and condemn in the most succinct way is a testament to the author’s storytelling and characterization skills.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) This debut novel has what many others lack: a wicked sense of humor. Verdict: With her mordant wit, deft plotting, and clever storytelling, Culliton is a young novelist to watch. —Leslie Patterson
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Oddly comic—think Miranda July—writing.… Culliton's assured and clever novel reads more like that of a seasoned novelist than a debut.… Readers who have wished the narration of The Royal Tenenbaums was an actual book need look no further than The Misfortune of Marion Palm. —Kathy Sexton
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. Why does Marion prefer to think of herself as a "woman who embezzles," rather than as an embezzler? What motivates Marion to embezzle? How does she justify her behavior? Would you characterize Marion’s embezzlement as a feminist act? Why or why not? To what extent does Marion relate to the other women embezzlers whom she reads about online? How are their experiences similar to or different from her own?

2. Discuss the theme of marital discord in The Misfortune of Marion Palm. How would you characterize Marion and Nathan’s courtship? When did the rift between them first begin to form? As you answer this question, consider their different backgrounds, their finances, their distribution of labor, and their approaches to parenthood.

3. Examine Marion’s adolescence and early adulthood. How would you describe her relationship with her mother? In what ways might this relationship have influenced her own feelings about motherhood? How would you characterize Marion’s experience at the cafe in SoHo where she worked in her early twenties? To what extent was this first job a formative experience?

4. Explore Ginny’s response to her mother’s departure. What frustrates her the most about how the adults around her respond to her mother’s disappearance? What is she hoping to get out of new friendships with older students? Why do you think Ginny "falls in love" with various boys over the course of the novel? In what ways are these responses a reflection of her age?

5. Discuss Jane’s fascination with the missing boy. Why do you think she starts to pretend they are spending time together? How does she respond to the news of his death? How might her fascination with his disappearance be connected to her confusion about her mother’s disappearance?

6. Examine the novel’s depiction of the different neighborhoods in Brooklyn. What does Carroll Gardens represent to Marion? What does Brighton Beach represent to her? Why does she decide to remain in Brooklyn after leaving her family, even though she knows she might be discovered? As you answer this question, consider how James Agee’s epigraph relates to the novel.

7. How would you characterize the administration and board of trustees at the school? Why do the members of the board remain nameless? To what extent does this characterization serve to satirize elite private schools — and, more generally, bureaucracy?

8. Explore the motif of secrecy in the novel. What kinds of secrets are depicted in the novel? Who keeps them? What are the consequences of the various characters’ secrets? Is secrecy ever defensible? Why or why not?

9. Examine the dynamic between Marion and Sveyta. Why does Marion accept the cleaning job that Sveyta offers her, despite the paltry pay? What are Marion’s hopes for her relationship with Sveyta? Why is she so fixated on going to the ballet with her?

10. Explore how Nathan adapts to life without Marion. How does his wife’s departure affect his approach to fatherhood? Why does he avoid leaving the house? Why do you think he feels more fulfilled blogging about his life than he did writing poetry?

11. Consider Nathan and Denise’s affair. What does Nathan hope to get out of the affair? What does Denise hope to get? Why does Denise eventually decide to cut if off? How does Nathan respond to their "breakup"?

12. Discuss the theme of parenthood as it is depicted in the novel. What does it mean to be a good parent? A bad parent? What obstacles do the parents in the novel face as they try to be good parents? At what point does the dichotomy between "good" and "bad" begin to break down? When answering this question, consider Nathan and Marion, Anna and Tom, the mother of the missing boy, and the wealthy Russian couple.

13. Explore the character of the detective. What is his personal life like? Why do you believe he remains unnamed? What motivates him to continue looking for Marion? When he finally speaks to her, why does he decide to inform Nathan that Marion is safe, without disclosing her whereabouts?

14. Discuss the conclusion of the novel. Is this the ending you were expecting? Do you believe that Marion will encounter more misfortune in Russia? Was Marion ever truly misfortunate? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Miss Garnet's Angel
Salley Vickers, 2000
Penguin Group USA
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780452282971

Summary
Stories magically unfold within this novel’s irresistible tale of Miss Julia Garnet, a schoolteacher who decides, after the death of her longtime friend Harriet, to take an apartment for six months in Venice. Soon overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the city and its magnificent art, Miss Garnet’s English reserve begins to melt away. For the first time in her life she falls in love—with an art dealer named Carlo—and her once ordinary world is further transformed by a beautiful Italian boy, Nicco, and an enigmatic pair of twins engaged in restoring the fourteenth-century Chapel-of-the-Plague.

Most affecting to Julia, though, is her discovery in a local church of panels depicting the ancient tale of Tobias and the Angel. As Julia unravels the story of Tobias’s redemption, she too strives to recover losses—not just her own but also the priceless painting of an angel that goes mysteriously missing from the Chapel along with one of the twins restoring it. His name is Toby.

And Miss Garnet herself may prove to be an angel, but nowhere in this haunting, beautifully textured and multilayered novel is anything quite what it appears to be. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1948
• Where—Liverpool, UK
• Reared—Stoke-on-Trent and London
• Education— Cambridge University
• Awards—judge, Booker Prize (2002)
• Currently—lives in London, UK

Salley Vickers is an English novelist whose works include the word-of-mouth bestseller Miss Garnet's Angel, Mr. Golightly's Holiday, The Other Side of You and Where Three Roads Meet, a retelling of the Oedipus myth to Sigmund Freud in the last months of his life. Her books touch on big philosophical themes of religion, art, creativity and death. She also writes poetry.

She was born in Liverpool in 1948. Her mother was a social worker and her father a trades union leader, both members of the British communist party until 1956 and then very committed socialists. She was brought up in Stoke-on-Trent and London, and read English Literature at Cambridge University. Following this, she taught children with special needs and then English literature at Stanford, Oxford and the Open University and was a WEA and further education tutor for adult education classes.

She then trained as an Jungian analytical psychotherapist, working in the NHS and also specialised in helping people who were creatively blocked. She gave up her psychoanalytic work in 2002, although she still lectures on the connections between literature and psychology. She now writes full time and lives in London.

Her father was a committed supporter of Irish republicanism and her first name, 'Salley', is spelled with an 'e' because it is the Irish for 'willow' (from the Latin: salix, salicis) as in the W.B. Yeats poem, "Down by the salley gardens" a favourite of her parents.

She has two sons from her first marriage. In 2002, her second marriage, to the Irish writer and broadcaster Frank Delaney, was dissolved.

In 2002, she was a judge for the Booker Prize for Fiction. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Novel-writing at its finest and most eloquent...splendid...the sort of book that effortlessly, like angels, or sunlight on Venice's rippling waterways, casts brightness and beauty into those private and most shadowed recesses of the human heart.
The Christian Science Monitor

Vickers has taken myth, religion, and secular humanism, and turned them into substantial life-affirming fiction.
Philadelphia Inquirer

This enjoyable, multilayered novel contemplates existential themes — religion, life, death and love and the ways in which these themes are juxtaposed insists on the harmonious closure which is achieved in both narratives.
Times Literary Supplement

What begins as a beautifully-written, gentle tale of a woman coming to life, slowly deepens into something more intriguing as Vickers takes up issues of good and evil, sexuality, religion and belief. Just as one can happily wander the streets of Venice until one finds oneself lost and fear sets in, the reader is lulled by her artful prose — until ensnared.
Oxford Times

As administrator of the Booker Prize for the past 30 years I am often asked whether I agreed with the judges of the year, or what I would have chosen ... Salley Vickers’ Miss Garnet’s Angel ... is easily the best novel that I have read in 2000 ... you watch Miss Garnet utterly changed in character and personality, and you marvel at how all this has been achieved, together with a depth of knowledge and projection of the story from the Apocrypha. It is also one of the best pictures of Venice I have come across."
Martyn Goff - New Statesman

Cleverly weaving her graceful rendition of The Book of Tobit, from the Apocrypha, through the main narrative, Vickers gives Miss Garnet’s revelations a weighty universality and timelessness. Although she is as clear-eyed and unsparing as Pym and Brookner when assessing her characters’ limitations, Vicker’s vision of human possibility is coloured by hope.
Atlantic Monthly

Miss Garnet’s Angel is a remarkable novel, whose genuine originality is the result not of flashiness but something far more substantial: imaginative intensity. This is not revealed in weighty digressions but distilled into suggestive images and precise relations. It is a vivid and fresh novel, deliciously entertaining and — which is rare for good novels — a happy book.
London Magazine

Guardian angels have attained such trendy status in American popular fiction that it's refreshing to read Vickers, a writer from across the Atlantic, whose subtle depiction of a life touched by a heavenly spirit carries not a hint of clich‚. Her debut novel is an unpretentious gem of a book that charts the late coming-of-age of Miss Julia Garnet, a retired English schoolteacher who spends six months in Venice after her lifelong companion, Harriet, dies. Venice has a magical effect on reserved Julia: a dyed-in-the-wool Communist, she relaxes in her antipathy toward religion, and even begins to visit the local church. There, she becomes enamored of a series of paintings that tell the story of the Apocryphal book of Tobit, a tale that mixes elements of Judaism with the religion of Zoroaster. In the story, young Tobias travels to Medea, part of the Persian Empire, to collect a debt for his father, blind Tobit. He is accompanied on his journey by a hired guide who turns out to be the Angel Raphael. As Julia learns more about Tobias's trek, she embarks upon a soul-altering journey of her own. She falls in love with an art dealer, Carlo, and befriends Sarah and Toby, twins working on the restoration of a Venetian chapel. When Toby disappears suddenly, after discovering a priceless Renaissance painting, Julia finds out that neither Carlo nor the twins are exactly what they seem—but that the Angel Raphael's watchful spirit will help good prevail. This touching novel, a ...[will appeal to] fans eager for a treatment of religious themes without the gooey sentiment that often accompanies the topic of angels.
Publishers Weekly

Beautifully wrought and impressively wise.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Salley Vickers' novel has been held up by numerous reviewers and readers as a refreshing and innovative alternative to much of what's out there on the contemporary fiction shelves today. What do they mean? What is it about Miss Garnet's Angel that has struck such a chord with so many readers internationally?

2. One writer described Vickers' novel as a book that stubbornly defies any neat categorization. So what kind of a novel is this? A romance? A mystery? A tale of religious awakening? How does Vickers' novel depart from every genre to which we try to assign it? How would you describe Miss Garnet's Angel to a friend?

3. In Miss Garnet's Angel, Salley Vickers treats us to a narrative within a narrative of personal odysseys and spiritual awakenings separated by millennia; of sexual repression and revitalization; of ideological feuds and rapturous epiphanies. Through it all, an overarching, timeless vision of "a world poised between truth and lies" shines through-filtered through the enigmatic character of contemporary Venice itself. "What a world she had entered," Julia marvels early on. "A world of strange ritual, penumbras, rapture." Discuss the author's writing style.

4. Describe the change Julia Garnet undergoes over the course of her stay in Venice. What effects do the events and discoveries of her visit have on her sense of self, as a communist grounded in atheism and as a woman generally wary of life's "irrational" realms, whether romantic, mystical, or spiritual? What-and who-are the catalysts for this change?

5. Describe each of the other characters in this novel. Vera. Carlo. The Cutforths. The Monsignore. Sarah. Toby. Azarias. Tobit. What are the motivations underlying their choices and actions?

6. "Long ago she had decided that history does not repeat itself; but perhaps when a thing was true it went on returning in different likenesses, borrowing from what went before, finding new ways to declare itself." Discuss the parallels Vickers establishes between the narrative of Tobias and the Angel and that of Julia, Toby, and Sarah.

7. Consider the way the author's narrative establishes dual meanings for "blindness": as a physical, unalterable condition on one hand, and as a more abstract reference to one's capacity for empathy, love, or self-awareness on the other.

8. "Can't be doing with that," Miss Garnet tells herself upon first seeing the picture of the Virgin and Christ Child above her bed at Campo Angelo Raffaele. With this moment, Vickers establishes Julia's atheist-communist wariness regarding religious iconography-and also foreshadows the radical nature of the spiritual and emotional transformations to come. Chart the course of Julia's awakening: discuss the specific moments and scenes in which Vickers illuminates her heroine's mounting intoxication with religious pageantry and mystery.

9. With the opening lines of the novel, Salley Vickers introduces readers to an ancillary character who comes to haunt the proceedings of all that follows: Death. "It leaves a hole in the fabric of things which those who are left behind try to repair." Elsewhere, Tobias invokes death as a metaphor for sexual penetration. Discuss the novel's other characterizations of and reflections on death. What, for example, is Julia's conception of death-and how does it evolve, particularly leading up to her last night in Venice?

10. "We cannot commission desire," Julia reflects at one point, referring not only to herself but also to Carlo. To what degree, and on what grounds, does Julia come to feel a sense of solidarity with Carlo, of all people? Explain.

11. Re-read the epigraph by John Ruskin. How do his words speak to the themes and preoccupations of Vickers' interwoven narratives?

12. How does Salley Vickers' vision of Venice compare, inform, and/or add to your own personal experiences with the city?

13. What parallels and distinctions might we draw between the lives of Julia and the Monsignore? Although they've both been given, for much of their lives, to starkly different philosophical ideologies, what fundamental beliefs and traits do the two of them share?

14. What were your understandings of the Angel Raphael and Zoroastrianism before you read Miss Garnet's Angel? Did Vickers' novel inform and/or complicate these understandings? How?

15. Julia Garnet is, among other things, a woman struggling to emerge from the long shadow cast by her father's censure and abuse. How successful, finally, has she been in doing so?

16. What sort of a man was Julia's father? What picture of him emerges to us through Julia's intermittent recollections?

17. Standing with Vera before "The Last Judgement" at the Tintoretto church, Julia wonders, "What did it mean to be weighed in a balance and found wanting?" And later, in her journal, she writes, "What does my life really amount to?" How are these questions ultimately resolved?

18. What is the Bridge of Separation?

19. Near the end of the novel, Julia encounters a young woman on a train named Saskia. As they talk, Julia experiences "the strangest sensation." And later, Julia reflects that "the meeting had crystallized something for her." What has happened here? What issues of identification, regret, and mutual recognition might Julia be coming to terms with in this scene?

20. The various mysteries and awakenings in Miss Garnet's Angel all play out against a Venetian backdrop that is perpetually in danger of annihilation, of being swallowed by the relentless sea tides. "Each day Venice sinks by just so much of a fraction." How does this tension speak to and enrich the sense of instability and flux underlying Julia's own beliefs and assumptions? At what points in the narrative-particularly in the final pages of the book, when Julia has returned to Venice after the wedding-does Vickers make the metaphor plain?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League
Jonathan Odell, 2014
Maiden Lane press
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 978194021004#

Summary
Set in pre-Civil Rights Mississippi, Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League is the story of two young mothers, Hazel and Vida—one wealthy and white and the other poor and black—who have only two things in common: the devastating loss of their children, and a deep and abiding loathing for one another.

Embittered and distrusting, Vida is harassed by Delphi’s racist sheriff and haunted by the son she lost to the world. Hazel, too, has lost a son and can’t keep a grip on her fractured life.

After drunkenly crashing her car into a manger scene while gunning for the baby Jesus, Hazel is sedated and bed-ridden. Hazel’s husband hires Vida to keep tabs on his unpredictable wife and to care for his sole surviving son. Forced to spend time together with no one else to rely on, the two women find they have more in common than they thought, and together they turn the town on its head.

This is the story of a town, a people, and a culture on the verge of a great change that begins with small things, like unexpected friendship. (From the publisher.)

Miss Hazel is an updated and republished version of Odell's 2004 book The View from Delphi. That earlier book was published to strong reviews but tepid sales, said Publishers Weekly. See some earlier reviews below.

Author Bio
Jonathan Odell is the author of two novels, the critically acclaimed The Healing (2012), which was called "required reading" by the New York Post, a "storytelling tour de force" by the Associated Press, and was compared by critics to both Toni Morrison's Beloved and Kathryn Stockett's The Help; and his debut novel, The View from Delphi (MacAdam/Cage, 2004), recently updated and republished as Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League, which is receiving glorious praise from the press and readers alike.

Odell was born and raised in Mississippi. His short stories and essay have appeared in numerous collections. A highly regarded public speaker and leadership coach, he now resides in Minnesota. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
This is an important story beautifully told. It is why we read novels. You will care about these characters — and emerge more aware and empathetic because of them.
Christine Brunkhorst - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Jonathan Odell can take his place in the distinguished pantheon of Southern authors.
Pat Conroy

(Review of 2004 The View from Delphia) Prejudice threatens to tear apart a small Mississippi town during the 1950s in Odell's first novel, a well-told but familiar and slow-moving story about a pair of families who find their lives altered by the bigotry of a small-minded sheriff.
Publishers Weekly

(Review of 2004 The View from Delphia) The View from Delphi shows just how racially divided the country was during the pre-Civil Rights era. For readers younger than 40, this can be a learning experience. From the story of Rosa Parks to the fact the blacks weren’t able to vote at the time, there’s a lot of history in this novel. Although Odell doesn’t bring the entire story to one big happy conclusion, he tells a story of human nature as it really is. And in doing so, he makes readers realize how much alike the races really are.
Southern Scribe

(Review of 2004 The View from Delphia) Fast-paced but thoughtful story of a friendship across the racial divide in 1950s Mississippi. Though he never lets whites off for their pervasive racism, African-American Odell is the rare writer on race who allows for a range of responses—and for the possibility of change. Among his finely drawn characters, both black and white, young—five-year-old Johnny is particularly memorable—and old, he introduces two whose lives are blighted by loss.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Both Floyd and Hazel are driven to leave their homes in the hills. What is it they are in such a rush to escape? Are they both fleeing from the same things? How realistic are their dreams?

2. The novel centers on Hazel and Vida as young mothers with flashbacks to their childhoods. How essential are the early years to our understanding of these women as adults?

3. Discuss Hazel's inability to belong. Would she have had the same issues has she stayed on the farm? How do these issues take shape when she confronts the other wives of her new class and neighborhood?

4. Hazel’s quest for beauty became her only goal as a child when she realized she was unattractive. Why did beauty become the answer to all of her problems? What role does physical beauty play in this novel?

5. Consider Levi’s relationship with the Senator. Where do you see this type of relationship between people today?

6. When Hazel and Vida meet, they are both grieving a loss. How do their losses affect them as women? Do they have any empathy for each other’s loss? Are you able to identify with either or both of the women? How are they changed by their losses? Were these loses necessary to their growth?

7. Discuss the differences in Hazel and Vida’s expectations of the men in their lives.

8. How does Vida come to terms with the hostility she faces from Hazel’s son Johnny? What do you imagine will become of young Johnny? Why do you suppose he was so fearful in the beginning? Why do you think Levi was able to reach him?

9. Consider the ways Hazel finds freedom as well as the times she requires rescuing. What, if any, transformations does she undergo throughout the course of this novel?

10. Consider the same questions for Vida.

11. Women are a central element to the society of Delphi. Odell paints a portrait of the what was considered the 1950s ideal woman throughout this novel. Where does Hazel fit into this ideal at the beginning at the novel and then at the end? What, if any, elements of the stereotypical 1950s woman remains today?

12. Why is Hazel so attracted to the maids? Why is Vida so repulsed by the white women? How is each group of women portrayed differently?

13. How does the balance of power in the relationships in the novel’s characters relationships change over the course of the novel?

14. Ponder the perceptions of sanity and insanity portrayed through the characters of Hazel and Levi Snow. How is the label of crazy the same or different for each?15. What do you imagine for the future of Nate? Will he ever learn the truth and how might that change him if he did?

16. The novel is set largely in 1955. How much do you believe we have changed as a country when it comes to issue of race? As you noticed examples of racism did you recognize incidents from your own life or from the lives of family members of close friends?

17. What were some instances of “internalized” racism (racist beliefs that have been accepted as true by the victims themselves) on the part of Odell’s black characters?

18. If you were to choose either Vida or Hazel as a mother, who would be your choice? Would one make a better mother in contemporary times than the other? Do you think the women had other choices in their given situations?

19. In retrospect, did Vida make a good choice for Nate by “sending him away” consequently growing up as “white” in the North or should she have kept him near her in the Jim Crow south where he would have had grown up as “black”?

20. How does Hazel get her dignity back? What role does Pearl play in that process? How does Hazel’s relationship with her husband change because of this? Do you think her actions are justified?

21. Has Odell offered you a deeper understanding of the civil rights movement that were missed in your textbooks? Do you believe this or any novel or film can help move us toward ending prejudice? Can you offer examples of books of films that made you see the world differently?

22. The summer of 2014 was the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi when local black activists initiated a massive voter registration drive. That summer hundreds of northern white college students came to help. What was the influence of these white students who came down? Some say their impact was largely because, in the eyes of the nation, the lives of the white students killed while trying to register voters had greater value while Blacks who had been fighting back, while being attacked, raped, and killed, trying to change a system.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Miss Jane
Brad Watson, 2016
W.W. Norton
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393241730

Summary
Nominated, 2016 National Book Awards

Astonishing prose brings to life a forgotten woman and a lost world in a strange and bittersweet Southern pastoral.

Since his award-winning debut collection of stories, Last Days of the Dog- Men, Brad Watson has been expanding the literary traditions of the South, in work as melancholy, witty, strange, and lovely as any in America.

Inspired by the true story of his own great-aunt, he explores the life of Miss Jane Chisolm, born in rural, early-twentieth-century Mississippi with a genital birth defect that would stand in the way of the central "uses" for a woman in that time and place—namely, sex and marriage.

From the country doctor who adopts Jane to the hard tactile labor of farm life, from the highly erotic world of nature around her to the boy who loved but was forced to leave her, the world of Miss Jane Chisolm is anything but barren.

Free to satisfy only herself, she mesmerizes those around her, exerting an unearthly fascination that lives beyond her still. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 24, 1955
• Where—Meridian, Mississippi, USA
• Education—B.A., Mississippi State University; M.A., University of Alabama
• Awards—(below)
• Currently—lives in Laramie, Wyoming

Brad Watson teaches creative writing at the University of Wyoming, Laramie. His first collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men, won the Sue Kauffman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts & Letters; his first novel, The Heaven of Mercury, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. (From the publisher .)

Book Reviews
Brad Watson delivers delightful descriptions that will bring great joy to readers of his new book, Miss Jane. The novel has been nominated for the National Book Award, so you will not be alone in wanting extra time to re-read parts, often entire paragraphs, to savor the author’s stunning rhythm and language.
Fiona Lawrence - LitLovers

[The] complexity and drama of Watson’s gorgeous work here is life's as well: Sometimes physical realities expand us, sometimes trap; sometimes heroism lies in combating our helplessness, sometimes in accepting it. A writer of profound emotional depths, Watson does not lie to his reader, so neither does his Jane. She never stops longing for a wholeness she may never know, but she is determined that her citizenship in the world, however onerous, be dragged into the light and there be lived without apology or perfection or pity.
Amy Grace Loyd - New York Times Book Review

Watson infuses the story with curiosity, uncertainty, and, not unlike Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, a certain wildness.... The book plays on the tongue like an oyster―first salty, then cold―before slipping away to be consumed and digested.
Aditi Sriram - Washington Post

[Jane’s] fearless acceptance of what sets her apart is profoundly human, and her lifelong struggle to understand her place in the world reflects the intricate workings of our own mysterious hearts.
Gina Webb - Atlanta Journal-Constitution

One of the most spot-on, most poetic renderings of Southern vernacular this side of Charles Portis. In his hands, Miss Jane becomes an epic of a small survivor. As with fellow Mississippian William Faulkner, Watson's humble characters prevail because they endure.
Ben Steelman - Wilmington (NC) Star News

[T]he affecting, nuanced story of a girl who “did not fear her own strangeness.” ... The story of Jane’s lonely, lovely life is more powerful because of its emotional reserve. With the exception of several stagey confrontations involving Jane’s older, coarser sister, Grace, Watson lets his ethereal heroine retain her quiet, dignified air of mystery.
Publishers Weekl

(Starred review.) [Watson] dedicates his second novel to his great-aunt Mary Ellis "Jane" Clay, who as reimagined here lived a full and admirable life despite a severe limitation.... [With] beautifully precise prose, we are both absorbed and humbled. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal

Jane's strange yet beautiful spirit possesses a haunting, anachronistic beauty. Miss Jane is a truly original novel with a character that readers will cherish. Watson has delivered a striking and unforgettable portrait.
BookPage

If the novel has a flaw, it's a lack of traditional drama. Jane approaches life with quiet determination, so her acceptance of her own limitations ultimately becomes a strength and not a weakness. A well-written portrait of a person whose rich inner life outstrips the limits of her body.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We;ll add publisher's questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Miss Jane...then take off on your own:

1. Why might Brad Watson have opened the book with the prologue listing what frightens and doesn't frighten Jane? What, if anything, does the opening contribute to your understanding of Jane? In what way, say, does the prologue set a tone for the book?

2. How would you describe Jane Chisholm? What is her condition? What inner strengths does she draw on? As she grows into adolescence, what is it like for her to be denied romantic involvement?

3. We learn of the night Jane was conceived: her father drunk on whiskey, her mother unconscious on laudanum, and whatever love they might have felt for one another had been worn away. How, perhaps, is that unfortunate night a foreshadowing device for Jane's subsequent birth and life?

4. Jane learns to isolate herself from embarrassment. She finds solace in the fields and woods. What does the natural world teach her, or offer her? Mushrooms, for instance: what is the attraction the fungal world holds for Jane?

5. What is Jane's relationship with her family—her parents and sister Grace?

6. How does Dr. Thompson help Jane understand and even exceed her limitations? He tells her, "Just as the way you are denies you some things, it also gives you license that others may not have. What does he mean. He also says to her, "In my opinion you live on a higher moral ground." How so? Do you agree?

7. One of the thematic concerns posed by the book is the questions of where heroism lies. Is heroism in fighting against one's physical limitations or accepting them. What do you think?

8. Had you been born with Jane's physical condition, back before it was operable as it is today, how might you have fared? Or this question: how would you have coped as a parent?

9. The author of Miss Jane is a man, writing about a girl and later young woman, a character based to some extent on his great aunt. Does Watson successfully channel a female voice, especially an unusual one, such as Jane's?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Miss Kopp's Midnight Confession (Kopp Sisters Series, 3)
Amy Stewart, 2017
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544409996

Summary
The best-selling author of Girl Waits with Gun and Lady Cop Makes Trouble continues her extraordinary journey into the real lives of the forgotten but fabulous Kopp sisters.

Deputy sheriff Constance Kopp is outraged to see young women brought into the Hackensack jail over dubious charges of waywardness, incorrigibility, and moral depravity. The strong-willed, patriotic Edna Heustis, who left home to work in a munitions factory, certainly doesn’t belong behind bars. And sixteen-year-old runaway Minnie Davis, with few prospects and fewer friends, shouldn’t be publicly shamed and packed off to a state-run reformatory. But such were the laws—and morals—of 1916.

Constance uses her authority as deputy sheriff, and occasionally exceeds it, to investigate and defend these women when no one else will. But it's her sister Fleurette who puts Constance's beliefs to the test and forces her to reckon with her own ideas of how a young woman should and shouldn't behave.

Against the backdrop of World War I, and drawn once again from the true story of the Kopp sisters, Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions is a spirited, page-turning story that will delight fans of historical fiction and lighthearted detective fiction alike. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Born—ca. 1968-69
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.S., M.S., University of Texas-Austin
• Awards—(See below)
• Currently—lives in Eureka, California

Amy Stewart is the author of eight books. Her debut novel Girl Waits With Gun, based on a true story, was published to wide acclaim in 2015. Lady Cop Makes Trouble, the second in the Kopp Sisters series, came out in 2016, also to favorable reviews.

She has also written six nonfiction books on the perils and pleasures of the natural world, including four New York Times bestsellers: The Drunken Botanist (2013), Wicked Bugs (2011), Wicked Plants (2009), and Flower Confidential (2009).

She lives in Eureka, California, with her husband Scott Brown, who is a rare book dealer. They own a bookstore called Eureka Books. The store is housed in a classic nineteenth-century Victorian building that Amy very much hopes is haunted.

Media
Since her first book was published in 2001, Stewart has appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition and Fresh Air, she’s been profiled in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, and she’s been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, Good Morning America, the PBS documentary The Botany of Desire, and—believe it or not—TLC’s Cake Boss.

Amy has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other newspapers and magazines. She is the co-founder of the popular blog GardenRant.

Honors & Awards
Amy’s books have been translated into twelve languages, and two of them—Wicked Plants and Wicked Bugs—have been adapted into national traveling exhibits that appear at botanical gardens and museums nationwide.

She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the American Horticulture Society’s Book Award, and an International Association of Culinary Professionals Food Writing Award. In 2012, she was invited to be the first Tin House Writer-in-Residence, a partnership with Portland State University, where she taught in the MFA program.

Lectures & Events
Amy travels the country as a highly sought-after public speaker whose spirited lectures have inspired and entertained audiences at college campuses such as Cornell and the University of Minnesota, corporate offices, including Google (where she served tequila and nearly broke the Internet), conferences and trade shows, botanical gardens, bookstores, and garden clubs nationwide. Go here to find out where she’s heading next. (Author bio from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Here…there is little crime-fighting and less suspense, as Stewart focuses instead on the very real social, economic, and legal restrictions on women in 1916, and on the prickly relationships between Constance and her two sisters.… [T]his latest volume is by far the funniest.
Publishers Weekly

The cases here are based on the experiences of real women, a technique that Stewart has employed in previous volumes. Collectively, the story lines intersect to create an intriguing window into women's rights and the social mores that women challenged on the eve of World War I. —Tina Panik, Avon Free P.L., CT
Library Journal

Constance's ability to hold her own in male-dominated investigations and courtrooms … makes her a welcome "vision of an entirely different kind of woman."… Lively and admirable female characters … impeccably realized and given new life by Stewart.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. How has the world changed and progressed from book to book in the Kopp Sisters series?

2. How do the sisters’ roles evolve throughout the series, and how are the roles becoming more defined?

3. This third book is written in the third person instead of from Constance’s point of view. Did you notice this change? Why do you think the author chose to do this? What does it allow that Constance’s point of view did not?

4. What do you think of the rapport between Sheriff Heath and Constance? How has their relationship changed since the first book?

5. In the newspaper interview, Constance explains the six requisites she believes are necessary for a detective, and says, "At midnight a woman will tell almost anything if she finds one who is sympathetic to tell it to." This is also included in the book’s epigraph. In what ways are "help" and "sympathy" important themes in Constance’s life and in this book?

6. In the book, parents ask the police to arrest daughters for lack of morals and for waywardness — things as simple as staying out late, dating, or taking jobs. Before Constance takes on more responsibility, there is little or no defense available for these women. Were you surprised to learn about this part of our history? The Mann Act still exists, but its meaning and use have changed. What does its new use say about how our society has changed or stayed the same since the early 1900s?

7. Even though Constance supports and defends women like Edna who are in jail for leaving home, Constance expresses concern when Fleurette goes off on her own adventure. Constance even follows her and asks others to check on her too. How is Constance similar to the parents who turn in their daughters? How is she different?

8. Norma is protective of her family. She initiates spying on Fleurette, handles all of Constance’s fan mail, and takes care of the farmhouse. Does she enjoy her role? Do you think that role might change?

9. Even though Constance and May have very different personalities and jobs, they are both in strong positions for women at the time. How does being a woman affect their lives and their positions? Do they have to act differently than men in the same positions? If so, in what ways?

10. Why does Fleurette lie about her experience on the show? What is she feeling at the end
about her homecoming?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Ransom Riggs, 2011
Quirk Publishing
382 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594746031

Summary
A mysterious island.... An abandoned orphanage.... A strange collection of very curious photographs.

t all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience.

As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.

As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.

A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows. (From the publisher.)

This book, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011) is the first book in the Peculiar Children Series. Hollow City (2014) is the second, and Library of Souls (2016), is the third.

Tim Burton's film adaption of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children was released in 2016. It stars Eva Green and Asa Butterfield.

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—in Florida, USA
• Education—Kenyon College; University of
Southern California
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Ransom Riggs grew up in Florida but now makes his home in the land of peculiar children—Los Angeles. Along the way he earned degrees from Kenyon College and the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television, got married, and made some award-winning short films. He moonlights as a blogger and travel writer, and his series of travel essays, Strange Geographies, can be found at mentalfloss.com or via ransomriggs.com. This is his first novel. (From the publisher.)

In his words
I was born on a 200-year-old farm in rural maryland, where at the tender age of five I decided that I definitely wanted to be a farmer when I grew up, because being a farmer meant driving tractors. Then, partially as a result of my new ambition, my mom moved us far away to Florida, where there were relatively few farms but lots and lots of old people and not very much for kids to do.

In retrospect, it was precisely because there wasn’t a lot to do, and because the internet didn’t exist and cable TV was only like twelve channels back then, that I was forced to make my own fun and my own stories—and that’s what I’m still doing, only now I get paid for it. So thanks, sleepy Florida fishing village!

I grew up writing stories and making videos in the backyard with my friends. I knew I wanted to do one or both of those things in some professional capacity when I got older, but I didn’t know how. For three summers during high school I attended the University of Virginia’s Young Writer’s Workshop, and I still consider it one of the shaping experiences of my life. I met so many great, brilliant people, and it convinced me that it was possible to make a life for myself as a writer.

I also knew I wanted to make movies. So I compromised, and went to Kenyon College first to study English, then moved out to Los Angeles to go to film school at the University of Southern California. Looking back, that was a lot of time and money spent on school, but I don’t regret it at all Being part of those creative communities gave me lots of time to practice writing things and making movies before I had to go out and try to do either of those things professionally.

So now I do a lot of different things, which can make for a rambling and confused-sounding answer when I am asked, as I often am in work-obsessed Los Angeles, “So...what do you do? But I will attempt to answer this question, in list form:

• I write books First, a non-fiction book about Sherlock Holmes. Then a novel about peculiar children (2011). Then a book of found photographs with writing on them, coming out in 2012. I'm fairly certain there are more novels on the way. I can feel them clanking around half-formed in my brain.

• I make movies. I went to film school and made a lot of shorts there, then after I graduated I got jobs making short and some book trailers, too, like this and this. I also write screenplays and make the occasional video blog.

• I word-blog for mentalfloss.com. My favorite column is a series of photo-travel-essays called Strange Geographies. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Debut novelist Ransom Riggs liberally sprinkles his book with a series of vintage photos around which he has constructed his plot. Depending on your taste, you will find the photos either totally cool or kind of creepy, but either way they feed the book’s atmospherics and help to convincingly set much of it in a time loop—an odd chasm in the space-time continuum in which the day Sept. 3, 1940, plays over and over again/
Marjorie Kehe - Christian Science Monitor

"Peculiar" doesn’t even begin to cover it. Riggs’ chilling, wondrous novel is already headed to the movies.
People

Riggs deftly moves between fantasy and reality, prose and photography to create an enchanting and at times positively terrifying story.
Associated Press

Though technically a children's book, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is more Grimm's than Disney, and Riggs images, dropped like bread crumbs, could lead audiences of any age happily down the path of its spellbinding tale.
Florida Times-Union

Riggs's atmospheric first novel concerns 16-year-old Jacob, a tightly wound but otherwise ordinary teenager who is "unusually susceptible to nightmares, night terrors, the Creeps, the Willies, and Seeing Things That Aren't Really There." When Jacob's grandfather, Abe, a WWII veteran, is savagely murdered, Jacob has a nervous breakdown, in part because he believes that his grandfather was killed by a monster that only they could see. On his psychiatrist's advice, Jacob and his father travel from their home in Florida to Cairnholm Island off the coast of Wales, which, during the war, housed Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Abe, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, lived there before enlisting, and the mysteries of his life and death lead Jacob back to that institution. Nearly 50 unsettling vintage photographs appear throughout, forming the framework of this dark but empowering tale, as Riggs creates supernatural backstories and identities for those pictured in them (a boy crawling with bees, a girl with untamed hair carrying a chicken). It's an enjoyable, eccentric read, distinguished by well-developed characters, a believable Welsh setting, and some very creepy monsters. (Ages 12 up.)
Publishers Weekly

Sixteen-year-old Jacob Portman no longer believes the stories his grandfather told him when he was a little boy. These are obviously fairy tales about children with mysterious abilities, such as a girl who could levitate and a boy with bees inside him, and not real memories from his grandfather's childhood. Grandpa's sepia-toned photographs of his strange friends also seem fake to Jacob. However, when he gets a chance to visit the island where the stories took place, he can't resist delving into his grandfather's past. Could these odd children really have existed? Verdict: An original work that defies categorization, this first novel should appeal to readers who like quirky fantasies. Suitable for both adults and a YA audience. Riggs includes many vintage photographs that add a critical touch of the peculiar to his unusual tale. —Laurel Bliss, San Diego State Univ. Lib
Library Journal

A haunting and out-of-the-ordinary read, debut author Ransom Rigg’s first-person narration is convincing and absorbing, and every detail he draws our eye to is deftly woven into an unforgettable whole. Interspersed with photos throughout, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is a truly atmospheric novel with plot twists, turns, and surprises that will delight readers of any age
Amazon Editors

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 Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children:

1. What effect did the photographs have on how you experienced this novel? In fact, what was your reading experience of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children? How did it make you feel? Were you disturbed...or fascinated...or something else? Did the book hold your interest?

2. What's wrong with Jacob Portman? What's his problem?

3. What about Abe Portman, what kind of character is he? What kind of a world does he create in his stories for young Jacob? Why do the stories intrigue Jacob so much?

4. As he moves into adolescence, why does Jacob begin to doubt the veracity of his grandfather's stories? In what way does he think they may be connected to Abe's struggle under the Nazis?

5. What makes Jacob think his grandfather's death is more sinister than what the official version claims.

6. Talk about the house in Wales. When Jacob first lays eyes on it, he observes that it "was no refuge from monsters, but a monster itself." Would you say the house serves as a setting to the story...or is its role something else—a character, perhaps?

7. What are the atmospherics used to build suspense in the novel. Find some examples of how the author uses language to instill unease, fear, and tension.

8. Are you able to make sense of the "after," the time loop? Can you explain it? Do you enjoy the way Riggs plays with time in his novel?

9. Were you surprised by the direction that the story took? Were you expecting it to go elsewhere? Were you able to suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the story's turn of events?

10. Talk, of course, about the peculiar children. Which of their oddities and personalities do you find most intriguing?

11. Some readers have complained about the inconsistency of the narrative voice, that it was perhaps too sophisticated for a young boy, even an adolescent? Do you agree, or disagree? Does the narrative voice change during the course of the novel?

12. In what way can this book be seen as a classic quest story—a young hero who undertakes a difficult journey and is transformed in the process? Do you see parallels with other fantasy works involving young people?

13. Does the end satisfy? Are loose ends tied up....or left hanging? This is the first book of a planned series. Will you read future installments? Where do you think Riggs will take his readers next?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Miss Timmins' School for Girls
Nayanna Currimbhoy, 2011
HarperCollins
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061997747

Summary
A murder at a British boarding school in the hills of western India launches a young teacher on the journey of a lifetime.

In 1974, three weeks before her twenty-first birthday, Charulata Apte arrives at Miss Timmins' School for Girls in Panchgani. Shy, sheltered, and running from a scandal that disgraced her Brahmin family, Charu finds herself teaching Shakespeare to rich Indian girls in a boarding school still run like an outpost of the British Empire. In this small, foreign universe, Charu is drawn to the charismatic teacher Moira Prince, who introduces her to pot-smoking hippies, rock -n' roll, and freedoms she never knew existed.

Then one monsoon night, a body is found at the bottom of a cliff, and the ordered worlds of school and town are thrown into chaos. When Charu is implicated in the murder—a case three intrepid schoolgirls take it upon themselves to solve—Charu's real education begins. A love story and a murder mystery, Miss Timmins' School for Girls is, ultimately, a coming-of-age tale set against the turbulence of the 1970s as it played out in one small corner of India. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Nayana Currimbhoy was raised in India where she attended an all-girls boarding school in a fairly remote hill station. She moved to the U.S. in the early 1980s, and has been a businesswoman and a freelance writer. She has written books, film scripts and articles about many things, including architecture and design, and a biography of Indira Gandhi. This is her first novel. Nayana lives in New York City with her husband, an architect, and their teenage daughter. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Currimbhoy's fiction debut is an absorbing atmospheric thriller set at a girl's boarding school in Panchgani, India. In 1974, Charu Apte is an impressionable 21-year-old new to teaching. Instead of conforming to the school's strict religious guidelines, she finds herself drawn to a fellow teacher, and renegade, Moira Prince, a larger than life British woman with plenty of secrets and a puzzling relationship with the school's administration. Charu and Moira begin a passionate affair, but one night during monsoon season, in a mountainous outlying area known as "table-land," Moira is murdered. The tragedy divides the town along an "English fault line" and fills the school with rumors of burning jealousy, salacious lesbian affairs, and vendettas. As arrests are made, Charu and some of the schoolgirls work to get to the bottom of what happened. Almost everyone is a suspect, including Charu, in Currimbhoy's gripping tale.
Publishers Weekly

The intimate portrait the novel offers of India at this specific point in its history is compelling, as is the dramatic relationship between Charu and the deeply troubled Moira.
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. In Miss Timmins School for Girls, young Charu, fresh from a conventional Brahmin upbringing, is suddenly exposed to Christian British-run boarding school, as well as to the iconoclastic hippie culture of the 1970s. “I watched my worlds collide,” says Charu, “not in fire and brimstone as I had feared, but in comic relief.” Do you think this is true of the book? What are the main cultural conflicts our heroine faces? Are they all resolved through humor?

2. The British Missionaries are in this remote corner of India to spread Christianity. What else do they spread as evidenced by the daily life in the school?

3. Charu’s parents have tried to protect their beloved only child from a world they consider cruel. Do you think they did her a disservice by limiting her exposure to the world at large? In what way do you think her cloistered upbringing led Charu to be seduced by Moira Prince?

4. In spite of her erratic behavior and dark past, do you think Moira Prince is presented as a sympathetic character? How does the author do this?

5. Charu, has a disfiguring mark on her face. This has made her into an intense, sensitive and secretive person, a watcher. How do you think this influences her actions, and ultimately, the resolution of the murder mystery?

6. When Charu mourns Prince, she finds herself humming “Ruby Tuesday” by the Rolling Stones. Do you find this incongruous? The soundtrack of the book is rock 'n' roll: The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan and Jethro Tull. In your opinion, does this make the foreign landscape and culture more familiar to you? Does it resonate with a coming of age in America in the seventies?

7. One part of the book is narrated by Nandita, a 15-year-old school girl. How does the author use Nandita’s voice to move the story further? Does Nandita’s vision change your opinion of Charu? If so, how?

8. Nandita and Charu, the two main narrators of the book, are very different personalities. In the end, who do you think proves to be the stronger, more heroic person, Charu or Nandita?

9. The principal of Miss Timmins’, Miss Shirley Nelson, puts her reputation in the school above the life of her own daughter. What is it about the relationship between them that makes this believable?

10. The novel begins and ends on the same day, twelve years after the actual events take place. In the end of the prologue, Merch is planning to do something that night. What do you think he plans to do?

11. At the very end of the book, when Charu says, “It’s all over now,” what does she mean? In your opinion, what is Merch thinking of, when he asks “What is all over?” Do you think she is still thinking of the murder 12 years ago? Write one paragraph after the last line, to continue the conversation between Merch and Charu that night.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Missing Pieces
Heather Gudenkauf, 2016
Harlequin
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780778318651

Summary
A woman uncovers earth-shattering secrets about her husband's family in this chilling page-turner from New York Times bestselling author Heather Gudenkauf.

Sarah Quinlan's husband, Jack, has been haunted for decades by the untimely death of his mother when he was just a teenager, her body found in the cellar of their family farm, the circumstances a mystery.

The case rocked the small farm town of Penny Gate, Iowa, where Jack was raised, and for years Jack avoided returning home. But when his beloved aunt Julia is in an accident, hospitalized in a coma, Jack and Sarah are forced to confront the past that they have long evaded.

Upon arriving in Penny Gate, Sarah and Jack are welcomed by the family Jack left behind all those years ago—barely a trace of the wounds that had once devastated them all. But as facts about Julia's accident begin to surface, Sarah realizes that nothing about the Quinlans is what it seems.

Caught in a flurry of unanswered questions, Sarah dives deep into the puzzling rabbit hole of Jack's past. But the farther in she climbs, the harder it is for her to get out. And soon she is faced with a deadly truth she may not be prepared for. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—Birth—N/A
• Where—Wagner, South Dakota, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—Edgar Award Finalist
• Currently—lives in Dubuque, Iowa

Heather Gudenkauf is the author of several novels. She was born in Wagner, South Dakota, the youngest of six children. At one month of age, her family returned to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota where her father was employed as a guidance counselor and her mother as a school nurse. At the age of three, her family moved to Iowa, where she grew up.

Having been born with a profound unilateral hearing impairment (there were many evenings when Heather and her father made a trip to the bus barn to look around the school bus for her hearing aids that she often conveniently would forget on the seat beside her), Heather tended to use books as a retreat, would climb into the toy box that her father's students from Rosebud made for the family with a pillow, blanket, and flashlight, close the lid, and escape the world around her. Heather became a voracious reader and the seed of becoming a writer was planted.

Gudenkauf graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in elementary education, has spent the last sixteen years working with students of all ages and is currently an Instructional Coach, an educator who provides curricular and professional development support to teachers.
Heather lives in Dubuque, Iowa with her husband, three children, and a very spoiled German Shorthaired Pointer named Maxine. In her free time Heather enjoys spending time with her family, reading, hiking, and running.

Novels
2009 - The Weight of Silence
2011 - These Things Hidden
2012 - One Breath Away
2014 - Little Mercies
2016 - Missing Pieces
(Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
[A]n old-fashioned melodrama.... Readers should be prepared for implausible plotting, an unsympathetic protagonist, and a cliched denouement. Hopefully, Gudenkauf will return to form next time.
Publishers Weekly

This fast-paced read will appeal to fans of psychological suspense like that by Joy Fielding.
Booklist

Atmospheric... Gudenkauf expertly develops the story from Sarah's perspective, so readers ask questions, doubt answers, and seek the truth right along with her.... [M]ysterious moments... sustain...suspicion until the final pages.
Bookpage

[A] neatly sewn-up plot. Light on surprises and character development, this tepid thriller will have most astute readers correctly guessing the ending halfway through.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our 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.)

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Mississippi Blood (Natchez Burning Series, 3)
Greg Iles, 2017
HarperCollins
704 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062311153

Summary
The endgame is at hand for Penn Cage, his family, and the enemies bent on destroying them in this revelatory volume in the epic trilogy set in modern-day Natchez, Mississippi—Greg Iles’s epic tale of love and honor, hatred and revenge that explores how the sins of the past continue to haunt the present.

Shattered by grief and dreaming of vengeance, Penn Cage sees his family and his world collapsing around him.

The woman he loves is gone, his principles have been irrevocably compromised, and his father, once a paragon of the community that Penn leads as mayor, is about to be tried for the murder of a former lover.

Most terrifying of all, Dr. Cage seems bent on self-destruction. Despite Penn's experience as a prosecutor in major murder trials, his father has frozen him out of the trial preparations--preferring to risk dying in prison to revealing the truth of the crime to his son.

During forty years practicing medicine, Tom Cage made himself the most respected and beloved physician in Natchez, Mississippi. But this revered Southern figure has secrets known only to himself and a handful of others.

Among them, Tom has a second son, the product of an 1960s affair with his devoted African American nurse, Viola Turner. It is Viola who has been murdered, and her bitter son—Penn's half-brother—who sets in motion the murder case against his father.

The resulting investigation exhumes dangerous ghosts from Mississippi's violent past. In some way that Penn cannot fathom, Viola Turner was a nexus point between his father and the Double Eagles, a savage splinter cell of the KKK.

More troubling still, the long-buried secrets shared by Dr. Cage and the former Klansmen may hold the key to the most devastating assassinations of the 1960s. The surviving Double Eagles will stop at nothing to keep their past crimes buried, and with the help of some of the most influential men in the state, they seek to ensure that Dr. Cage either takes the fall for them, or takes his secrets to an early grave.

Tom Cage's murder trial sets a terrible clock in motion, and unless Penn can pierce the veil of the past and exonerate his father, his family will be destroyed. Unable to trust anyone around him—not even his own mother—Penn joins forces with Serenity Butler, a famous young black author who has come to Natchez to write about his father's case. Together, Penn and Serenity—a former soldier—battle to crack the Double Eagles and discover the secret history of the Cage family and the South itself, a desperate move that risks the only thing they have left to gamble: their lives.

Mississippi Blood is the enthralling conclusion to a breathtaking trilogy seven years in the making—one that has kept readers on the edge of their seats.

With piercing insight, narrative prowess, and a masterful ability to blend history and imagination, New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles illuminates the brutal history of the American South in a highly atmospheric and suspenseful novel that delivers the shocking resolution his fans have eagerly awaited. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—Stuttgart, Germany
• Raised—Natchez, Mississippi, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Mississippi
• Currently—lives in in Natchez, Mississippi

Greg Ilesis an American novelist who was born in Stuttgart, Germany, where his physician father ran the U.S. Embassy Medical Clinic. He was raised in Natchez, Mississippi, in the US, the setting of many of his novels. After attending Trinity Episcopal Day School, he graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1983. Iles spent several years as a guitarist, singer, and songwriter in the band Frankly Scarlet.

He quit the band after he was married and began working on his first novel, Spandau Phoenix, a thriller about Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess. The book was published in 1993 and became the first of twelve New York Times best sellers. In 2010, The Devil's Punchbowl reached #1 on the Times list.

Iles has published fourteen novels in a variety of genres. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and published in more than thirty-five countries worldwide.

In 2002, he wrote the script 24 Hours from his novel of the same name. It was rewritten by director Don Roos and renamed Trapped (to avoid confusion with the then-current television series, 24), which Iles then rewrote during the shoot, at the request of the producers and actors. Iles has mixed feelings about the film, but he enjoyed working with the actors, including Charlize Theron, Kevin Bacon, Courtney Love, and Dakota Fanning.

In 2011, Iles sustained life-threatening injuries in a traffic accident and ultimately lost part of his right leg. He has since recovered and is now working on a trilogy of novels featuring Penn Cage, which is set in Natchez, Mississippi, Iles's hometown. The first volume, Natchez Burning, was published in 2014. His second, The Burning Tree, picks up immediately where the first leaves off and was released in 2015. The third volume, Mississippi Blood, published in 2017, brings the trilogy (supposedly) to its conclusion.

Iles is a member of the literary musical group The Rock Bottom Remainders, which includes authors Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Stephen King, Scott Turow, Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount, Jr., Matt Groening, and James McBride.

In July 2013, Greg co-authored Hard Listening (2013) with the rest of the Rock Bottom Remainders. The ebook combines essays, fiction, musings, candid email exchanges and conversations, compromising photographs, audio and video clips, and interactive quizzes to give readers a view into the private lives of the authors/musicians. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/15/2014.)

Book Reviews
A superb entertainment that is a work of power, distinction and high seriousness… also (a) prime example of what the thriller—and other forms of so-called "genre" fiction—can accomplish when pushed beyond traditional limits.
Washington Post

There is a graphic beauty to Iles’ writing. He uses measured words to express voluminous stories.… He is a masterful storyteller!
Huffington Post

[The books] are page-turning entertainments with an edge of history and a deep understanding of race relations in the American South.… Mississippi Blood is packed with compelling characters.… Harrowing and spellbinding.
Pittsburg Post-Gazette

Iles draws his characters so well, and brings off scenes so deftly.
Houston Chronicle

(Starred review.) Both unwieldy and tightly controlled, bestseller Iles’s terrific conclusion to his Natchez Burning trilogy (after 2015’s The Bone Tree) is a sweeping story that remains intimate.… The trial scenes are among the most exciting ever written in the genre.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) From his opening line, Iles draws you back into Penn Cage's deep South in this phenomenal trilogy's final novel (after Natchez Burning; The Bone Tree). His heart-racing, enthralling thriller brings to the forefront the racial divisiveness that still plagues this country. —Joy Gunn, Paseo Verde Lib., Henderson, NV
Library Journal

(Starred review.) This trilogy is destined to become a classic of literary crime fiction.
Booklist

Iles brings his politically charged, timely trilogy of Mississippi murder and mayhem to a thunderous close.… Iles mostly sticks to the format of the hard-boiled procedural, though there's some nicely wrought courtroom drama here, too.… A boisterous, spills-and-chills entertainment from start to finish.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our 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?

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?

Mister Monkey
Francine Prose, 2016
HarperCollins
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062397836

Summary
An ingenious, darkly humorous, and brilliantly observant story that follows the exploits and intrigue of a constellation of characters affiliated with an off-off-off-off Broadway children’s musical.

Mister Monkey—a screwball children’s musical about a playfully larcenous pet chimpanzee—is the kind of family favorite that survives far past its prime.

Margot, who plays the chimp’s lawyer, knows the production is dreadful and bemoans the failure of her acting career. She’s settled into the drudgery of playing a humiliating part...

...Until the day she receives a mysterious letter from an anonymous admirer, and later, in the middle of a performance, has a shocking encounter with Adam, the twelve-year-old who plays the title role.

Francine Prose’s effervescent comedy is told from the viewpoints of wildly unreliable, seemingly disparate characters whose lives become deeply connected as the madcap narrative unfolds. There is Adam, whose looming adolescence informs his interpretation of his role; Edward, a young audience member who is candidly unimpressed with the play; Ray, the author of the novel on which the musical is based, who witnesses one of the most awkward first dates in literature; and even the eponymous Mister Monkey, the Monkey God himself.

With her trademark wit and verve, Prose delves into humanity’s most profound mysteries: art, ambition, childhood, aging, and love. Startling and captivating, Mister Monkey is a breathtaking novel from a writer at the height of her craft. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 1, 1947
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Radcliffe College
• Awards—Pushcart Prize; PEN-America prize for translation; Guggenheim Fellowship
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York

When it comes to an author as eclectic as Francine Prose, it's difficult to find the unifying thread in her work. But, if one were to examine her entire oeuvre—from novels and short stories to essays and criticism—a love of reading would seem to be the animating force.

That may not seem extraordinary, especially for a writer, but Prose is uncommonly passionate about the link between reading and writing. "I've always read," she confessed in a 1998 interview with Atlantic Unbound. "I started when I was four years old and just didn't stop.... The only reason I wanted to be a writer was because I was such an avid reader." (In 2006, she produced an entire book on the subject—a nuts-and-bolts primer entitled Reading Like a Writer, in which she uses excerpts from classic and contemporary literature to illustrate her personal notions of literary excellence.)

If Prose is specific about the kind of writing she, herself, likes to read, she's equally voluble about what puts her off. She is particularly vexed by "obvious, tired cliches; lazy, ungrammatical writing; implausible plot turns." Unsurprisingly, all of these are notably absent in her own work. Even when she explores tried-and-true literary conventions—such as the illicit romantic relationship at the heart of her best known novel, Blue Angel—she livens them with wit and irony. She even borrowed her title from the famous Josef von Sternberg film dealing with a similar subject.

As biting and clever as she is, Prose cringes whenever her work is referred to as satire. She explained to Barnes & Noble editors, "Satirical to me means one-dimensional characters...whereas, I think of myself as a novelist who happens to be funny—who's writing characters that are as rounded and artfully developed as the writers of tragic novels."

Prose's assessment of her own work is pretty accurate. Although her subject matter is often ripe for satire (religious fanaticism in Household Saints, tabloid journalism in Bigfoot Dreams, upper-class pretensions in Primitive People), etc.), she takes care to invest her characters with humanity and approaches them with respect. "I really do love my characters," she says, "but I feel that I want to take a very hard look at them. I don't find them guilty of anything I'm not guilty of myself."

Best known for her fiction, Prose has also written literary criticism for the New York Times, art criticism for the Wall Street Journal, and children's books based on Jewish folklore, all of it infused with her alchemic blend of humor, insight,and intelligence.

Extras
• Prose rarely wastes an idea. In Blue Angel, the novel that the character Angela is writing is actually a discarded novel that Prose started before stopping because, in her own words, "it seemed so juvenile to me."

• While she once had no problem slamming a book in one of her literary critiques, these days Prose has resolved to only review books that she actually likes. The ones that don't adhere to her high standards are simply returned to the senders.

• Prose's novel Household Saints was adapted into an excellent film starring Tracey Ullman, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Lili Taylor in 1993.

• Another novel, The Glorious Ones, was adapted into a musical.

• In 2002 Prose published The Lives of the Muses, an intriguing hybrid of biography, philosophy, and gender studies that examines nine women who inspired famous artists and thinkers—from John Lennon's wife Yoko Ono to Alice Liddell, the child who inspired Alice in Wonderland. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Expertly constructed, Mister Monkey is so fresh and new it’s almost giddy, almost impudent with originality. Tender and artful, Prose’s 15th novel is a sophisticated satire, a gently spiritual celebration of life, a dark and thoroughly grim depiction of despair, a screwball comedy, a screwball tragedy.... It’s gorgeous and bright and fun and multi-faceted, carrying within it the geological force of the ages. It’s a book to be treasured. It’s that good. It’s that funny. It’s that sad. It’s that deceptive and deep.
Cathleen Schine - New York Times Book Review (front cover review)

Everybody involved in the show loathes it and with good reason. It sounds dreadful.... Prose has plenty of fun mocking her invented disaster, but her real interest is the web of people connected by Mister Monkey.... Like some earlier storyteller, Prose suggests that "all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players." In a sense, we’re all cast in what she calls "the collective nightmare of Mister Monkey," condemned to play out this ghastly farce of material existence. Masterful....a lovely tribute to the transformative value of imagination.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

[A] comic novel vastly more entertaining than the sad production of the children’s musical, Mister Monkey, she so hilariously pillories.... Juggling multiple points of view, she presents an indelible cast of characters.... Some are reliable narrators, some self-deluding, but all intersect in surprising and remarkable ways..… In this strong, humane, and funny novel, Prose has treated us to an enthralling entertainment both on and off stage.
Boston Globe

Beautifully crafted, incisively written…Engaging and accessible…What elevates this novel is Prose’s ability to let us see into the heart of each character, to render each so vulnerably human, so achingly real in just a few short paragraphs.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Mister Monkey' Channels Disappointment.... [A] dark comedy about the mainly sad, disappointing lives of everyone involved in a woeful way-off-Broadway revival.... What's remarkable is how much wit and pathos Prose manages to wring from this wildly unpromising jumping-off point.... That said, I can't pretend that I was as taken with all the monkey business.... [Still, Prose] shares...her considerable talent for ventriloquy: She is the Meryl Streep of literary fiction.
Heller McAlpin - NPR

As absorbing and three-dimensional as each character is, the development of the actual novel feels awkwardly formulaic, and the strangeness of the play itself...s stilted, despite the genuine intrigue of each scene in the novel.
Publishers Weekly

The Off-Off Broadway children's musical Mister Monkey has been running too long, as Margot, who plays the chimp's lawyer, surely knows. Witty mayhem ensues when she receives a letter from a secret admirer....
Library Journal

(Starred review.) With her customary sure hand....Prose hilariously nails the down-at-the-heels milieu.... Wickedly funny and sharply observant, in the author’s vintage manner, with a warmth that softens the satire just enough.
Kirkus Reviews

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Mister Pip
Lloyd Jones
Random House
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385341073

Summary
A novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.

On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations.

So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.

More
Celebrating the timeless power of storytelling, Mister Pip unites the stirring tale of a young girl’s quest for hope with a marvelous tribute to a Charles Dickens classic. Thirteen-year-old Matilda is coming of age on a Pacific island that has been torn apart by war. Almost everyone, including her father, has left to find work or escape the danger. Among those few who remain is the eccentric and mysterious Mr. Watts, the island’s sole remaining white man, who takes on the role of teacher and begins to read Great Expectations aloud to students. For Matilda and her classmates, the story offers an escape from their brutal reality, while instilling in them the strength to endure in a place where nothing is certain, not even their survival. Mister Pip celebrates individual strength, the ability of humanity to transform itself through narrative, and powerful friendships that cross cultural lines. In this gripping and imaginative novel, Lloyd Jones gives us a unique way to explore issues of faith, family, loyalty, identity, and, ultimately, the transcendence of literature. (From the publisher

Author Bio
• Birth—March 23 1955
• Where—Lower Hutt, New Zealand
• Education—B.A. Victoria University
• Awards—Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship;
Commonwealth's Writers' Prize (Mister Pip).
• Currently—Wellington, New Zealand

Lloyd Jones is a New Zealand author whose novels and collections of stories include the award-winning The Book of Fame, Biografi, a New York Times Notable Book, Choo Woo, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance and Paint Your Wife.

He is a graduate of Victoria University. In 1988 he was the recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship.

In 1994 he curated an exhibition which illustrated the New Zealand Saturday. This work was a collaboration with photographer Bruce Foster and held at the National Library in Wellington. The work was published as the The Last Saturday and included historical photographs, contemporary ones by Foster and an essay by Jones.

In 2003, a theatrical adaptation of his novel, The Book of Fame was presented at Wellington's Downstage Theatre.

n May 2007, he won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Overall Best Book Award for his novel Mister Pip. The novel is set during the Bougainville Civil War of the early 1990s. His novel Mister Pip was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2007.

In August 2007 he spent a year in Berlin as beneficiary of the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency.

He is the younger brother of property tycoon Bob Jones. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Mister Pip moves easily, even comically, into its Great Expectations fetish…if Mister Pip is preachy—and it is—it's also a book with worthwhile thoughts to impart. Mr. Jones's ability to translate these thoughts into the gentle, tropical, roundabout idiom of his setting…turns out to be genuinely affecting.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones's spare, haunting fable explores the power and limitations of art as Matilda chronicles 21 increasingly desperate months. The villagers are trapped between the rebels and the soldiers just as inexorably as Matilda is caught between Mr. Watts and her fiercely religious mother.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post

A promising though ultimately overwrought portrayal of the small rebellions and crises of disillusionment that constitute a young narrator's coming-of-age unfolds against an ominous backdrop of war in Jones's latest. When the conflict between the natives and the invading "redskin" soldiers erupts on an unnamed tropical island in the early 1990s, 13-year-old Matilda Laimo and her mother, Dolores, are unified with the rest of their village in their efforts for survival. Amid the chaos, Mr. Watts, the only white local (he is married to a native), offers to fill in as the children's schoolteacher and teaches from Dickens's Great Expectations. The precocious Matilda, who forms a strong attachment to the novel's hero, Pip, uses the teachings as escapism, which rankles Dolores, who considers her daughter's fixation blasphemous. With a mixture of thrill and unease, Matilda discovers independent thought, and Jones captures the intricate, emotionally loaded evolution of the mother-daughter relationship. Jones (The Book of Fame; Biografi) presents a carefully laid groundwork in the tense interactions between Matilda, Dolores and Mr. Watts, but the extreme violence toward the end of the novel doesn't quite work. Jones's prose is faultless, however, and the story is innovative enough to overcome the misplayed tragedy.
Publishers Weekly

This eighth offering by New Zealander Jones (e.g., The Book of Fame) follows the early years of teenage protagonist Matilda on a remote island off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Matilda's father takes a job with an Australian mining company, leaving Matilda and her mother behind on the island. Meanwhile, the village's lone white occupant appoints himself local schoolmaster, with his first lesson being a yearlong recitation of Dickens's Great Expectations, whose themes of estrangement and personal metamorphosis mirror Matilda's story. When rebellion ferments on the island, the central authorities impose a naval blockade, cutting off the inhabitants from the outside world. As government soldiers move against villages sympathetic to the rebels, Matilda must choose between remaining on the island or striking out for Australia in search of her father. Despite surprising plot twists and delightfully eccentric personalities, there are moments when Jones's characters speak with the author's voice rather than their own. In the end, however, this book addresses ideas of place and homesickness with conviction, making it a worthwhile read. Recommended for public libraries.
Chris Pusateri - Library Journal

Bringing Great Expectations to desperate children ravaged by revolution, an eccentric teacher becomes a martyr to literature and transforms the prospects of a strong-willed girl. He's actually "Mr. Watts." But so identified does he become with Dickens' wondrous coming-of-age narrative that he's known as "Mr. Pip." Jones (Paint Your Wife, 2004, etc.) juxtaposes this English exile, married to a native black woman and now the last white man on an unspecified Survivor-style island, with teenaged Matilda, his most eager student. He's a stopgap professor, really, just volunteering to instruct 20 kids, seven to 15 years old, who gather for shelter from the war between the "redskins" and the "rebels." A long-bearded Scheherazade in a white linen suit, Watts draws out the telling of Dickens' classic to the children and soon we have the age-old tale: story as balm, spell, savior. He also invites the island mothers in for show ‘n' tell: chances to share their wisdom. They offer fishing tips; rhapsodies of the sea; and one tells of a woman who "once turned a white man into marmalade and spread him onto her toast." That tale spinner is Matilda's mother, and she becomes Watts's rival, her pidgin Bible contrasting his Victorian tale; she is imperiled nature; he's threatening culture. He reminisces about "the smell of fresh-mown grass and lawnmower oil"; she fears the capture of her daughter's soul. And yet in time, for Matilda's sake, the pair negotiate a tremulous peace-one soon savaged by murder, as the redskins descend. As the revolution intensifies, the schoolhouse burns, along with Great Expectations. And Watts's last injunction to his students is that they rebuild the story orally, for themselves,piece by piece. A little Gauguin, a bit of Lord Jim, the novel's lyricism evokes great beauty and great pain.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Is it important that Mr. Watts is the last white man on the island? Why?

2. Why does Matilda write Pip’s name in the sand alongside the names of her relatives? Why does this upset her mother? How does this contribute to Dolores’s feelings about Mr. Watts’s instruction of her daughter? Are these feelings understandable?

3. Why do you think Mr. Watts pulled his wife in the cart? Why did he wear the red clown nose? What meaning did that have for them?

4. What is the message Matilda’s mother is trying to express to the children with the story of her mother’s braids? How is this related to the issue of Mr. Watts’s faith in God?

5. What did you think of the lessons that the mothers of the children bring to the classroom? If you were the parent of a child in Matilda’s class, what lesson would you teach the children? What might your mother have taught the class?

6. Who is Dolores warning the children about when she tells them the story about the devil lady and the church money? How does this story justify her actions regarding the book and the redskins? Do you agree with Dolores’s refusal to bring forth the book? With Matilda’s?

7. Where do you think Gilbert’s father takes Sam? How do you know? In your opinion, was it necessary that he do so?

8. Why does the corned beef in Mr. Watts’s house “represent a broad hope” for Matilda? Discuss Mr. Watts’s reaction to Matilda’s fragment. Do you believe that Grace was alive when Matilda arrived?

9. Discuss how the characters in this story struggle to reconcile the concepts of race and identity. Does it seem to dictate their interaction with each other? How does it influence their concepts of self? What moments, especially, helped reveal this to you?

10. What is the meaning of the story of the Queen of Sheba? Why does Mr. Watts bring it up? Why is it significant that Dolores is familiar with that story?

11. Why does Dolores step forward to declare herself “God’s witness” to the murder of Mr. Watts? Were you surprised that she did? Why does she insist that Matilda remain silent?

12. Do you think Matilda was able to return home? How would that outcome affect your reading of both novels?

13. Discuss your memorable experiences of being read to as a child. What book made the greatest impact on your life? Did any book come to you at precisely the right time, the way Great Expectations was brought to Matilda?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Mistress of Spices
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, 1997
Knopf Doubleday
338 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385482387

Summary
Magical, tantalizing, and sensual, The Mistress of Spices is the story of Tilo, a young woman born in another time, in a faraway place, who is trained in the ancient art of spices and ordained as a mistress charged with special powers.

Once fully initiated in a rite of fire, the now immortal Tilo—in the gnarled and arthritic body of an old woman—travels through time to Oakland, California, where she opens a shop from which she administers spices as curatives to her customers. An unexpected romance with a handsome stranger eventually forces her to choose between the supernatural life of an immortal and the vicissitudes of modern life.

Spellbinding and hypnotizing, The Mistress of Spices is a tale of joy and sorrow and one special woman's magical powers. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 29, 1956
• Where—Kolkata, India
• Education—B.A., Kolkata University; Ph.D., University of
California, Berkeley
• Currently—lives in Houston, Texas and San Jose, Calif.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the author of the bestselling novels Queen of Dreams, Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, and The Vine of Desire, and of the prizewinning story collections Arranged Marriage and The Unknown Errors of Our Lives. Her writings have appeared in more than 50 magazines, including Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker.

Divakaruni was born in India and came to the United States at 19. She put herself through Berkeley doing odd jobs, from working at an Indian boutique to slicing bread in a bakery. She lives in Houston, Texas, and teaches creative writing at the University of Houston. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Extras
Excerpts from a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:

• During graduate school, I used to work in the kitchen of the International House at the University of California, Berkeley. My favorite task was slicing Jell-O.

• I love Chinese food, but my family hates it. So when I'm on book tour I always eat Chinese!

• I almost died on a pilgrimage trip to the Himalayas some years back—but I got a good story out of it. The story is in The Unknown Errors of Our Lives—let's see if readers can figure out which one it is!

• Writing is so central to my life that it leaves little time/desire/need for other interests. I do a good amount of work with domestic violence organizations—I'm on the advisory board of Asians Against Domestic Violence in Houston. I feel very strongly about trying to eradicate domestic violence from our society.

• My favorite ways to unwind are to do yoga, read, and spend time with my family.

• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her answer:

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. I read this when I was in grad school, and it really made me examine my own role as a woman of color living in the U.S. It made me want to start writing about my own experiences. It made me think that perhaps I, too, had something worthwhile to write about.

("Extras" from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
(Audio version.) Divakaruni, author of the award-winning short story collection Arranged Marriage (1995), has crafted a fine first novel that makes a smooth transition to the audio format. Tilo, proprietress of the Spice Bazaar in Oakland, California, is not the elderly Indian woman she appears to be. Trained as a mistress of spices, she evokes the magical powers of the spices of her homeland to help her customers. These customers, mostly first- or second-generation immigrants, are struggling to adapt their Old World ideals to the unfamiliar and often unkind New World. Though trapped in an old woman's body and forbidden to leave the store, Tilo is unable to keep the required distance from her patrons' lives. Her yearning to join the world of mortals angers the spices, and Tilo must face the dire consequences of her disobedience. Divakaruni, whose conversational style translates well into audio, blends social commentary and romance into an eloquent novel of the human condition. With superb narration from Sarita Choudhury, this production is highly recommended for all fiction collections. —Beth Farrell, Portage Cty. Dist. Lib., Ohio
Library Journal

Mythical and mystical, The Mistress of Spices is reminiscent of fables and fairy tales....The story Divakaruni tells is transporting, but it is her gift for metaphor that makes this novel live and breathe, its pages as redolent as any freshly ground spice. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

The author of the promising story collection Arranged Marriage (1995) employs magical realism to delve back into the lives of Indian immigrants—all of whom, in this case, consult an ancient shamanic spice-vendor in their efforts to improve their lives. Born ugly and unwanted in a tiny village in India, Nayan Tara ("Flower That Grows by the Dust Road") is virtually discarded by her family for the sin of being a girl. Resentful at being treated so shabbily, young Nayan Tara throws herself on the mercy of the mythical serpents of the oceans, who deliver her to the mystical Island of Spices. There, she is initiated into a priestly sisterhood of Spice Mistresses sent out into the world to help others, offering magic potions of fennel, peppercorn, lotus root, etc. The place where Nayan Tara (now renamed Tilottama, or Tilo) eventually lands happens to be the Spice Bazaar in a rough section of Oakland, California—a tiny, rundown shop from which the now- aged Tilo is forbidden to venture. Here, she devotes herself to improving the lives of the immigrant Indians who come to buy her spices—including an abused wife, a troubled youth, a chauffeur with dreams of American wealth, and a grandfather whose insistence on Old World propriety may have cost him his relationship with a beloved granddaughter. As long as Tilo follows the dictates of her ancient island-bound spice mentor, particularly thinking only of her charges' needs and never of her own, Tilo feels in sync with the spice spirits and with the world at large. Her longing for love tempts her to stray, however, when a mysterious American arrives in her shop. A sometimes clumsy, intermittently enchanting tale of love and loss in immigrant America. Still, the unique insights into the struggles of Indian-Americans to transcend the gulf between East and West make trudging through some rather plain prose worthwhile.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The New York Times Book Review states that The Mistress of Spices "becomes a novel about choosing between a life of special powers and one of ordinary love and compassion." Did Tilo choose correctly? Why or why not?

2. How do the spices become characters in the novel?

3. Tilo only speaks her name out loud to one person in the novel. What is the significance of this action? What role do names play in the novel?

4. What do the spices take from Tilo? What do they give her? Is it a fair exchange?

5. Tilo left her shop for the first time early in the novel to look at Haroun's cab. But later she is drawn even further out by Raven. Was her course already set at that point? Would she have left again even without Raven's pull?

6. In what ways is punishment seen as a natural force in this novel? How are punishment and retribution tied to balance?

7. Tilo says, "Better hate spoken than hate silent." Does hate spoken achieve the effect Tilo intends or not?

8. Divakaruni chose to write The Mistress of Spices in the first person present tense. Does this point of view add or detract from the story?

9. What passages of the novel resemble poetry? How does Divakaruni make use of lyricism and rhythm?

10. What role does physical beauty play in this story? In Tilo's feelings about her body? About Raven? About the bougainvillea girls?

11. Does Raven's story (pp. 161-171) differ from Tilo's story of her past at the points where she tells it? Do these differences say anything about the differences between women and men, or between Indians and Americans?

12. How are physical acts of violence and disaster foreshadowed in the novel? What is the significance of foreshadowing in Indian culture?

For Discussion: Divakaruni's Novels and Stories

13. What do the characters in Divakaruni's novels and stories lose and gain as they become more "American"?

14. In the story "Affair," Abha says, "It's not wrong to be happy, is it? To want more out of life than fulfilling duties you took on before you knew what they truly meant?" How is this idea further developed in The Mistress of Spices? In Sister of My Heart?

15. In Divakaruni's stories, women are wives and mothers, but the men are portrayed primarily as husbands, not fathers. How are the men's roles in the novels similar to or different from those in the stories?

16. How does the Indian immigrant experience compare to that of other immigrants—Spanish, Italian, Chinese?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Mistress of the Revolution
Catherine Delors
Penguin Group USA
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451225955

Summary
In 1815 England, an exiled Frenchwoman, Gabrielle de Monserrat, begins a memoir of her days before and during the French Revolution. Gabrielle, the youngest daughter of a family of the impoverished nobility, recalls her journey through hardships and betrayals by three men in her life.

A girl of quiet strength and startling beauty, a widow at seventeen with a young daughter, Gabrielle is released into the world of Paris nobility. Determined and inquisitive, with little money and few prospects, she strives to find her own freedom. Around her, the French people attempt to build a utopia based on the ideals of liberty and equality. Differing currents of thought clash over the fate of a nation as the Revolution takes an ever more violent turn. Yet Gabrielle survives, maintaining her humanity and sense of decency. On occasion, she glimpses her first love as he ascends from obscure patriot to one of the most passionate architects of the new order. At last she reaches for him and an impossible happiness.

As Gabrielle writes on, twenty years later, political events again overtake her and she realizes that her tale is far more than an evocation of the past. It is the truth she owes her children. (From the author's website.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—France
• Education—University of Paris, Sorbonne School of Law
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California (USA) and Paris,
France

Catherine Delors was born and raised in France. She graduated from the University of Paris-Sorbonne School of Law and became a member of the Bar of Paris at the age of twenty-one.

She moved to the United States after her marriage and passed the California Bar. She worked at a few large law firms, then, after the birth of her son, set up a solo practice. She now splits her time between Los Angeles and Paris.

She has completed her second novel, titled For The King, a historical thriller about a terrorist attack in 1800 Paris, at the beginning of Bonaparte's reign. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Definitely a contender for one of the best reads of the year.
Associated Press

A most impressive literary debut, this outstanding novel of the French Revolution is well worth reading.
Historical Novels Review (Editors' Choice)

Against the backdrop of the leadup to the French Revolution, Delors's mostly successful debut follows the life of Gabrielle de Montserrat, a feisty young woman forced by her meddling brother to forsake her commoner true love and marry the Baron de Peyre, a wealthy, older man. The baron is abusive and cruel, but the short-lived marriage produces a daughter before the baron dies. A widowed Gabrielle travels to Paris and enters the heady world of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, where, with a sparse inheritance and the responsibility of a young daughter, Gabrielle becomes the mistress of Count de Villers. Delors shines in her portrayal of the late 18th-century French women's world (she has a rougher time with the men), though the amount of political-historical detail covered overshadows the tragic love story that develops once Gabrielle reunites with her first love, Pierre-André Coffinhal, who is now a lawyer. The appearance of historical figures sometimes comes off awkwardly (as when Gabrielle meets Thomas Jefferson or has a private audience with Robespierre), and the ending is marred by a too-convenient and seemingly tossed-off twist. Nevertheless, the author ably captures the vagaries of French politics during turbulent times and creates a world inhabited by nicely developed and sympathetic characters.
Publishers Weekly

Delors does an admirable job of depicting the tension, confusion, and volatility of an era when one false move could mean the guillotine. —Margaret Flanagan
Booklist

A noblewoman suffers several close brushes with the guillotine during the French Revolution in this debut novel from Delors. Gabrielle, from a noble family in Auvergne, sees her ancestral chateau for the first time at age 11, after she's removed from convent boarding school by her brother, the Marquis de Montserrat. Her mother, whom she hardly knows, is cold and hypercritical, and as Gabrielle matures, her brother makes incestuous overtures to her. While visiting her former wet nurse, a peasant woman, Gabrielle falls in love with Pierre-Andre, a young doctor. The Marquis forbids her to wed Pierre-Andre because he is a commoner. Instead, when she turns 15, her family forces her to marry middle-aged Baron de Peyre, who proves a volatile, brutal husband. When he dies suddenly, leaving Gabrielle a pittance, she flees with daughter Aimee to Paris, where she finds refuge with a distant cousin, a duchess who introduces her to the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Gabrielle becomes the mistress of the Count de Villers, who keeps her in grand style but often displays a cruel streak. When the Revolution begins, and Villers is killed defending the Tuileries Palace, Gabrielle is imprisoned, but acquitted by a peoples' court. Meanwhile, Pierre-Andre, now a lawyer, has become an influential magistrate under the new regime, and remains so throughout the various power shifts of the Revolution, while his contemporaries are losing their heads. Gabrielle seeks his help in procuring identity documents falsifying her aristocratic past, and the two rekindle their romance. Gabrielle is again arrested when her employer, whose advances she spurns, informs on her. Pierre-Andre secures her release and obtains his mentor Robespierre's blessings for the relationship. But a sudden reversal of Robespierre's political fortunes leaves Pierre-Andre and Gabrielle at the mob's mercy. Delors, who was born in France, writes competently in English, but at times her prose reads like a stilted translation. The Revolution's successive upheavals form an engrossing backdrop to Gabrielle's predicament, but she's too timid a protagonist to command center stage.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In Mistress of the Revolution, Gabrielle often makes difficult choices (when she becomes Villiers's mistress, when she accepts the position of lady-in-waiting, when she goes to work at the Theatre.) In her place, would you have chosen other options?

2. Gabrielle is, for all intents and purposes, abandoned at birth by her mother. How does she cope with it?

3. Do you think Gabrielle is a good mother? How does her relationship with her daughter evolve throughout the book?

4. Do you see Gabrielle's brother, the Marquis de Montserrat, as a villain, or do you feel some sympathy for him?

5. Is Gabrielle passive? Does she accept the limits imposed on women of her class and time, or does she strive to forge her own path?

6. When Gabrielle arrives in Paris as a widow at the age of seventeen, she is not reunited with her former love. Why not?

7. Is the portrait of Queen Marie-Antoinette in Mistress of the Revolution different from what you read in other books or saw in films?

8. How are the stark realities of the Terror foreshadowed in the luxurious lifestyle of the aristocracy before the Revolution?

9. How does Gabrielle's attitude towards religion in general, and her own faith, evolve throughout the novel?

10. Mistress of the Revolution begins as a memoir. How, and why does the tone and purpose of Gabrielle's narrative evolve?

11. Did Mistress of the Revolution change your image of the French Revolution? If yes, how so?

12. Did the conclusion of the novel surprise you? Is it a "happy ending"?
(Questions from the author's website.)

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The Mists of Avalon
Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1982
Random House
912 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345350497

Summary
Here is the magical legend of King Arthur, vividly retold through the eyes and lives of the women who wielded power from behind the throne. A spellbinding novel, an extraordinary literary achievement, The Mists of Avalon will stay with you for a long time to come. (From the publisher.)

The book was adapted into a 2001 film for TV, starring Angelica Houston and Julianna Margulies, Joan Allen, and Sam Neill.

Author Bio
• Birth—June 30, 1930
• Where—Albany, New York, USA
• Death—September 25, 1999
• Where—Berkeley, CA
• Education—B.A., Hardin-Simmons College; University of
California, Berkeley
• Awards—Locus Award for best fantasy novel, 1984

A prolific storyteller from the time she was old enough to talk, Marion Zimmer Bradley had an enormous impact on the science fiction and fantasy genres, imagining centuries of technological and culture clashes in the colonization of a distant planet in her Darkover series and recasting the Arthurian legends from the perspective of the women in his life in her 1983 masterpiece, The Mists of Avalon. (From the publisher.)

More
Marion Zimmer Bradley was writing before she could write. As a young girl, before she learned to take pen in hand, she was dictating stories to her mother. She started her own magazine —devoted to science fiction and fantasy, of course—as a teenager, and she wrote her first novel when she was in high school.

Given this history of productivity, it is perhaps no surprise that Bradley was working right up until her death in 1999. Though declining health interfered with her output, she was working on manuscripts and editing magazines, including another sci-fi/fantasy publication of her own making.

Her longest-running contribution to the genre was her "Darkover" series, which began in 1958 with the publication of The Planet Savers. The series, which is not chronological, covers several centuries and is set on a distant planet that has been colonized by humans, who have interbred with a native species on the planet. Critics lauded her efforts to address culture clashes — including references to gays and lesbians — in the series.

"It is not just an exercise in planet-building," wrote Susan Shwartz in the St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers. "A Darkover book is commonly understood to deal with issues of cultural clash, between Darkover and its parent Terran culture, between warring groups on Darkover, or in familial terms."

Diana Pharoah Francis, writing in Contemporary Popular Writers, noted the series' attention on its female characters, and the consequences of the painful choices they must make: "Struggles are not decided easily, but through pain and suffering. Her point seems to be that what is important costs, and the price is to be paid out of the soul rather than out of the pocketbook. Her characters are never black and white but are all shades of gray, making them more compelling and humanized."

Bradley's most notable single work would have to be The Mists of Avalon. Released in 1983, its 800-plus pages address the King Arthur story from the point of view of the women in his life — including his wife, his mother and his half sister. Again, Bradley received attention and critics for her female focus, though many insist that she cannot be categorized strictly as a "feminist" writer, because her real focus is always character rather than politics.

"In drawing on all of the female experiences that make of the tapestry of the legend, Bradley is able to delve into the complexity of their intertwined lives against the tapestry of the undeclared war being waged between the Christians and the Druids," Francis wrote in her Contemporary Popular Writers essay. "Typical of Bradley is her focus on this battle, which is also a battle between masculine (Christian) and feminine (Druid) values."

And Maureen Quilligan, in her New York Times review in 1983, said: "What she has done here is reinvent the underlying mythology of the Arthurian legends. It is an impressive achievement. Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Celtic and Orphic stories are all swirled into a massive narrative that is rich in events placed in landscapes no less real for often being magical."

Avalon flummoxed Hollywood for nearly 20 years before finally making it to cable television as a TNT movie in 2001, starring Joan Allen, Anjelica Huston, and Julianna Margulies.

Two years before she died, Bradley's photograph was included in The Faces of Science Fiction, a collection of prominent science fiction writers, such names as Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. Under it, she gave her own take on the importance of the genre:

"Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.

Extras
• Aside from her science fiction and fantasy writing, Bradley also contributed to the gay and lesbian genre, publishing lesbian fiction under pseudonyms, bibliographies of gay and lesbian literature, and a gay mainstream novel.

• Bradley rewrote some editions of her Darkover series to accommodate real advances in technology.

• Her first stories were published in pulp science fiction magazines in the 1950s. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
A monumental reimagining of the Arthurian legends.... Reading it is a deeply moving and at times uncanny experience.... An impressive achievement.
New York Times Book Review

Marion Zimmer Bradley has brilliantly and innovatively turned the myth inside out...add[ing] a whole new dimension to our mythic history.
San Francisco Chronicle

Gripping.... Superbly realized.... A worthy addition to almost a thousand years of Arthurian tradition.
Cleveland Plain Dealer

The Mists of Avalon is a beautiful book. The characters are alive, multi-dimensional; I really care about them.
Madeleine L'Engle

A most original interpretation of the matter of Britian by way of Celtic religion and the Great Mother...a remarkable feat of imagination.
Mary Renault

I loved the book so much I went out and bought it for a friend, and have told many people about it. Why did no one ever think before to tell the story of King Arthur from the perspective of the women!
Jean Auel

Masterfully plotted and beautifully written. The Mists of Avalon sheds new light on old characters—especially Morgan of the Faeries, Merlin, Lancelot, and Guinevere. An epic novel of violence, lust, painful loyalties, and haunting enchantments.
Publishers Weekly

There is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you." The Mists of Avalon is a story of another time and place. It's the legendary saga of King Arthur and his companions at Camelot, their battles, love, and devotion, told this time from the perspective of the women involved. Viviane is "The Lady of the Lake," the magical priestess of the Isle of Avalon, a special mist-shrouded place which becomes more difficult to reach as people turn away from its nature- and Goddess-oriented religion. Viviane's quest is to find a king who will be loyal to Avalon as well as to Christianity. This king will be Arthur. Gwenhwyfar, Arthur's Queen, is an overly pious, fearful woman who successfully sways her husband into betraying his allegiance to Avalon. Set against her is Morgaine of the Fairies, Arthur's sister, love, and enemy - and the most powerfully believable person in the book - who manipulates the characters like threads in a tapestry to achieve her tragic and heroic goals. The Mists of Avalon becomes a legend seen through new eyes, with details, majestic language, and haunting foreshadowing that hold the reader through its more than 800 pages
Gloria Bauermeister - 500 Great Books by Women

Discussion Questions
1. The Mists of Avalon revolves around a number of dualities: male/ female, Christianity/druidism, duty/desire. How are these dualities represented in the book? Can you think of others that were presented?

2. How does the book strive to challenge common stereotypes? How does it reinforce them?

3. Is Gwenhwyfar a sympathetic character? In your opinion, does Marion Zimmer Bradley treat physical beauty in a positive, negative, or neutral manner? Explain.

4. How responsible is Arthur for allowing the spread of Christianity and ultimate disappearance of Avalon? Was he simply being an honorable husband to Gwenhwyfar? Did you find the Arthur, Lancelet, Gwenhwyfar tryst disturbing? Although Arthur was an indisputably potent leader, can he, in the end, be deemed an effective one?

5. It seemed in several instances that Morgaine disappeared when she was most needed. Was she ultimately successful in representing the Goddess? Would you say that she was a victim to her fate or that she ultimately rose to meet it? What parallels can you draw between Morgaine’s life and Igraine’s? Between Morgaine and Viviane?

6. The Merlin seems to play an ambiguous role in the story. Do you agree with this statement? In your opinion, was he motivated more by his faith, or by pride and ambition?

7. Throughout history, did the spread of Christianity really lead to a diminishing of tolerance? Does the Goddess have a place in today’s world? Do you think that Christianity ever held woman as the principal of evil?

8. What symbolism, if any, would you apply to the dragon slain by Lancelet? What is the symbolism behind Excalibur? The Grail? The Holy Thorn?

9. At the end of Mists, did you feel that the Goddess had truly been absorbed into Christianity?

10. How has Mists changed your perception or understanding of the Arthurian legend? How has it changed your perception of women’s roles in the making (and telling) of history?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Moby-Dick, or The Whale
Herman Melville, 1851
Signet : Penguin Group USA (cover image)
~500 pp. (varies by publisher)
ISBN-13: 9780451532282

Summary
It was an obsession that would destroy them all.

On a cold December night, a young man called Ishmael rents a room at an inn in Massachusetts. He has come from Manhattan to the north-east of America to sign up for a whaling expedition. Later that same night, as Ishmael is sleeping, a heavily tattooed man wielding a blade enters his room. This chance meeting is just the start of what will become the greatest adventure of his life.

The next day, Ishmael joins the crew of a ship known as the Pequod. He is approached by a man dressed in rags who warns him that, if he sails under the command of Captain Ahab, he may never come back. Undaunted, Ishmael returns early the next morning and leaves for the high seas. For the crew of the Pequod, their voyage is one of monetary gain.

For Captain Ahab, however, it is a mission driven by hatred, revenge, and his growing obsession with the greatest creature of the sea. (From the Campfire illustrated edition.)

More
Moby-Dick is at once a thrilling adventure tale, a timeless allegory, and an epic saga of heroic determination and conflict. At its heart is the powerful, unknowable sea—and Captain Ahab, a brooding, one-legged fanatic who has sworn vengeance on the mammoth white whale that crippled him.

Narrated by Ishmael, a wayfarer who joins the crew of Ahab’s whaling ship, this is the story of that hair-raising voyage, and of the men who embraced hardship and nameless horrors as they dared to challenge God’s most dreaded creation and death itself for a chance at immortality.

A novel that delves with astonishing vigor into the complex souls of men, Moby-Dick is an impassioned drama of the ultimate human struggle that the Atlantic Monthly called “the greatest of American novels.” (From the 2013 Signets Classics edition.)

Still more
Over a century and a half after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself.

But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception. (From the 2000 Penguin Classics edition.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 1, 1819
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Death—September 28, 1891
• Where—New York, New York
• Education—Albany Academy until age 15

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet, whose work is often classified as part of the genre of dark romanticism. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and novella Billy Budd, the latter of which was published posthumously.

Melville was born in New York City in 1819, as the third child of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. (After her husband Allan died, Maria added an "e" to the family surname.) Allan Melvill sent his sons to the New York Male School (Columbia Preparatory School). Overextended financially and emotionally unstable, Allan eventually declared bankruptcy, dying soon afterward and leaving his family penniless when Herman was 12.

Melville attended the Albany Academy from October 1830 to October 1831, and again from October 1836 to March 1837, where he studied the classics. Melville's roving disposition and a desire to support himself led him to seek work as a surveyor on the Erie Canal. This effort failed, and his brother helped him get a job as a cabin boy on a New York ship bound for Liverpool. He made the voyage, and returned on the same ship. Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) is partly based on his experiences of this journey.

After teaching for a stint (1837-1840), Melville spent the next four years at sea, travelling in the South Pacific Ocean, stopping off for periods in Hawaii and the Marquesas Islands (where he lived mong the Typee natives). He returned to Boston in 1844. These experiences were described in Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and White-Jacket (1850), which gave Melville overnight notoriety as a writer and adventurer.

In 1847, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw (daughter of chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Lemuel Shaw); the couple had four children, two sons and two daughters. In 1850 they purchased Arrowhead, a farm house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, now a museum. Here Melville lived for thirteen years, occupied with his writing and managing his farm. While living at Arrowhead, he befriended the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived in nearby Lenox. Melville, an intellectual loner for most of his life, was tremendously inspired and encouraged by his new relationship with Hawthorne during the period he was writing Moby-Dick (1851). Melville dedicated that work to Hawthorne, though their friendship was on the wane only a short time later, when Melville wrote Pierre (1852). Sadly, these works did not achieve the popular and critical success of his earlier books.

His The Confidence-Man (1857), winning general acclaim in modern times, received contemporary reviews ranging from the bewildered to the denunciatory.

By 1866 his professional writing career can be said to have come to an end. To repair his faltering finances, Melville's wife and her relatives used their influence to obtain a position for him as customs inspector for the City of New York (a humble but adequately paying appointment), and he held the post for 19 years. In a notoriously corrupt institution, Melville soon won the reputation of being the only honest employee of the customs house.

As his professional fortunes waned, Melville's marriage was unhappy, plagued by rumors of his alcoholism and insanity and allegations that he inflicted physical abuse on his wife. Her relatives repeatedly urged her to leave him, and offered to have him committed as insane, but she refused.

In 1867 his oldest son, Malcolm, shot himself, perhaps accidentally. While Melville worked, his wife managed to wean him off alcohol, and he no longer showed signs of agitation or insanity. But recurring depression was added-to by the death of his second son, Stanwix, in San Francisco early in 1886.

Melville retired in 1886, after several of his wife's relatives died and left the couple legacies that Mrs. Melville administered with skill and good fortune.

Upon his death in September 1891, he left an unfinished piece; not until the literary scholar Raymond Weaver published it in 1924 did the book—which we now know as Billy Budd, Sailor—come to light. Later it was turned into an opera by Benjamin Britten, a play, and a film by Peter Ustinov. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
(Classic books offer few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon or Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

The following is excerpted from the "Introduction" to Penguin Classic edition of Moby-Dick. For the longer—and very fine—version, visit the Penguin Group USA website.

Its reputation invariably preceding it, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is a novel like no other. Whether readers expect a subtle work of art, a rollicking adventure story, or a ponderous, inaccessible book, they come to this novel with a sense that the experience of reading it will be memorable. The story Melville tells is powerful and tragic—a whaling ship captain, obsessed with the animal that maimed him, pursues it to the point of destroying himself and his crew, except for Ishmael, the novel's narrator. But the plot of Moby-Dick is little more than a variation on those used by countless authors both before and after Melville. It is the way Melville tells the story that makes the novel incomparable. In fact, how a story is told and, more generally, how we interpret our experiences become as much the subject of the novel as Ahab's hunt for the white whale. As relentlessly as Ahab chases Moby Dick, so Melville questions the nature of the interaction between the mind and the external world. (Continue reading...)

Discussion Questions
(Below are two sets of questions: one from Penguin Group USA and other other from Random House Publishing Group.)

1. Why does the novel's narrator begin his story with "Call me Ishmael"?

2. How does Ishmael's relationship to Queequeg change from the time they meet to the sailing of the Pequod?

3. Why does Melville include stage directions in some chapters (e.g., "The Quarter-Deck")?

4. Why does Ahab pursue Moby Dick so single-mindedly?

5. Why does Melville have Fedallah offer a prophesy that Ahab interprets in his favor, but which turns out otherwise?

6. Why does Starbuck decide against killing Ahab, despite believing that it is the only way to "survive to hug his wife and child again"? Why does Starbuck fail to convince Ahab to give up his pursuit of Moby Dick ("The Symphony")?

7. Why does Ahab offer the doubloon to the first member of the crew to spot Moby Dick?

8. Why does Ishmael digress from his story to meditate on the meaning of whiteness ("The Whiteness of the Whale")?

9. Why does Melville begin the novel by adhering to the conventions and limitations of a first-person narrator, but violate them later?

10. Why is Ishmael so concerned with past efforts to represent whales, in writing as well as other media, and the extent to which these efforts have succeeded or failed?

11. Why does Ishmael include in his story so many details about life and work aboard a whaling ship?

12. Does the novel support or undermine Ishmael's contention that "some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth"?

13. Why does the coffin prepared for Queequeg become Ishmael's life buoy once the Pequod sinks?

14. Who or what is primarily responsible for the destruction of the Pequod and, except for Ishmael, her crew?"

15. Why does the Rachel rescue Ishmael?

16. How has his experience aboard the Pequod affected Ishmael?

17. On what basis should we determine the point at which ambition turns into obsession?

18. Is knowledge always at least partly harmful, either in its application or the cost of acquiring it?
(Questions issued by Penguin.)

1. What is the significance of the whale? What do you think Melville intends in developing such a vicious antagonism between Ahab and the whale?

2. How does the presence of Queequeg, particularly his status as a "savage," inform the novel? How does Melville depict this cultural clash?

3. How does whaling as an industry function metaphorically throughout the novel? Where does man fit in in this scenario?

4. Melville explores the divide between evil and virtue, justice and vengeance throughout the novel. What, ultimately, is his conclusion? What is Ahab's?

5. What do you think of the role, if any, played by religion in the novel? Do you think religious conventions are replaced or subverted in some way? Discuss.

6. Discuss the novel's philosophical subtext. How does this contribute to the basic plot involving Ahab's search for the whale? Is this Ishmael's purpose in the novel?

7. Discuss the role of women in the novel. What does their conspicuous absence mean in the overall context of the novel?
(Questions issued by Random House.)

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A Model Murder (Alicia Allen Investigates Trilogy, 1)
Celia Conrad, 2011
Barcham Books
341 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780954623326

Summary
A Model Murder is a fast-paced mystery that draws scary, sometimes hilarious, parallels between alpha males in strip clubs and law firms.

This first book in the Alicia Allen Investigates Trilogy introduces Alicia Allen, a 29-year-old London Anglo-Italian lawyer whose desire for Pringles is matched only by her desire to solve crime. When her neighbor—a beautiful aspiring Australian model—is found raped and murdered before she can pick up her first paycheck at a sleazy “hostess” club, Alicia ignites with such passion to bring the wrongdoer to justice, it would make even Portia envious.

As her dangerous quest draws her into the dark world of exploitative “hostess clubs,” Alicia finds herself facing similar circumstances in a new law firm where alpha males roam the halls in solicitor suits intimidating or stalking undervalued female coworkers. Worse luck, the deeper she delves into the investigation, the more her comfortable world falls apart. Friends are viciously attacked...potential lovers may not be what they seem...clues pop up in Italian opera, Shakespeare, and a cat.

Alicia soon finds her willingness to risk her own life for the sake of justice is sorely put to the test in a world where Fate plays no small role. (From the publisher.)

This is the first book in the Alicia Allen Investigates Trilogy. Wilful Murder (2012) is the second, and Murder in Hand (2012) is the third.

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—J.D., University of London
• Currently—lives in West London, England

Celia Conrad is a British author who shares similarities with the heroine of her Alicia Allen Investigates Trilogy in her own Anglo-Italian heritage and solicitor experience (aka "lawyer" in the U.S.). Together they share an enthusiasm for crime solving, Shakespeare, All Things Italian and, of course, Pringles. A Model Murder was her debut novel, written at the suggestion of a mentor who encouraged her to write mysteries based on real-life stories she has encountered while working within the law. She followed it with Wilful Murder and Murder in Hand, Books 2 and 3, respectively in the Alicia Allen Investigates series. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow Celia on Facebook.

Book Reviews
Conrad draws disturbing, often painfully entertaining, parallels between strip clubs and law firms where Neanderthals still roam the Earth. Her down-to-earth heroine has no superpowers of intuition and deduction, but is quite simply a good neighbor who will stop at nothing until a wrong is made right. All clues are juggled in midair until the breathtaking conclusion: no small feat for a first-time author.
Midwest Book Review

A craftily woven tale of friendship, deception and murder.
Maria Miller - Amazon U.S.

A subtle satire about the law and lawyers. Here is a debut thriller that kept me page turning until the final unexpected twist.
Multrus - Amazon U.K.

Like a delicious meal cooked with love, you will want to savour every mouthful slowly and nibble every morsel. And once completed, enjoy the memory of a satisfying experience yet not wanting the moment to end.
Hermes 3Magistus - Amazon U.K.

Gripping suspense...Celia Conrad has woven a wonderful tapestry of complex and interesting characters, not a few of whom are potential suspects in a horrific murder.
Robert Worden - Amazon U.S.

A contemporary murder mystery written in a straightforward style with discreet clues and naturalistic dialogue. Conrad reserves plot intricacies until the unexpected denouement.
C.S. England - Amazon U.K.

Discussion Questions
1. What makes Alicia unique as a character? What do you think her passions are? How do your own passions manifest in your life?

2. What do you think drives Alicia in her quest to find the murderer? Why does she choose to get so embroiled in the investigation?

3. How do you feel Alicia’s Anglo-Italian background influences her personality and decisions? How are the other characters influenced by her multi-cultural heritage?

4. In what ways can you relate to having a multi-cultural background or perspective, or do you know someone who does? How is this useful?

5. What did you think about Ivano’s character and Alicia’s feelings towards him? How do your feelings towards him change as the plot unfolds?

6. How did you feel about the character of Cesare and Alicia’s relationship with him?

7. How do you feel about the character of Alex and Alicia’s involvement with him?

8. How did you feel about Alicia’s interaction with the police?

9. What do you think about Alicia’s relationships with women in her personal life? Did you suspect that any of her “friends” might turn out to have something to do with Tammy’s murder?

10. What do you think about Teresa’s character and Alicia’s professional relationship with her? How do your feelings towards her change as the plot unfolds?

11, Did you suspect any of Alicia’s co-workers might be the murderer or have something to do with the murder?

12. What do you think the author wishes to portray about the nature of sleazy clubs and law firms?

13. What insight does this book give you into the working life of a young female lawyer?

14. How do you feel about the action leading up to Tammy’s murder? Did you wonder how the story was going to develop or why certain characters were being introduced in the way they were at a specific point in the plot?

15. How did you feel about Alicia’s elderly neighbour Dorothy, and what happens to her?

16. How were the references to opera and Shakespeare relevant to plot and character?

17. What was your reaction when the identity of the murderer was revealed?

18. What does the novel tell you about good and evil and the distinction between them?

19. What part do you feel Fate plays in the story?

20. How do you feel about the way language and culture is portrayed? Did you learn anything new about Italian or Australian culture? If you are American, did you learn anything new about British language or food?"

21. A Model Murder is the first book of a trilogy. Certain characters appear in the remaining parts of the trilogy. Which characters do you envisage returning, which characters would you like to see return and how would you like Alicia’s relationship with those characters to develop?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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Modern Girls
Jennifer S. Brown, 2016
Penguin Publishing
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451477125

Summary
How was it that out of all the girls in the office, I was the one to find myself in this situation? This didn’t happen to nice Jewish girls.

In 1935, Dottie Krasinsky is the epitome of the modern girl. A bookkeeper in Midtown Manhattan, Dottie steals kisses from her steady beau, meets her girlfriends for drinks, and eyes the latest fashions.

Yet at heart, she is a dutiful daughter, living with her Yiddish-speaking parents on the Lower East Side. So when, after a single careless night, she finds herself in a family way by a charismatic but unsuitable man, she is desperate: unwed, unsure, and running out of options.

After the birth of five children—and twenty years as a housewife—Dottie’s immigrant mother, Rose, is itching to return to the social activism she embraced as a young woman. With strikes and breadlines at home and National Socialism rising in Europe, there is much more important work to do than cooking and cleaning.

So when she realizes that she, too, is pregnant, she struggles to reconcile her longings with her faith.

As mother and daughter wrestle with unthinkable choices, they are forced to confront their beliefs, the changing world, and the fact that their lives will never again be the same. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Miami Beach, Florida, USA
• Education—B.F.A., New York University; M.F.A., University of Washington
• Currently—lives near Boston, Massachusetts

Jennifer S. Brown has published fiction and creative nonfiction in Fiction Southeast, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Southeast Review, Sierra Nevada Review, and Bellevue Literary Review, among other places. Her essay “The Codeine of Jordan” was selected as a notable essay in The Best American Travel Writing in 2012. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Washington. (From the publisher and the author's website.)

Book Reviews
I enjoyed Jennifer S. Brown’s Modern Girls from the first page, but at the halfway point I became a reader obsessed. This 1920s historical novel explores the give and take of motherhood, women’s rights, and the weight of family traditions. When a single careless night leaves Dottie pregnant by a man other than her boyfriend she wrestles to find an outcome that will maintain her reputation without affronting her faith.… Brown writes with a smart yet intimate tone. One of many gems I highlighted reads, “It was possible, I found, to both mourn a loss and yet be grateful it happened.” READ MORE …
Abby Fabiaschi - LitLovers

The novel is not only a nostalgic portrait of an earlier era but a feminist reminder of how limited and circumscribed were women’s opportunities and choices just a few generations ago.… Satisfying both emotionally and narratively.… Its suspenseful plot and warm emotional tone should appeal to a wide audience.
New York Journal of Books

With its compelling storyline, a well-researched historical setting, protagonists who are authentic and strong, and beautifully written prose, Modern Girls is, without a doubt, one of my favorite books of 2016 to date. The story drew me in from the very opening pages, and I was reluctant to let go of the characters once I finished the book. I predict it has a bright future as a book club favorite.
Historical Novels Review

A moving debut, portraying the sacrifices a mother and daughter make in order to save face for their family.
Booklist

In 1935, as women in America strive for the rights to work, to vote, and to lead independent lives, a Jewish mother and daughter face unwanted pregnancies.… A cleareyed view of the sharp, difficult choices facing women on the cusp of equality.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Modern Girls focuses on a Jewish immigrant family during the Depression. Do you think that Rose and Dottie could as easily have been Irish or Italian or another immigrant ethnicity? Why or why not? If the story were set today, with a modern-day immigrant family, might the story be different?

2. Dottie’s friends have different ideas on what marriage should be. What did marriage mean in 1935? How has the definition of marriage changed?

3. Traditions—keeping kosher, lighting Shabbes candles, having a chuppah at her wedding—are important to Dottie, and she can’t imagine her life without them. What traditions would you have a hard time breaking? Do you believe in the values behind those traditions or do you maintain them simply because that’s what your family has always done?

4. Both Rose and Dottie have definitive ideas about what makes them modern women. Do you identify with their conceptions of the modern? Does holding on to tradition and “old-world” ideas make them less modern in your eyes?

5. Rose thinks Willie is a fool for wanting to travel to Europe at such a dangerous time; Edith admires him for his commitment to journalism and politics. What do you think of his decision? If you were Dottie, would you have gone with him?

6. Eugene spent a year and a half of his life with his aunt, and Rose feels that Eugene is a stranger to her. With Dottie gone, how do you think Rose and Eugene will fare? What do you see for Eugene’s future?

7. Many themes are touched on in this novel: motherhood, family, assimilation, immigration, the rights of women and workers. Which most resonated with you?

8. Rose changed her name and her age as she shed her past life to become an American. If you could start anew, what would you change?

9. How much does the place you live affect how you think of yourself? Are place and identity linked?

10. Dottie’s future is uncertain when the story concludes. What do you think will come of her marriage? What will her future bring?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Modern Lovers
Emma Straub, 2016
Penguin Publishing
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594634673

Summary
A smart, highly entertaining novel about a tight-knit group of friends from college— and what it means to finally grow up, well after adulthood has set in.

Friends and former college bandmates Elizabeth and Andrew and Zoe have watched one another marry, buy real estate, and start businesses and families, all while trying to hold on to the identities of their youth.

But nothing ages them like having to suddenly pass the torch (of sexuality, independence, and the ineffable alchemy of cool) to their own offspring.

Back in the band's heyday, Elizabeth put on a snarl over her Midwestern smile, Andrew let his unwashed hair grow past his chin, and Zoe was the lesbian all the straight women wanted to sleep with. Now nearing fifty, they all live within shouting distance in the same neighborhood deep in gentrified Brooklyn, and the trappings of the adult world seem to have arrived with ease.

But the summer that their children reach maturity (and start sleeping together), the fabric of the adult lives suddenly begins to unravel, and the secrets and revelations that are finally let loose—about themselves, and about the famous fourth band member who soared and fell without them—can never be reclaimed.

Straub packs wisdom and insight and humor together in a satisfying book about neighbors and nosiness, ambition and pleasure, the excitement of youth, the shock of middle age, and the fact that our passions—be they food, or friendship, or music—never go away, they just evolve and grow along with us. (LitLovers.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979-80
• Raised—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City

Emma Straub is an American author three novels and a short story collection. Raised on Manhattan's Upper West side, she now lives with her husband and two young sons in Brooklyn.

Emma comes by writing naturally: her father is Peter Straub, an award winning writer of horror fiction, a fact which makes even Emma admit to a belief in a writing gene. Here's what she told Michele Filgate of Book Slut:

I believe the writing gene is located just behind the gene for enjoying red wine and just in front of the gene for watching soap operas, both of which I also inherited from my father. What I do know for sure is that I watched my father write for a living my entire childhood, and I understood that it was a job like any other, that one had to do all day, every day. I think a lot of people have the fantasy that a writer sits around in coffee shops all day, waiting for the muse to appear.

So while genes may play a role, so does hard work and grit: determined to become a writer, she pushed on even after her first four books were turned down. As she told Alexandra Alter of the New York Times,

They all got rejected by every single person in publishing, in the world. It’s still true that I will go to a publishing party or event, and the first thing I will think of is, "I know who you are, you rejected novels 2 and 4."

It's nice to think that today Straub is having the last laugh.

Attending Oberlin College, Straub received her B.A. in 2002. She went on to earn her M.F.A. at the University of Wisconsin where she studied with author Lorrie Moore. Returning to New York, she worked for a number of years at the independent Book Court bookstore in Brooklyn.

Her novels include Modern Lovers (2016), The Vacationers (2014), and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures (2012). Her story collection is titled Other People We Married (2011). Straub's fiction and nonfiction have been published in Vogue, New York Magazine, Tin House, New York Times, Good Housekeeping, and Paris Review Daily. She is also a contributing writer to Rookie. (From .)

Book Reviews
In all of her novels, Emma Straub seems to peer into her characters’ hearts in a most believable way. Her latest is no different: in Modern Lovers, we meet up with way cool college bandmates three decades later. Zoe, Elizabeth, and Andrew—now middle-aged—live near one another in gentrified Brooklyn, yet despite their trendy, almost precious life-styles, Straub manages to bring them to life, far beyond any level of caricature. READ MORE.
Keddy Ann Outlaw - LitLovers

Ms. Straub writes with such verve and sympathetic understanding of her characters…[that] this novel has all the pleasures of reading one of Anne Tyler's compelling family portraits…. In [Straub's] capable hands…even the most hackneyed occasions are transformed into revealing or comic moments…. She captures the jagged highs and lows of adolescence with freshness and precision, and the decades-long relationships of old college friends with a wry understanding of how time has both changed (and not changed) old dynamics.... [D]eftly and thoughtfully written.
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

[I]n Emma Straub’s witty third novel...[to] be once young and briefly famous and painfully of-the-moment and then morph into regular-people middle age is...insulting, as if your whole life is the worst Instagram fail. And this is where we find the novel’s 40-something friends, past millennial hipness and on into hot flashes.... Modern Lovers hurries to tie up its loose ends, and the interwoven climaxes seem sludgy. The final chapter employs a lazy literary device, a series of announcements...that would seem more at home in the closing credits of Animal House. But up until then, Modern Lovers is a wise, sophisticated romp through the pampered middle-aged neuroses of urban softies.
Alex Kuczynski - New york Times Book Review

Summer in the city has never felt so good.... Modern Lovers celebrates the updated look and feel of familial love and all of its complexities. Straub’s clever and perceptive observations on growing up are gentle reminders that coming of age isn’t just for kids.
Washington Post

In Modern Lovers, Straub’s new intertwined families are stuck in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, for the summer, but there are plenty of fireworks—including a teen romance and a potential movie about the friends’ punk-rock past.
Newsday

[Modern Lovers] has the smart, cool sensibility of Straub's other novels, and you're sure to love this one just as much.
Elle

Straub lets her characters fall apart and come together in their own messy, refreshingly human ways— always older, sometimes wiser, but never quite done coming of age.
Entertainment Weekly

With a real-estate agent, a chef, a yogi 'guru,' and teens sneaking off to do what teens do when teens sneak off— Straub’s latest has something for everyone.
Marie Claire

Bestseller Emma Straub gives us an insightful look into middle age, parenthood, and the funny way that passions never fade, no matter how much time passes by.
Harper’s Bazaar

[Straub] sets her observational wit on three middle-aged friends (former college bandmates) who find themselves in a crisis of identity as their now-grown children head off to college themselves.
Huffington Post

(Starred review.)Straub spins her lighthearted but psychologically perceptive narrative with a sure touch [and]...excels in establishing a sense of place.... Events move at a brisk pace, and surprises...enliven the denouement.... [A] warmly satisfying novel.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) [E]ngaging.... Sprinkled with humor and insight, this is a Brooklyn novel with heart. Straub's characters are well rounded and realistic; even the teenagers are sympathetic.... [A] drama...built around the small moments of life. —Melanie Kindrachuk, Stratford P.L., Ont.
Library Journal

(Starred review.) [I]n Straub's fond gaze, [Brooklyn] feels like an enchanted land out of a Shakespearan comedy.... She's a precise and observant writer whose...characters are a quirky and interesting bunch, well aware of their own good fortune, and it's a pleasure spending time with them.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Modern Lovers explores the concept of aging. How do you think these characters feel about their own journeys into adulthood? How does the adults’ description of youth compare with the teenagers’ experience or description of youth? What about their different perspectives on adulthood? Which of them—the adults or the teens—is more accurate? Is one perspective more true than the other?

2. Lydia soared on to become a star, leaving the rest of Kitty’s Mustache behind. How does Lydia’s success—and subsequent death—affect the current actions of these characters? Specifically, Elizabeth, Zoe, and Andrew—do they see themselves in opposition to Lydia? What if she hadn’t died?

3. Do you think Andrew was right in lying to Elizabeth about his relationship with Lydia? How might things have been different if he had told her the truth from the start?

4. Should Elizabeth have gone through with the Kitty’s Mustache documentary, even without Andrew’s approval? Considering the events that are set in motion, do you think this decision helps their marriage or hinders it in the end?

5. Does the fire at Hyacinth, though devastating at the time, actually lead to a happier marriage for Zoe and Jane? Why or why not?

6. Are Ruby and Harry a good romantic fit? Are they too young to know whether they are?

7. Self-image plays an important role in Modern Lovers. All of these characters have specific ideas about themselves, and often, the realities don’t quite match. Discuss how the characters want to be seen, in comparison with who they actually are.

8. Discuss how the characters' friendships change over the years—from college to early parenthood to middle age. How are their relationships with one another and their perceptions of themselves linked? How does one affect the other?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Moll Flanders: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
Daniel Defoe, 1721
Random House
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375760105

Summary
Written in a time when criminal biographies enjoyed great success, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders details the life of the irresistible Moll and her struggles through poverty and sin in search of property and power.

Born in Newgate Prison to a picaresque mother, Moll propels herself through marriages, periods of success and destitution, and a trip to the New World and back, only to return to the place of her birth as a popular prostitute and brilliant thief.

The story of Moll Flanders vividly illustrates Defoe’s themes of social mobility and predestination, sin, redemption and reward.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the 1721 edition printed by Chetwood in London, the only edition approved by Defoe. (From Random House.)

More
As Moll Flanders struggles for survival amid the harsh social realities of seventeenth-century England, there is but one thing she is determined to avoid: the deadly snare of poverty. On the twisting path that leads from her birth in Newgate Prison to her final prosperous respectability, love is regarded as worth no more than its weight in gold; and such matters as bigamy, incest, theft, and prostitution occasion but a brief blush before they are reckoned in terms of profit and loss.

Yet so pure is her candor, so healthy her animal appetites, so indomitable her resiliency through every vicissitude of fortune, that this extraordinary woman emerges as one of the most appealing heroines in English literature. (From Penguin Group USA.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1659–1660
• Where—London, England
• Death—April 24, 1731
• Where—London, England
• Education—boarding school and a Presbyterian academy

Daniel Defoe born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer, and spy, now most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain, and, along with others such as Samuel Richardson, is among the founders of the English novel.

A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than 500 books, pamphlets and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/31/2014.)

Book Reviews
(For helpful customer reviews see Amazon, Goodreads, and Barnes & Noble.)

Defoe’s excellence it is, to make me forget my specific class, character, and circumstances, and to raise me while I read him, into the universal man.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Moll Flanders [is] a novel in which character is everything and is given the freest play.
E.M. Forster (1879-1970)

On any monument worthy of the name of monument the names of Moll Flanders and Roxana, at least, should be carved as deeply as the name of Defoe. They stand among the few English novels which we can call indisputably great.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Discussion Questions
1. Why did Defoe choose a woman to be his main character? Do you think she is a believable character? Is Defoe commenting on the female gender in this novel, or humankind in general?

2 .Defoe seemingly contradicts himself when speaking of the Church. How is the Church represented in this novel? Consider Moll’s early life as a warden of the Church through to her redemption.

3. Study the many men that pass through Moll’s life. Are any of them good men? Do any of them respect Moll more than others? Do their social positions and wealth effect the way they view Moll and women in general?

4. Modern day critics have debated over Defoe’s exact intent. Some argue Moll Flanders is a picturesque novel, others say a fictionalized Puritan spiritual work, still others claim it is a bourgeois romance. Some critics liken this novel to a work of irony much like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Which analysis makes the most sense?

5. Some critics argue that Moll’s wit and independence prove Defoe’s respect for women while other critics argue Moll’s sinfulness and self-acknowledged depravity show Defoe’s anti-women’s rights view. Which do you agree with?

6. Consider the men Moll steals from, both husbands and victims. Is this a comment on class or gender?

7. After reading of Moll’s spiritual reawakening, do you feel Defoe is a supporter or criticizer of religion? Is he a supporter of any divine providence?

8. Compare and contrast Moll’s marriages before her life and crime and after. What are Defoe’s views on marriage?

9. If you were to consider this a work of irony, what exactly is Defoe criticizing? Is his irony even consistent throughout the novel?
(Questions issued by Random House.)

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Moloka'i
Alan Brennert, 2003
St. Martin's Press
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781429902281

Summary
This richly imagined novel, set in Hawai'i more than a century ago, is an extraordinary epic of a little-known time and place and a deeply moving testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.

Rachel Kalama, a spirited seven-year-old Hawaiian girl, dreams of visiting far-off lands like her father, a merchant seaman. Then one day a rose-colored mark appears on her skin, and those dreams are stolen from her. Taken from her home and family, Rachel is sent to Kalaupapa, the quarantined leprosy settlement on the island of Moloka'i. Here her life is supposed to end—but instead she discovers it is only just beginning.

With a vibrant cast of vividly realized characters, Moloka'i is the true-to-life chronicle of a people who embraced life in the face of death. Such is the warmth, humor, and compassion of this novel that readers will be changed forever by Rachel's story (From the publisher

Author Bio
• Birth—1954
• Where—Englewood, New Jersey, USA
• Education—University of California, Los Angeles
• Awards—Nebula Award for Best Short Story; Emmy Award
(for L.A. Law)
• Currently—lives in Southern California

Alan Brennert is a United States television producer and screenwriter who has lived in Southern California since 1973 and completed graduate work in screenwriting at the University of California Los Angeles. His earliest television work was in 1978 when he penned several scripts for Wonder Woman. He was story editor for the NBC series Buck Rogers and wrote seven scripts for that series.

He won an Emmy Award as a producer and writer for L.A. Law in 1991. For science and fantasy readers, he might be best known as a writer for The New Twilight Zone and the revival of The Outer Limits. One of his best regarded episodes was for The New Twilight Zone, an adaptation of his own story Her Pilgrim Soul, which became a play.

Since 2001 he has written episodes of the television series Stargate Atlantis and Star Trek Enterprise (as Michael Bryant).

He also writes books and stories, the majority of which are science fiction or fantasy. His first story was published in 1973 and in 1975 he was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction. He also won a Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1991 and had stories in Gardner Dozois's Year's Best volumes.

His 2003 historical novel, Moloka'i, focuses on life in Honolulu in the early 1900s and the leper colony at Kalaupapa in Hawaii, made famous by Father Damien, Mother Marianne Cope and Lawrence M. Judd, historical people who appear in the novel.

In 2009, Brennert returned to Hawai'i with another historical novel, Honolulu, centering on a Korean picture bride in the early 1900s.

Brennert's 2013 novel, Palisades Park goes stateside, all the way east to the author's home state of New Jersey and its once famous amusement park. The book follows a family from the depression era, through World War II, and up to 1971.

Brennert contributed many acclaimed DC Comics stories for Detective Comics, The Brave and The Bold, Batman: Holy Terror and Secret Origins in the 1980s and 1990s. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/16/2014.)

Book Reviews
Jin's story is prototypical, the bildungsroman of an aspiring woman, yearning for a life beyond the one society has prescribed. (Jin Eyre, anyone?) But in mooring this familiar character to the unique history of early-20th-century Hawaii, Brennert portrays the Aloha State's history as complicated and dynamic—not simply a melting pot, but a Hawaiian-style "mixed plate" in which, as Jin sagely notes, "many different tastes share the plate, but none of them loses its individual flavor, and together they make up a uniquely 'local' cuisine."
Krista Walton - Washington Post

Alan Brennert draws on historical accounts of Kalaupapa and weaves in traditional Hawaiian stories and customs.... Moloka'i is the story of people who had much taken from them but also gained an unexpected new family and community in the process.
Chicago Tribune

An absorbing novel...Brennert evokes the evolution of—and hardships on—Moloka'i in engaging prose that conveys a strong sense of place.
National Geographic Traveler

Brennert's compassion makes Rachel a memorable character, and his smooth storytelling vividly brings early 20th-century Hawaii to life. Leprosy may seem a macabre subject, but Brennert transforms the material into a touching, lovely account of a woman's journey as she rises above the limitations of a devastating illness.
Publishers Weekly

A gritty story of love and survival in a Hawaiian leper colony: more a portrait of old Hawaii than a compelling narrative. The chronicle of leprosy-infected Rachel Kalama begins in 1891 in Honolulu and ends in the late 1960s on isolated Moloka’i, site of the Kalaupapa Leprosy settlement.... Not a comfortable read, but certainly instructive.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The book's opening paragraph likens Hawai'i in the 19th century to a garden. In what ways is Hawai'i comparable to another, Biblical, garden?

2. Given what was known at the time of the causes and contagion of leprosy, was the Hawaiian government's isolation of patients on Moloka'i justified or not?

3. How is Hawai'i's treatment of leprosy patients similar to today's treatment of SARS and AIDS patients? How is it different?

4. What does 'ohana mean? How does it manifest itself throughout Rachel's life?

5. What does surfing represent to Rachel?

6. Rachel's mother Dorothy embraced Christianity; her adopted auntie, Haleola, is a believer in the old Hawaiian religion. What does Rachel believe in?

7. There are many men in Rachel's life—her father Henry, her Uncle Pono, her first lover Nahoa, her would-be lover Jake, her husband Kenji. What do they have in common? What don't they?

8. Rachel's full name is Rachel Aouli Kalama Utagawa. What does each of her names represent?

9. Did you as a reader regard Leilani as a man or a woman?

10. Discuss the parallels and inversions between the tale of heroic mythology Rachel relates on pages 296-298, and what happens to Kenji later in this chapter.

11. Imagine yourself in the place of Rachel’s mother, Dorothy Kalama. How would you have handled the situation?

12. The novel tells us a little, but not all, of what Sarah Kalama feels after her accidental betrayal of her sister Rachel. Imagine what kind of feelings, and personal growth, she might have gone through in the decades following this incident.

13. In what ways is Ruth like her biological mother? How do you envision her relationship with Rachel evolving and maturing in the twenty years between 1948 and 1970?

14. Considering the United States' role in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, was the American response adequate or not? In recent years a "Hawaiian sovereignty" movement has gathered momentum in the islands—do you feel they have a moral and/or legal case?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Mom's Perfect Boyfriend
Crystal Hemmingway, 2019
Galbadia Press
306 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781950458011

Summary
A smart romantic comedy about mothers and daughters, told in an addicting, fast-paced style.

Crystal has trouble saying no to her lonely, single mother. For 25 years, it wasn't a problem. But when one small mistake leaves Crystal jilted, homeless, and unemployed, she has to move back in with the person who caused it all: her mother.

Soon Crystal is sucked into her mother's vortex, partying with boomers and hawking homemade marshmallows. Desperate for some independence, she hatches a foolproof plan: get an experimental android to play her mom's "perfect" boyfriend. It's only a matter of time before her mom finds out, and Crystal will never live down the hilarious and disastrous consequences.

A story told through emails, texts, and journal entries, Mom's Perfect Boyfriend is a humorous yet deeply honest portrayal of the complicated friendship between mothers and daughters. Sometimes the people we want to rely upon the least are those who can help us the most. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Crystal Hemmingway is a corporate washout and novelist. She lives in Los Angeles with her favorite person and two cats. In her spare time, Crystal enjoys binge-watching TV shows, eating sugary cereals, and pretending to write at coffee shops. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
A funny, poignant debut.
IndieReader

Mom's Perfect Boyfriend is a modern must-read.
San Francisco Book Review

A slow start mars debut author Hemmingway’s humorous exploration of love, mother/daughter relationships, and technology, but it eventually delivers a powerful message couched in laughs.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. This book was written entirely in an epistolary format (text messages, emails, journal entries, etc.). Why do you think the author chose to structure it this way? How did this structure affect your reading experience?

2. How similar are Crystal and Margot? In what ways do their personalities differ? Which character do you identify with?

3. David breaks up with Crystal early in the book. Who do you think is responsible: Crystal, David, or both of them?

4. How does Crystal’s relationship with Lisa compare to her relationship with Margot?

5. Adam is designed to be the "perfect man" for Margot. What makes him perfect? How is he also less than perfect?

6. Did you really believe Adam was an android? What made you feel that way?

7. After buying pants with Margot, Adam says, "It is nearly impossible for her to be 100% happy with any given choice. I try to aim for 80%, which we seem to be able to achieve most days." In what ways does Margot’s perfectionism lead to her unhappiness?

8. Both Crystal and Lisa lie to Margot throughout the book. Are these lies helpful or hurtful?

9. In what ways does Crystal’s novel, Return from the Tower, reflect her relationship with Margot? Do you think she was right to abandon the novel?

10. When Adam finds out the truth about his origins, Crystal writes, "Mom had every reason to be furious and hurt and betrayed, but instead she made herself a rock for Adam, whose entire world had just been shattered." How does this moment change her perception of Margot?

11. By the end of the story, both Crystal and David have grown and changed significantly. How do these changes affect their relationship?

12. How did the book make you feel? Were there any moments that stood out to you as particularly unique or memorable?

13. Were you satisfied by the book’s ending? Do you think Crystal and Lisa will continue lying to Margot or do you think their relationship will change?

14. What changes would you make to adapt this book into a film?

15. Would you read another book by this author? Did this story remind you of other books or authors?
(Questions from the author's website.)

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The Monsters of Templeton
Lauren Groff, 2008
Hyperion
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781401340926

Summary
One dark summer dawn, at the exact moment that an enormous monster dies in Lake Glimmerglass, twenty-eight-year-old Willie (nee Wilhemina) Upton returns to her hometown of Templeton, NY in disgrace.

She expects to be able to hide in the place that has been home to her family for generations, but Willie then learns that the story her mom, Vi, had always told her about her father has all been a lie. He wasn't the one-night stand Vi had led her to imagine, but someone else entirely. Someone from this very town.

As Willie digs for the truth about her lineage, voices from the town's past—both sinister and disturbing—rise up around her to tell their sides of the story. In the end, dark secrets come to light, past and present blur, old mysteries are finally put to rest, and the surprising truth about more than one monster is revealed. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 23, 1978
• Where—Cooperstown, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Amherst College; M.F.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Awards—Pushcart Prize
• Currently—lives in Gainesville, Florida

Lauren Groff is an American novelist and short story writer, who was as born and raised in Cooperstown, New York. She graduated from Amherst College and from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with an MFA in fiction.

Novels
Groff is the author of three novels. Her first novel, The Monsters of Templeton (2008), is a contemporary tale about coming home to Templeton, a stand-in for Cooperstown, New York. Interspersed in the book are voices from characters drawn from the town's history, as well as from James from Fenimore Cooper's 1823 The Pioneers, the first book in the Leatherstocking Tales. Fenimore Cooper set his book in a fictionalized Cooperstown which he, too, called Templeton. Groff's debut landed on the New York Times Bestseller list and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers.

Groff's second novel, Arcadia (2012), recounts the story of the first child born in a fictional 1960s commune in upstate New York. It, too, became a New York Times Bestseller and received solid reviews and was also named as one of the Best Books of 2012 by the New York Times, Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, NPR, Vogue, Toronto Globe and Mail, and Christian Science Monitor.

Fates and Furies (2015), Groff's third novel, examines a complicated marriage over the course of 24 years aas told by first the husband, then his wife. Like her previous novels, it, too, was published to wide acclaim, some calling it "brilliant," with Ron Charles of the Washington Post saying that "Lauren Groff just keeps getting better and better."

Stories
Groff has had short stories published in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Five Points, and Ploughshares, as well as the anthologies Best New American Voices 2008, Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best American Short Stories—the 2007, 2010 and 2014 editions. Many of her stories appear in her collection Delicate Edible Birds (2009).

Personal
Groff is married with two children and currently lives in Gainesville, Florida. Groff's sister is the Olympic Triathlete Sarah True. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/22/2015.)

Book Reviews
The Monsters of Templeton, a fascinating first novel by Lauren Groff, is a book with joy in its marrow-fabulous.
San Francisco Chronicle

Lauren Groff hits a home run in her first at-bat, with a novel that is intriguingly constructed and compulsively readable.
Denver Post

At the start of Groff's lyrical debut, 28-year-old Wilhelmina Willie Upton returns to her picturesque hometown of Templeton, N.Y., after a disastrous affair with her graduate school professor during an archeological dig in Alaska. In Templeton, Willie's shocked to find that her once-bohemian mother, Vi, has found religion. Vi also reveals to Willie that her father wasn't a nameless hippie from Vi's commune days, but a man living in Templeton. With only the scantiest of clues from Vi, Willie is determined to untangle the roots of the town's greatest families and discover her father's identity. Brilliantly incorporating accounts from generations of Templetonians—as well as characters borrowed from the works of James Fenimore Cooper, who named an upstate New York town Templeton in The Pioneers—Groff paints a rich picture of Willie's current predicaments and those of her ancestors. Readers will delight in Willie's sharp wit and Groff's creation of an entire world, complete with a lake monster and illegitimate children.
Publishers Weekly

Twenty-eight-year-old Willie Upton has just detonated a promising academic career by her scandalous affair with a married professor. Now pregnant, she slinks home to Templeton, NY, just as an enormous dead monster is pulled from nearby Lake Glimmerglass. There, Willie's mother, a former hippie, admits she has always lied about Willie's paternity and discloses this one clue about her biological father's actual identity: he is a descendant of Judge Marmaduke Temple and currently a prominent member of Templeton. Sound familiar? Pay attention: James Fenimore Cooper is from Cooperstown, NY (as is Groff) and used it as the model for Templeton, NY, setting of The Pioneers. Yes, Groff has daringly used Cooper's Templeton and its inhabitants as the launching pad for Willie's search for her father. Willie takes her mother's clue and pulls on it, following endless strands to get her answer, all the while tormented with indecision about her own pregnancy. Liberally peppered with old photographs, diary entries, letters, and a family tree constantly in need of revision as Willie eliminates one possibility after another spanning more than two centuries of shocking Templeton history, this is an irresistible adventure. Highly recommended.
Beth E. Andersen - Library Journal

Cooperstown, N.Y., and its most famous native son provide first-time novelist Groff with much of the grist for this sprawling tale of a young woman searching for her father. In The Pioneers, James Fenimore Cooper rechristened his (and Groff's) hometown as Templeton; she not only adopts the name, but grafts her protagonist onto the family tree of a character from the novel, Judge Marmaduke Temple. Grad student Willie Upton slinks back into Templeton in the summer of 2002 just as the corpse of a mysterious, 50-foot creature surfaces in Lake Glimmerglass. She's had a disastrous affair with a married professor and isn't sure she can go back to Stanford, Willie tells her feisty single mother. Vi, who always claimed not to know which member of her San Francisco commune knocked her up in 1973, has a surprise of her own. In truth, Willie's father lives in Templeton and doesn't even know he has a daughter. Vi won't tell Willie his name, but (implausibly) drops a big hint. Like Vi, Willie's dad is descended from Judge Temple, who apparently scattered illegitimate children across the 18th-century landscape. As Willie hunts through old documents for clues to her parentage, the voices of generations of Templeton residents mingle with those of such archetypal Cooper creations as Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in a narrative that winds through 250 years of American history. The secrets uncovered include murder, arson, poisonous intra-family rivalries and the exploitation of slaves and Native Americans. The leviathan pulled out of the lake seems less of a monster than some of Templeton's respectable founders. Willie and other contemporary citizens are far nicer; readers will be pleased when the likable heroine meets her father, reconciles with Vi and forms a tentative new relationship with a decent guy. But there seem to be two novels here, and they don't fit together terribly well. Flawed, but commendably ambitious and stuffed with ideas-many of them not well developed, but inspiring hope for a more disciplined second effort from this talented newcomer.
Kirkus Reviews

Book Club Discussion Questions
1. What did you think of the range of voices and time periods the author employs in The Monsters of Templeton? How would the novel have been different had the story been told from a single point of view, or been set in one era?

2. “As soon as it died, our lives spiraled down,” the Buds lament in Chapter 13, on the death of the Lake Glimmerglass monster (page 151). Why are so many people in Templeton affected by the monster’s death? What did the monster represent to them?

3. Given her conflicted relationship with her mother and, to a lesser extent, with her hometown, why do you think Willie Upton decides to go back to Templeton? What was Willie looking for when she returned to Templeton? Does she find it?

4. In what instances do ghosts make appearances in The Monsters of Templeton? What do the ghosts represent? What other symbols does the author employ in the novel? What do they mean?

5. In the Author’s Note, the author discusses writing about her hometown of Cooperstown, New York, and calling the fictional town Templeton. Do you think that The Monsters of Templeton could have taken place in any other locale? Why is the actual town’s history so important to the book’s present day events? How would the book have changed if she had decided to call the town Cooperstown?

6. For twenty-eight years, Vivienne has told her daughter that Willie was the product of a hippie commune. The day that Willie returns home, she decides to tell her the truth: that her father was a man in Templeton. What would you have done if you were in Willie’s position? Or in Vivienne’s?

7. Of the many characters from the past—Marmaduke Temple, Davey Shipman, Charlotte and Cinnamon, Elizabeth Franklin Temple, to name a few—which one(s) stood out for you? Why?

8. Vivienne’s life is seemingly full of contradictions: she’s a former drug-using hippie with a child out of wedlock who later converts to Christianity and becomes the chaste girlfriend of a minister. Talk about these and other aspects of Vivienne’s character. How are she and Willie different, and similar?

9. What did you think of Willie’s search to uncover her father’s identity? What did each new layer of history teach Willie about her family? Why was it important that Willie learn everything she learned?

10. What was your opinion of Ezekiel Felcher at the beginning of the novel? Did it change as the novel progressed? Did you think that Willie might stay in Templeton to be with him? What do you think she should have done? What do you think she will do in the future?

11. “This is a story of creation,” says Marmaduke Temple in one of the epigrams before the book begins, ostensibly an excerpt from his own storyabout how he founded Templeton. In what other ways is The Monsters of Templeton a story of creation? How can Willie’s story been seen as a story of creation?

12. The Monsters of Templeton ends with a death and a birth. What does this mean in the larger context of the novel? Who—or what—else is born in the book?

13. What does the book’s title mean? Who or what are the “monsters” it refers to? What, exactly, does the word “monster” mean in the context of this book?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Montana 1948
Larry Watson, 1993
Milkweed Editions
186 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781571310613

Summary
From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them...

So begins David Hayden's story of what happened in Montana in 1948.

The events of that small-town summer forever alter David Hayden's view of his family: his self-effacing father, a sheriff who never wears his badge; his clear sighted mother; his uncle, a charming war hero and respected doctor; and the Hayden's lively, statuesque Sioux housekeeper, Marie Little Soldier, whose revelations are at the heart of the story. It is a tale of love and courage, of power abused, and of the terrible choice between family loyalty and justice. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1947
• Raised—Bismark, North Dakota, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F.A., Unversity of North Dakota; Ph.D., University of Utah
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Milwaukee, Wisoconsin

Larry Watson was born in 1947 in Rugby, North Dakota. He grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, and married his high school sweetheart. He received his BA and MFA from the University of North Dakota, his Ph.D. from the creative writing program at the University of Utah, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Ripon College. Watson has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987, 2004) and the Wisconsin Arts Board.

Watson is the author of several novels and a chapbook of poetry. His fiction has been published in more than ten foreign editions, and has received numerous prizes and awards. Montana 1948, published in 1993, was nominated for the first IMPAC Dublin International Literary Prize. The movie rights to Montana 1948 and Justice have been sold to Echo Lake Productions and White Crosses has been optioned for film. His most recent novel, As Good as Gone was released in 2016.

He has published short stories and poems in Gettysburg Review, New England Review, North American Review, Mississippi Review, and other journals and quarterlies. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and other periodicals. His work has also been anthologized in Essays for Contemporary Culture, Imagining Home, Off the Beaten Path, Baseball and the Game of Life, The Most Wonderful Books, These United States, and Writing America.

Watson taught writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point for 25 years before joining the faculty at Marquette University in 2003.

Awards
Milkweed National Fiction Prize,
Mountains and Plains Bookseller Award,
Friends of American Writers Award,
Banta Award,
Critics Choice Award,
ALA/YALSA Best Books for Young Adults Winner
(Author bio from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
This story is as fresh and clear as the trout stream fished by its narrator, David Hayden, growing up near the Montana-Canada border.... As universal in its themes as it is original in its particularities, Montana 1948 is a significant and elegant addition to the fiction of the American West, and to contemporary American fiction in general.
Howard Frank Mosher - Washington Post Book World

One of the top 100 novels of the West.
San Francisco Chronicle

Watson' prose is as clean, vivid and uncluttered as the Montana sky. Much like Larry McMurtry and Norman Maclean, Watson takes aim at the great myths of the American West in this page turner.
Book Magazine

Meditative, rich, and written close to the bone, Montana 1948 is a beautiful novel about the meaning of place and evolution of courage. It is a wonderful book.
Louise Erdrich

(Starred review.) Watson indelibly portrays the moral dilemma of a family torn between justics and loyalty; by implication, he also illuminates some dark corners of our national history.
Publishers Weekly

A quiet, almost meditative reflection on the hopelessly complex issue of doing the right thing.
Booklist

A literary page-turner, morally complex and satisfying.
Kirkus Review

Discussion Questions
1. Bentrock is a fictitious prairie town in Montana that recurs as a setting in Larry Watson’s novels. How would you characterize Bentrock? In what ways is the setting, both time and place, reflected in the characters?

2. What is the role and importance of loyalty in the Hayden family and how does it influence Wesley’s reaction to the accusations brought against his brother? How would you characterize the relationships between the Hayden men, Grandpa Hayden, Frank, Wesley and David?

3. How would you characterize Wesley’s opinions about the Indian characters in the novel, such as Ollie Young Bear and Marie Little Soldier? Do you think his prejudices complicate his role as sheriff?

4. David idolizes many of the adult characters in the novel—for what qualities does he admire Marie, Gloria, Uncle Frank and his parents? How do these affections contradict one another as the story unfolds? How do David’s opinions of these characters evolve as the novel progresses?

5. Did you form any predictions as to why Marie was reluctant to see Dr. Frank Hayden, and if so, how accurate were they? At what point in the story did you begin to suspect Frank’s character?

6. David’s mother, Gail readily accepts Marie’s allegations against Frank, while Wesley is reluctant to investigate. What factors do you think make Wesley hesitant to investigate Marie’s accusations and what factors prompt Gail to believe her?

7. Toward the end of the novel, David observes a reversal of his parents’ roles: “My mother now represented practicality and expediency; my father stood for moral absolutism” (144). What, in your opinion, causes this reversal? Do you agree with the assessment that releasing Frank is the practical and expedient option? Do you
agree with the alternate implication, that prosecuting him is morally absolute?

8. At the novel’s conclusion, it is decided to keep the scandal a secret from the larger Bentrock community. What do you think motivates this decision? If the accusations against Uncle Frank were publicized, who would it have affected and how?

9. In the epilogue David states that he “could never believe in the rule of law again” (164). Why do you think he is disillusioned with the justice system? To what extent do you think his father’s, uncle’s and grandfather’s actions in 1948 shaped this opinion?

10. Montana 1948 has been featured as required reading for high school students while simultaneously appearing on a few banned books lists. In what ways and to what degree is Watson’s novel controversial? In
what ways is it educational?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Montpelier Tomorrow
MaryLee MacDonald, 2014
All Things That Matter Press
307 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780990715818

Summary
After the deaths of her parents, Colleen Gallagher, a kindergarten teacher with three grown kids, is finally free to help out during the birth of her daughter’s second child. She’s at her daughter’s house when her son-in-law returns from the doctor with news that he has Lou Gehrig’s disease. Colleen, widowed when her own children were young, fears that fate is about to strike another blow at her family.

The sick man’s hapless father and ditzy, shopaholic mother provide comic relief by spoiling the grandchildren. Believing there’s no real hope, they urge him to go on a respirator, the only way to permanently "save his life." When the sick man gathers his family for a surprise announcement, Colleen is stunned to learn that he wants to give the respirator a try.

He leaves it to his wife to make the final decision. Colleen’s daughter thinks she has months before her husband can’t breathe on his own, but the sick man is worse off than anyone realizes. When he tries to lure his wife into a Jacuzzi for a romantic evening, the combined effects of hot water and a full stomach stop his breathing. Only then does Colleen’s daughter decide she can’t endorse the respirator plan.

Her husband holds the respirator decision against her and begins to play the dying-man card, thus beginning a series of "lasts." To fulfill his wish to go somewhere snowy for his last Christmas, Colleen arranges a trip to Vermont, where she anticipates a reunion with a handsome young carpenter, her almost-lover and long-time friend. Colleen secretly has the hots for him, but in Vermont, it’s Colleen’s daughter who attracts his attention. A relationship develops between them, and Colleen’s daughter leans on this new man for support.

The powerful cocktail of love, duty, obligation, exhaustion, and frustration make it hard for Colleen to remember why she’d ever left her life in Illinois. The grandkids keep her awake. The dying man isn’t noble. Her daughter resents her presence. She’s going broke, but feels compelled to stay. After a blow-up between the two women, an uneasy truce is soon broken. Colleen admits defeat and announces her intention to leave. She can’t save her daughter or her daughter’s marriage. She must save herself.

While Colleen's daughter and family depart for Disney World, a getaway paid for by the sick man’s parents, Colleen is left to finish her daughter’s "to do" list. A phone call summons Colleen to the hospital, but it is not the "dying man" who’s in danger.

Author Bio
• Birth—September 26, 1945
• Raised—Redwood City, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.A., San Francisco State University
• Currently—lives in Tempe, Arizona

In her words:
You’ve taken the "Ice Bucket Challenge." Now read about a family trying to deal with the seismic shock of an ALS diagnosis. This book is brand new.

As readers will surely guess, this novel had its beginnings in my own experience. I had just returned to writing when my son-in-law was diagnosed with ALS. I found myself immersed in an almost daily battle against Fate. How to relieve the stress on my daughter so that she could be a good mother to her kids? How to care for a man who became increasingly hard to deal with? How to get enough sleep, for heaven’s sakes. The one tiny sword I had to fight this battle was my writing. I used it to center myself. I hoped that making art would allow me to gain control over a tragedy unfolding before my eyes.

What you should know about me is that I’m not a beginning writer, nor a young one. I’ve racked up many prizes in literary magazines, including the Barry Hannah Prize, the ALR Fiction Prize, the Matt Clark Prize, the Ron Rash Award, and most recently, the Jeanne Leiby Award. A collection of my short stories will be published in 2015. I would love to participate with any book group that wants to read this novel and discuss it. (From the author.)

Visit the author's webpage...and her blog.
Follow MaryLee on Facebook.

Book Reviews
An engaging and heartfelt novel about the intricate relationships among family dealing with disease and disability. Characters are vivid, relatable, and all too imperfectly human. An emotional read.
Jewell Parker Rhodes, author of Douglass’ Women and Ninth Ward

Each time I have reread this fine novel, I have felt rewarded by the connection it offers to the central character, Colleen. She is that kind of character for which the large scale of the novel is made: her external and internal dilemmas have many dimensions; her relationships with other characters are shaped by complex past and present plot tensions; her viewpoint is transformative, that is, it presents the world as she alone perceives it. I can think of no single page in which her voice is not an irreplaceable gift to the reader.
Kevin McIlvoy, author of The Fifth Station, Little Peg, and Hyssop

In her novel Montpelier Tomorrow, Marylee MacDonald illuminates a seemingly dark, hopeless story with light, humor, and compassion. In the aftermath of her son-in-law's devastating diagnosis, Colleen Gallagher becomes increasingly driven to save her daughter and grandchildren even as she struggles to forge a life of her own. Montpelier Tomorrow is at once an engrossing account of the impossible choices faced by caregivers in the United States and a moving portrait of one close-knit, memorable family.
Katherine Shonk, author of The Red Passport and Happy Now?

Discussion Questions
1. In most novels there’s a clear heroine or hero working to defeat an enemy. In Montpelier Tomorrow do you think that Sandy is the villain or that Tony is? Sandy and Colleen have quite a lot of conflict, and that conflict escalates as the novel progresses. Do you think Sandy considers her mom an antagonist or an ally? How about Tony: Who are his allies? Who helps him in his dark night of the soul?

2. What do you think about an unseen villain being the antagonist, namely ALS itself? Given Colleen’s background, could Fate be considered the antagonist?

3. Do you think some families or individuals have a disproportionate share of bad things happen to them? What did you think about Sandy’s remark about feeling like bad luck magnet?

4. Imagine that each of the main characters is carrying baggage from the past. What is in Sandy’s suitcase? What baggage is Lillian carrying? Does Tony have baggage, or is ALS burden enough?

5. What did you think the chapters in Chicago reveal about Colleen’s character? When you were reading the novel were you glad for a break about then?

6. Did you like Esmeralda? Did Colleen have an easier time being with her than being with Sandy?

7. What were Colleen’s unmet needs? These might be physical or psychological. By the end of the book what was her greatest unmet need?

8. Do you think it’s easy for mothers and daughters to know each other on a deep level, or are there traps or patterns that families revert to when they’re together?

9. Guilt is a big player in the novel. Can you talk a little about Sandy’s guilt in not being able to spend more time with her children? What about Colleen’s guilt that she didn’t invite Esmeralda to live with her?

10. The climactic event of the novel is precipitated by Sandy’s decision to come back on the train from Disney World. In what way has the book prepared you to believe that her decision was almost inevitable? Could she have left Tony with his parents and not been plagued by guilt?

11. Were there places where you understood that the children were being hurt by Tony’s illness? Can you think of scenes where Josh revealed his worries?

12. In a sense readers are the bystanders to this drama, much like the friends from Tony’s and Sandy’s neighborhood and like Colleen’s teacher-friends. How much do you think Sandy’s and Tony’s neighbors really understood what was going on inside that house? If you’d received an email with the "to do" list, would you have signed up for the early morning shift or found reasons not to?

13. At the end of the book, Colleen and Charles discuss the idea of heroism: who is and who is not behaving heroically. How do you think Colleen feels about herself at the end of the book?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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Moo
Jane Smiley, 1995
Knopf Doubleday
437 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307472762

Summary
A big, blackly comic, wickedly-on-target send up of our society—all of it—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres. As a microcosm of today's western world, Smiley gives readers a huge Midwestern agricultural college nicknamed Moo U.

Nestled in the heart of the Midwest, amid cow pastures and waving fields of grain, lies Moo University, a distinguished institution devoted to the art and science of agriculture.

Here, among an atmosphere rife with devious plots, mischievous intrigue, lusty liaisons, and academic one-upmanship, Chairman X of the Horticulture Department harbors a secret fantasy to kill the dean; Mrs. Walker, the provost's right hand and campus information queen, knows where all the bodies are buried; Timothy Nonahan, associate professor of English, advocates eavesdropping for his creative writing assignments; and Bob Carlson, a sophomore, feeds and maintains his only friend: a hog named Earl Butz.

In this wonderfully written and masterfully plotted novel, Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres, offers us a wickedly funny comedy that is also a darkly poignant slice of life. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 26, 1949
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Rasied—Webster Grove, Missouri
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.A., M.F.A, and Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1992; National Book Critics Circle Award, 1991
• Currently—lives in Northern California

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love & Good Will, A Thousand Acres (for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize), and Moo. She lives in northern California. (From the publisher.)

More
Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.

Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a B.A. at Vassar College, then earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar.

Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.

From 1981 to 1996, she taught undergrad and graduate creative writing workshops at Iowa State University. She continued teaching at ISU even after moving her primary residence to California.

In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Delectably entertaining.... An uproariously funny and at the same time hauntingly melancholy portrait of a college community in the Midwest.
The New York Times

Smart, irreverent, and wickedly tender.... Moo suggests a mix of Tom Wolfe's wit and John Updike's satiny reach.
The Boston Globe

Displays a wicked wit and an unerring eye for American foibles.... Stuffed with memorable characters, sparkling with deliciously acid humor, Moo is a rare bird in today'sliterary menagerie: a great read that also makes you think.
The Chicago Sun-Times

In Smiley's world, people are sometimes greedy, foolish, and muddleheaded, but they are most often triumphant.
BookList

Effortlessly switching gears after the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, Smiley delivers a surprising tour de force, a satire of university life that leaves no aspect of contemporary academia unscathed. The setting is a large midwestern agricultural college known as Moo U., whose faculty and students Smiley depicts with sophisticated humor, turning a gimlet eye on the hypocrisy, egomania, prejudice and self-delusion that flourish on campus—and also reflect society at large. Everybody at Moo U. has an agenda: academic, sexual, social, economic, political and philosophical. Among the more egregious types that Smiley portrays are Dr. Lionel Gift, an intellectual whore who calls students "customers" and is willing to skew research to further his name and line his pocketbook; Dr. Bo Jones, who is conducting a secret experiment on an appealing boar named Earl Butz (Earl and the horses on campus are nicer than the humans by a mile); and a superlatively bossy secretary who is a lot smarter than the Ph.Ds she serves. A chapter titled "Who's in Bed With Whom" clears things up in that department—but only temporarily, since musical beds is a continuous game. A quartet of women roommates who all hide secrets from each other, an unscrupulous "little Texan with jug ears" who wants to give the college tainted money, and a stuffy dean who thinks that anything he desires is God's will are some of the large cast of characters that Smiley manipulates with remarkable ease—and though some portrayals verge on caricature, she never goes over the line. Details of midwest topography, weather and culture are rendered with unerring authenticity. The narrative sails along with unflagging vigor and cleverness, and even the ironic denouement has an inevitability that Smiley orchestrates with hilarious wit.
Publishers Weekly

Smiley, now acclaimed for her portrayals of the dark side of America's pastoral ideal (a Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, plus her wonderful novellas, Ordinary Love and Good Will), returns with a sharp-edged spoof of academic life. "Moo U" is a large, Midwestern "ag and tech" school where campus politics and intrigue rule. Smiley has assembled a large, colorful group of characters who will be familiar to ivory tower dwellers: the campus secretary who controls personnel and paper flow, the faculty who plot for power and revenge, plus the dining hall worker, the students, and the administrators, all with their own agendas. While entertaining and on-target as parody, Moo is not as riveting as Smiley's best work. This should do well and be very popular with higher education insiders. —Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
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)

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Moonglow
Michael Chabon, 2016
HarperCollins
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062225559

Summary
A novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure—and the forces that work to destroy us.

In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother's home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather.

Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon's grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.

Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather."

It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of keeping secrets and telling lies.

It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator’s grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination.

From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York's Wallkill prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of the "American Century," the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week.

A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 24, 1963
• Where—Washington, D.C.
• Education—B.A., University of Pittsburgh; M.F.A., University of California-Irvine
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in Berkeley, California

Michael Chabon (SHAY-bon) is an American novelist and short story writer. His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was published in 1988 when he was still a graduate student. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that New York Times's John Leonard, once referred to as Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. All told, Chabon has published nearly 10 novels, including a Young Adult novel, a children's book, two collection of short stories, and two collections of essays.

Early years
Michael Chabon was born in Washington, DC to Robert Chabon, a physician and lawyer, and Sharon Chabon, a lawyer. Chabon said he knew he wanted to be a writer when, at the age of ten, he wrote his first short story for a class assignment. When the story received an A, Chabon recalls, "I thought to myself, 'That's it. That's what I want to do.... And I never had any second thoughts or doubts."

His parents divorced when Chabon was 11, and he lived in Columbia, Maryland, with his mother nine months of the year and with his father in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during the summertime. He has written of his mother's marijuana use, recalling her "sometime around 1977 or so, sitting in the front seat of her friend Kathy's car, passing a little metal pipe back and forth before we went in to see a movie." He grew up hearing Yiddish spoken by his mother's parents and siblings.

Chabon attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied under Chuck Kinder and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1984. He then went to graduate school at the University of California-Irvine, where he received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing.

Initial success
While he was at UC, his Master's thesis was published as a novel. Unbeknownst to Chabon, his professor sent it to a literary agent—the result was a publishing contract for The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and an impressive $155,000 advance. Mysteries appeared in 1988, becoming a bestseller and catapulting Chabon to literary stardom.

Chabon was ambivalent about his new-found fame. He turned down offers to appear in a Gap ad and to be featured as one of People's "50 Most Beautiful People." Years later, he reflected on the success of his first novel:

The upside was that I was published and I got a readership.... [The] downside...was that, emotionally, this stuff started happening and I was still like, "Wait a minute, is my thesis done yet?" It took me a few years to catch up.

Personal
His success had other adverse affects: it caused an imbalance between his and his wife's careers. He was married at the time to poet Lollie Groth, and they ended up divorcing in 1991. Two years later he married the writer Ayelet Waldman; the couple lives in Berkeley, California, with their four children.

Chabon has said that the "creative free-flow" he has with Waldman inspired the relationship between Sammy Clay and Rosa Saks in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Entertainment Weekly declared the couple "a famous—and famously in love—writing pair, like Nick and Nora Charles with word processors and not so much booze."

In a 2012 NPR interview, Chabon told Guy Raz that he writes from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. each day, Sunday through Thursday. He attempts 1,000 words a day. Commenting on the rigidity of his routine, Chabon said,

There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they're big, and they have a lot of words in them.... The best environment, at least for me, is a very stable, structured kind of life.

Novels
1988 - The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
1995 - The Wonder Boys
2000 - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
2002 - Summerland (Young Adult)
2004 - The Final Solution
2007 - The Yiddish Policemen's Union
2007 - Gentlemen of the Road
2012 - Telegraph Avenue
2016 - Moonglow

(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/2/2016.)

Book Reviews
[C]harming and elegantly structured novel.... [Parts] sometimes feel forced. What seduces the reader is Chabon’s language, which reinvents the world, joyously, on almost every page.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.)Luminous.... The story builds to core revelations of wartime horror and postwar heartbreak as powerful as they come.
Library Journal

(Starred review.) His most beautifully realized novel to date .... a masterful and resounding novel of the dark and blazing forces that forged our tumultuous, confounding, and precious world.
Booklist

Chabon is an inveterate overwriter who dilutes his best storytelling with...ponderous digressions.... He’s captured a fine story about the poignancy of two souls’ survival but...[in the end] a heartfelt but sodden family saga.
Kirkus Reviews

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Moonlight Mile
Dennis Lehane, 2010
HarperCollins
324 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061836923

Summary
Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston apartment in 1997. (See Gone, Baby, Gone.) Desperate pleas for help from the child's aunt led savvy, tough-nosed investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl—only to have Patrick orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home.

Now Amanda is sixteen—and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing. Yet Amanda's aunt is once more knocking at Patrick Kenzie's door, fearing the worst for the little girl who has blossomed into a striking, bright young woman who hasn't been seen in two weeks.

Haunted by the past, Kenzie and Gennaro revisit the case that troubled them the most, following a twelve-year trail of secrets and lies down the darkest alleys of Boston's gritty, blue-collar streets. Assuring themselves that this time will be different, they vow to make good on their promise to find Amanda and see that she is safe. But their determination to do the right thing holds dark implications Kenzie and Gennaro aren't prepared for consequences that could cost them not only Amanda's life, but their own. (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
What...keep[s] Moonlight Mile from heading down an overly well-trodden path...[is] the conviction with which Mr. Lehane breathes life into these characters. Unlike the usual sequel writer who simply puts old creations through new paces, Mr. Lehane registers a deep affection for the Kenzie-Gennaro team and a passionate involvement in their problems. And he treats each book in this series as an occasion for wondering what kind of world can produce the depravity that each new plotline describes.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

An old case takes on new dimensions in Lehane's sixth crime novel to feature Boston PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, last seen in 1999's Prayers for Rain. Twelve years earlier, in 1998's Gone, Baby, Gone, Patrick and Angie investigated the kidnapping of four-year-old Amanda McCready. The case drove a temporary wedge between the pair after Patrick returned Amanda to her mother's neglectful care. Now Patrick and Angie are married, the parents of four-year-old Gabriella, and barely making ends meet with Patrick's PI gigs while Angie finishes graduate school. But when Amanda's aunt comes to Patrick and tells him that Amanda, now a 16-year-old honor student, is once again missing, he vows to find the girl, even if it means confronting the consequences of choices he made that have haunted him for years. While Lehane addresses much of the moral ambiguity from Gone, this entry lacks some of the gritty rawness of the early Kenzie and Gennaro books.
Publishers Weekly

In 1998's Gone, Baby, Gone, Boston PI Patrick Kenzie rescued a four-year-old kidnapping victim and returned the child to her neglectful mother over partner and lover Angela Gennaro's objections. That decision ended the couple's professional and romantic relationship, although they briefly reunited in Prayers for Rain. In the 12 succeeding years, Lehane wrote several acclaimed stand-alone titles (e.g., Shutter Island; Mystic River) and his first historical novel, The Given Day. Yet the haunting conclusion of Gone, Baby, Gone obviously resonated with the author, as the result is this satisfying sequel. Now a freelance investigator for a white-shoe law firm, Patrick knows he was legally right but morally wrong in his actions years ago, but he and Angie, now married and raising a young daughter, don't discuss the Amanda McCready case. That is, until Amanda's aunt asks for Patrick's help in finding her missing (again) niece, who has grown into a brilliant but aloof 16-year-old. This time, he and Angie are determined to do the right thing by Amanda. Verdict: Longtime readers will appreciate how Lehane's protagonists have believably aged. Fatherhood has mellowed Patrick, but he's not above inflicting a little pain with the help of sidekick Bubba. Temporarily a stay-at-home mom, Angie misses the hard-edged excitement of her old life. A few false notes involve some cartoonish Russian villains, but the resolution, while sad to series fans, makes perfect sense. —Wilda Williams
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. Talk about Angie and Patrick. What are they like? How do their personalities work together? How have they changed over the years? How has becoming parents altered their lives and their outlook? How do they sustain each other and their marriage?

2. At the beginning of the novel, Patrick admits that he feels like a sell out. "What I was selling out was less clear to me, but I felt it all the same." Why does he feel this way? Does he have a better understanding by the novel's end? How do the events that unfold help him find clarity? Do you share his opinion of himself? What about his choices at the novel's end?

3. To support his family, Patrick freelances at a private security and investigation firm where he hopes to be officially hired. But his supervisor at the firm tells him that they won't make him a permanent employee because, "you think you're wearing that nice suit but all I see you wearing is class rage." What does he mean by this? Does Patrick "wear class rage"? Why? Is he right to do so?

4. Think about the cases Patrick has handled for this private security and investigation firm. How far should we—must we—compromise our beliefs for the sake of security—employment and health insurance? How does compromising our values affect us? Would you compromise your values for a job?

5. Would you say Patrick has integrity? How does this affect the man he is and the choices he makes? How does this quality elevate him, and how does it get him into trouble?

6. When Beatrice McCready calls Patrick she tells him, "You owe me." What, exactly, does he owe her? Should Patrick feel guilty for returning Amanda to her birth mother all those years ago?

7. After talking to Bea, Patrick thinks about the past and his role in shaping the circumstances of Amanda's life. "Twelve years ago, I'd been wrong. Every day that had passed since, roughly 4,440 of them, I was sure of that. But twelve years ago, I'd been right. Leaving Amanda with kidnappers, no matter how vested they were in her welfare, was leaving her with kidnappers. In the 4,400 days since I'd taken her back, I was sure this was true. So where did it leave me?" How would you answer him? Was his choice correct back then or was it wrong? Develop arguments to support both viewpoints.

8. As Patrick discovered all those years ago, doing what is legal isn't always doing what is right. How do we reconcile the occasional divergence between "situational ethics" and "societal ethics"?

9. Imagine if the law could be revised so that mothers like Helene wouldn't be allowed to raise their children. How do we ultimately write such a law and who gets to decide who is a good parent and who is not?

10. By agreeing to search for the teenage Amanda, is Patrick attempting to atone for the sins of the past? "I don't believe in redemption," he tells Angie. Is this true? Can we make up for our mistakes? By the novel's end, do you think Patrick is redeemed?

11. Angie argues that by trying to help Amanda McCready, Patrick would be doing good. What entails "doing good?" Do you think people want to do good? What other characters do good in the story? Why do so many people refrain from doing good when the opportunity arises?

12. Angie also uses their daughter to challenge Patrick. "When your daughter asks what you stand for, don't you want to be able to answer her?" What does Patrick stand for? What do you stand for? What might it be like if there were more people like Patrick and Angie in our society?

13. In Moonlight Mile, Dennis Lehane uses Patrick's character to comment on contemporary American society. Choose a few of Patrick's observations and discuss on them.

14. Parenting and its impact on a child's life are undercurrents that run through the novel. Compare and contrast the novel's various parental figures—from Patrick to the Russian mobster Kirill Borzkov to Helene and even Amanda. Just because someone can have a baby should he/she?

15. Amanda's social worker, Dre, and Patrick have a charged discussion about Dre's choice to sell babies. "You think the state knows any better about placing kids? You think anyone does?" Dre challenges Patrick. "We don't know shit. And by we, I mean all of us. We all showed up at the same semi-formal and we hope that somehow everyone will buy that we are what we dressed up as. A few decades of this, and what happens? Nothing happens. We learn nothing, we don't change, and then we die. And the next generation of fakers takes our place." Do you share Dre's bleak assessment? Can we, as a society, change? Have we over the years?

16. What are your impressions of Amanda? Do you agree with her choices? What kind of life do you think she will have?

17. By the novel's end, do you think Patrick would make the same choices about Amanda if he were able to undo time?

18. If you've read the previous books in the series, how does Moonlight Mile compare? What about the author's other works, including Mystic River, Shutter Island, and The Given Day? How does this book differ from those? Are there themes they share that offer insight into the author's values?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Moonlight Over Paris
Jennifer Robson, 2016
HarperCollins
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062389824

Summary
An aristocratic young woman leaves the sheltered world of London to find adventure, passion, and independence in 1920s Paris from the author of Somewhere in France and After the War is Over.

Spring, 1924

Recovering from a broken wartime engagement and a serious illness that left her near death, Lady Helena Montagu-Douglas-Parr vows that for once she will live life on her own terms.

Breaking free from the stifling social constraints of the aristocratic society in which she was raised, she travels to France to stay with her free spirited aunt. For one year, she will simply be Miss Parr. She will explore the picturesque streets of Paris, meet people who know nothing of her past—and pursue her dream of becoming an artist.

A few years after the Great War’s end, the City of Light is a bohemian paradise teeming with actors, painters, writers, and a lively coterie of American expatriates who welcome Helena into their romantic and exciting circle. Among them is Sam Howard, an irascible and infuriatingly honest correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.

Dangerously attractive and deeply scarred by the horror and carnage of the war, Sam is unlike any man she has ever encountered. He calls her Ellie, sees her as no one has before, and offers her a glimpse of a future that is both irresistible and impossible.

As Paris rises phoenix-like from the ashes of the Great War, so too does Helena. Though she’s shed her old self, she’s still uncertain of what she will become and where she belongs. But is she strong enough to completely let go of the past and follow her heart, no matter where it leads her?

Artfully capturing the Lost Generation and their enchanting city, Moonlight Over Paris is the spellbinding story of one young woman’s journey to find herself, and claim the life—and love—she truly wants. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 5, 1970
• Where—Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Western Ontario; Ph.D., Oxford University
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Canada

Jennifer Robson is a Canadian writer and former journalist living in Toronto, Canada. She has written three books—Moonlight Over Paris (2016), After the War is Over (2015), and Somewhere in France (2013)—all novels that use as their starting point, or background setting, Europe's Great War.

Perhaps it was her father, noted historian Stuart Robson, who passed on his love of history to Jennifer, a "lifelong history geek," as she refers to herself. In fact, it was her father from whom she first learned of the Great War, (1914-1918, which Americans refer to as World War I). Later she served as an official guide at the Canadian National Memorial at Vimy Ridge, France, one of the war's major battle sites.

Jennifer studied French literature and modern history as an undergraduate at King’s College at the University of Western Ontario, then attended Saint Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, where she earned her doctorate in British economic and social history. While at Oxford, she was both a Commonwealth Scholar and a Doctoral Fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Before turning to full-time writing, Jennifer spent time as an editor. She and her husband have three children, a sheepdog and cat, and live in Toronto. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
The vibrant whirl of the Paris art community is the ideal setting for this novel of healing and growth. Robson’s lovely prose allows the reader to savor the atmosphere of the Lost Generation, as well as the personal struggles of her characters.
Romantic Times Reviews

Rather than the sizzling and multilayered story that early chapters hint will unfurl, the novel offers a linear account of a year in the life of a likable yet uninspiring protagonist who interacts with similarly benign and tepid characters. Helena's friends at art school all reveal potential complexity, yet none are explored or developed.... [A] slow-moving plot...[for] a promising idea.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Other cities in Europe—for instance Rome, Venice, Barcelona, Vienna or London—are arguably just as beautiful and historic as Paris. Why, then, are we so drawn to the City of Lights? And what is it about Paris in the 1920s that we find so particularly fascinating?

2. Did you enjoy encountering real-life figures in the pages of Moonlight Over Paris? Is it possible to portray such iconic figures as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway with any degree of accuracy? Or has their fame obscured the real men behind the legends?

3. This novel is set six years after the end of World War I, but even still the characters and Paris itself are affected by those years. How do we see this with our characters? What do we see of this in the city itself?

4. Would a year in Paris, with all the freedom that Helena enjoys, have been possible for most women in that era? Or was it the case that her family’s wealth and status made it more easily achievable for her?

5. If you were able to read the story of one of the other fictional characters in the book, whose would it be? Etienne’s? Aunt Agnes’s? Another of the secondary figures?

6. Music, visual art and the written word play a big role in this story. Why do you think that Paris became such an epicenter for artistic expression during this time? Do you think the aftermath of the war played any part in this?
(Questions from the author's website.)

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Moonrise
Cassandra King, 2013
Maiden Lane
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781940210001

Summary
Moonrise is a novel of dark secrets and second chances, New York Times’ bestselling author Cassandra King’s homage to the gothic classic Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

When Helen Honeycutt falls in love with Emmet Justice, a charismatic television journalist who has recently lost his wife in a tragic accident, their sudden marriage creates a rift between her new husband and his oldest friends, who resent Helen’s intrusion into their tightly knit circle. Hoping to mend fences, the newlyweds join the group for a summer at his late wife’s family home in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains.

Helen soon falls under the spell not only of the little mountain town and its inhabitants, but also of Moonrise, her predecessor’s Victorian mansion, named for its unique but now sadly neglected nocturnal gardens. But the harder Helen tries to fit in, the more obvious it is that she will never measure up to the woman she replaced.

Someone is clearly determined to drive her away, but who wants her gone, and why? As Emmet grows more remote, Helen reaches out to the others in the group, only to find that she can’t trust anyone. When she stumbles on the secret behind her predecessor’s untimely death, Helen must decide if she can ever trust—or love—again. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1944
• Where—Lower Alabama, USa
• Education—B.A., M.A., Alabama college
• Currently—lives in the Low Country, South Carolina

Cassandra King is the author of five novels, most recently the critically acclaimed Moonrise (2013), her literary homage to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Moonrise is a Fall 2013 Okra Pick and a Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) bestseller. It has been described as “her finest book to date.”

Fellow Southern writers Sandra Brown, Fannie Flagg, and Dorothea Benton Frank hailed her previous novel, Queen of Broken Hearts (2008), as “wonderful,” “uplifting,” “absolutely fabulous,” and “filled with irresistible characters.” Prior to that, King’s third book, The Same Sweet Girls (2005), was a #1 Booksense Selection and Booksense bestseller, a Southeastern Bookseller Association bestseller, a New York Post Required Reading selection, and a Literary Guild Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

Her first novel, Making Waves in Zion, was published in 1995 by River City Press and reissued in 2004 by Hyperion. Her second novel, The Sunday Wife (2002), was a Booksense Pick, a People Magazine Page-Turner of the Week, a Literary Guild Book-of-the-Month selection, a Books-a-Million President’s Pick, a South Carolina State Readers’ Circle selection, and a Salt Lake Library Readers’ Choice Award nominee. In paperback, the novel was chosen by the Nestle Corporation for its campaign to promote reading groups.

King’s short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Callaloo, Alabama Bound: The Stories of a State (1995), Belles’ Letters: Contemporary Fiction by Alabama Women (1999), Stories From Where We Live (2002), and Stories From The Blue Moon Cafe (2004). Aside from writing fiction, she has taught writing on the college level, conducted corporate writing seminars, worked as a human-interest reporter for a Pelham, Alabama, weekly paper, and published an article on her second-favorite pastime, cooking, in Cooking Light magazine.

A native of L.A. (Lower Alabama), King currents lives in the Low Country of South Carolina with her husband, novelist Pat Conroy, whom she met when he wrote a blurb for Making Waves. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Cassandra King’s new novel Moonrise is both something familiar, like a well-loved leather recliner, and a writer’s mind game, which challenges the reader to keep up with sentences, plot and characters.... The tour de force of writing comes from King’s choice of voice.... [T]he plot moves along, and there are enough twists to make it a satisfying Southern read, with men and women the reader feels could be met along the small street in Highlands, or overhear their conversations at the local watering hole.
Stephanie Harvin - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

At this point many will recall, correctly, Daphne Du Maurier’s modern gothic masterpiece Rebecca, published in 1939 and set in Cornwall, England, in 1927. King happily acknowledges the inspiration, but Moonrise is fully her own, not a retelling or an adaptation.
Tuscaloosa News

In Moonrise, Cassandra King weaves the mystery of place and event into the truths of heart and heartlessness that shape human relationships.
Susan Zurenda - Spartanburg Herald Journal

Moonrise touches all the right notes to make it a suspenseful story and also a romantic one. Kudos to Ms. King for getting it right.... King's best asset is her ability to create a glowing array of characters in this story.... This is King's first novel since Queen of Broken Hearts was published in 2006 and her popular writing style has been missed. She has always been able to create heart-warming stories that play to the reader's emotions and intelligence and with Moonrise she continues that tradition. This is a story that impacts the reader, and its mixture of emotions will linger long after you have closed the book.
Jackie K. Cooper - Huffington Post

King’s latest novel takes inspiration from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, keeping the best of the latter’s atmospheric tension without falling into melodramatic cliche.... [Moonrise is] a suspenseful modern Gothic that gives a nod to its predecessors while still being fresh. The choice of present-tense narrative is an unfortunate distraction, but King’s light touch even in scenes that could have bogged down, and her deep understanding of her characters’ motivations makes this an exciting read.
Publishers Weekly

Much is made in this work's publicity of its homage to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, which is not surprising. There's an almost scarily magnetic husband, a somewhat gauche second wife gingerly following a universally admired first one, and a misty, strikingly beautiful estate.... King nicely focuses on untangling...complex emotions, which makes for the real suspense. Verdict: Though occasionally too stiff in the Rebecca parallels, this is a fresh and charming read. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal

When a book is inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s classic Rebecca, you know it is going to be darkly romantic and full of perplexing secrets. In Cassandra King’s hands, the bones of the story remain, but the setting is new and the characters are differently motivated, making Moonrise feel both fresh and familiar.... By the end of the book, it has become less of a ghost story and more about jealousy and sabotage of a different kind than we read in Rebecca, thus both mimicking and moving farther away from the du Maurier model.... Moonrise is a compelling and readable novel, and is a nice companion for brisk fall evenings or stormy nights.
Bookreporter

[A] rhododendron tunnel leading to a beguiling ancestral home, the strange death of a first wife, an increasingly confused heroine—King's latest alludes heavily to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca....[C]onstant reminders of Rosalyn's elegance make [Helen] only more keenly aware of her own shortcomings. [N]arrative shifts, however, deflect attention from Helen's mounting fears, deflating du Maurier's haunting psychological thriller into a predictable tale of romantic obstacles.... Gothic echoes of Manderley and the first Mrs. de Winter set up unfulfilled promises.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Houses play an important role in Moonrise in any number of ways, and they are often contested spaces--either inherited, temporary, or uncomfortable, etc. How does architecture contribute to our understanding of the characters in the novel? How are the houses revealing of larger constructions of "home"?

2. Early in the novel, Tansy observes, "The graveyard is where all our stories end." Is this true? How does the nocturnal garden at Moonrise challenge (or confirm) Tansy's claim?

3. Water is an important symbol in Moonrise, as it is in all of King's work. It takes many forms here: the drought, the experience at the falls, Kit's Oriental garden, the rain at the novel's conclusion, to name a few. How does water function as a symbol in the novel?

4. Moonrise is told from three distinct narrative perspectives. What might we conclude about the voices that are absent from the novel, however, most obviously Rosalyn's?

5. One of the concerns of the novel is the legitimacy of narrative: Emmett possesses the authority of his news channel, and thus is a "trusted interpreter" of events. How is Helen's cookbook also an important text? Rosalyn's journal? Myna's poems?

6. Like Maxim de Winter, Emmett is the older, wealthier, and arguably more powerful partner in his marriage, and, in fact, his role in Helen's success remains unclear. (Kit and Tansy intimate that he assisted in the creation of Helen's cooking show, but this rumor is never disproved.) How does power play out in their relationship? What parallels are evident here between Moonrise and Rebecca?

7. What role does nature (butterflies, the garden, the mountains, etc.) play in the novel? How is it both threatened and threatening?

8. Moonrise is filled with unconventional relationships-the friendship between Willa and Linc, the connection between Tansy and Noel, and even the "sisterhood" of Rosalyn and Kit. Many of these characters define themselves in very conventional ways according to expectations of class and gender. How do these friendships allow characters to see themselves in new, less restricted ways? What risks are inherent is stepping out of these established boundaries?

9. Meals become a site of dramatic tension throughout the novel. Revisit some of the scenes that revolve around food, and examine the ways that the food itself speaks to issues that the characters themselves are unable/unwilling to articulate.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins, 1868
Penguin Random House
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140434088

Summary
When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else.

The Moonstone, a yellow diamond looted from an Indian temple and believed to bring bad luck to its owner, is bequeathed to Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday.

That very night the priceless stone is stolen again and when Sergeant Cuff is brought in to investigate the crime, he soon realizes that no one in Rachel’s household is above suspicion.

Hailed by T. S. Eliot as "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels," The Moonstone is a marvellously taut and intricate tale of mystery, in which facts and memory can prove treacherous and not everyone is as they first appear.

Sandra Kemp’s introduction examines The Moonstone as a work of Victorian sensation fiction and an early example of the detective genre, and discusses the technique of multiple narrators, the role of opium, and Collins’s sources and autobiographical references. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 8, 1824
• Where—London, England, UK
• Death—September 23, 1889
• Where—London, England
• Education—studied law at Lincoln's Inn, London

Wilkie Collins has long been overshadowed by his friend and collaborator Charles Dickens—unfortunately for readers who have consequently not discovered one of literature's most compelling writers.

His novels are ceremonious and none too brief; they are also irresistible. Take the opening lines of his 1852 story of marital deceit, Basil:

What am I now about to write? The history of little more than the events of one year, out of the twenty-four years of my life. Why do I undertake such an employment as this? Perhaps, because I think that my narrative may do good; because I hope that, one day, it may be put to some warning use.

It's a typical Collins opening, one that draws the reader in with a tone that's personal, but carries formality and import.

With his long, frizzy black beard and wide, sloping forehead, Collins looked like a grandfatherly type, even in his 30s. But his thinking and lifestyle were unconventional, even a bit ahead of his time. His characters (particularly the women) have a Henry James–like predilection for bucking social mores, and he occasionally found his work under attack by morality-mongers. Collins was well aware of his books' potential to offend certain Victorian sensibilities, and there is evidence in some of his writings that he was prepared for it, if not welcoming of it. He writes in the preface to Armadale, his 1866 novel about a father's deathbed murder confession...

Estimated by the clap-trap morality of the present day, this may be a very daring book. Judged by the Christian morality which is of all time, it is only a book that is daring enough to speak the truth.

Career
Collins began his career by writing his painter father's biography. He gained popularity when he began publishing stories and serialized novels in Dickens's publications, Household Words and All the Year Round. His best-known works are The Woman in White and The Moonstone, both of which—along with Basil—have been made into films.

Collins often alludes to fantastic, supernatural happenings in his stories; the events themselves are usually borne out by reasonable explanations. What remains are the electrifying effects one human being can have upon another, for better and for worse. His main characters are often described in terms such as "remarkable," "extraordinary," and "singular," lending their actions—and thereby the story—a special urgency. In one of his great successes, 1860's The Woman in White, Collins spins what is basically a magnificent con story into something almost ghostly: The fates of two look-alike women—a beautiful, well-off woman and a poor insane-asylum escapee—are intertwined and manipulated by two evil men. One of those is among the best fictional villains ever created, the kill-'em-with-kindness Count Fosco. Fosco is emblematic of another Collins hallmark—antagonists who manage to throw their victims off guard by some powerful charm of personality or appearance.

The Moonstone, published in 1868, is regarded by many to be the first English detective novel. Starring the unassuming Sergeant Cuff, it follows the trail of a sought-after yellow diamond from India that has fallen into the wrong hands. Like The Woman in White, the novel is told in multiple first person narratives that display Collins's gift for distinctive and often humorous voices. Whether it is servants, foreigners, or the wealthy, Collins is an equal-opportunity satirist who quietly but deftly pokes fun at human foibles even as he draws nuanced, memorable characters.

Though The Woman in White and The Moonstone are Collins's standouts, he had a productive, consistent career; the novels Armadale, No Name, and Poor Miss Finch are worthwhile reads, and his short stories will particularly appeal to Edgar Allan Poe fans. Fortunately in the case of this underappreciated writer, there are plenty of titles to appreciate. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Discussion Questions
1. Sitting near the Shivering Sand with Betteredge early in the story, Rosanna says, "It looks to me as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under it—all struggling to get to the surface, and all sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps!" What does she mean? Who are the people who can’t escape, and why can’t they?

2. Near the end of the first period of the novel, Sergeant Cuff makes three predictions. How do they affect your expectations of what will happen later? How do you account for Miss Rachel’s continued silence at this point?

3. When The Moonstone was first published, the narrative of Drusilla Clack was one of its most popular sections. The titles of the tracts she so profusely distributes ("Satan under the Tea Table," etc.) are in fact only slightly parodied from those that Collins encountered in his father’s religious circle. How does Collins allow the reader to see the vanity, greed, and pettiness beneath the model of piety and propriety she portrays in her story?

4. Collins had a lifelong interest in the inner workings of the mind, especially when it was under of the influence of "mesmerism" or opium. What does Collins’s treatment of dreams, drugs, and delirium suggest about the value of the subconscious and the subjective mind, especially as opposed to the more objective methods of Sergeant Cuff?

5. After a conventional happy ending in England, Collins shifts the setting to conclude with an epilogue in India. How does the portrayal of the Brahmins here compare with that of Betteredge and Miss Clack? How does the meaning of story change because of the Indian frame at its opening and closing?

6. Dickens was primarily a master of character, Collins of plot, argued T.S. Eliot. Yet each learned much from the other during their years of intense collaboration. (Dickens’s final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, draws heavily on The Moonstone.) What do you think of Eliot’s assertion that "Dickens’s characters are real because there is no one like them; Collins’s because they are so painstakingly coherent and life-like"?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Moor's Account
Laila Lalami, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804170628

Summary
In these pages, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America: Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico.

The slave of a Spanish conquistador, Estebanico sails for the Americas with his master, Dorantes, as part of a danger-laden expedition to Florida. Within a year, Estebanico is one of only four crew members to survive.

As he journeys across America with his Spanish companions, the Old World roles of slave and master fall away, and Estebanico remakes himself as an equal, a healer, and a remarkable storyteller. His tale illuminates the ways in which our narratives can transmigrate into history—and how storytelling can offer a chance at redemption and survival. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1968
• Where—Rabat, Morocco
• Education—B.A., Universite Mohammed V; M.A., University College of London; Ph.D.,
University of Southern California
• Awards—American Book Award
• Currently—teaches at the University of California, Riverside

Laila Lalami is a Moroccan American novelist and essayist. She was born and raised in Rabat, Morocco, where she earned her B.A. in English from Universite Mohammed V. In 1990, she received a British Council fellowship to study in England, earning her M.A. in Linguistics at University College London.

Lalami moved to the U.S. in 1992, and completed a Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Southern California. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Writing
Lalami began writing fiction and nonfiction in English in 1996. Her literary criticism, cultural commentary, and opinion pieces have appeared in the Boston Globe, Boston Review, Los Angeles Times, Nation, New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Beast, and elsewhere.

Her debut collection of stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was released in the fall of 2005 and has since been translated into six languages. Her first novel, Secret Son (2009), was longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Her second novel The Moor's Account (2014) is based on Estevanico, the historic first black explorer of America and one of four survivors of the 1527 Narvaez expedition. The book won an American Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and nominated for the Man Booker Prize.

Lalami has received an Oregon Literary Arts grant and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was selected in 2009 by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/20/2015.)

Book Reviews
Feels at once historical and contemporary.... For Lalami, storytelling is a primal struggle over power between the strong and the weak, between good and evil, and against forgetting.... Lalami sees the story [of Estebanico] as a form of moral and spiritual instruction that can lead to transcendence.
New York Times Book Review

Estebanico is a superb storyteller, capable of sensitive character appraisals and penetrating ethnographic detail.
Wall Street Journal

[A] rich novel based on an actual, ill-fated 16th century Spanish expedition to Florida.... Offers a pungent alternative history that muses on the ambiguous power of words to either tell the truth or reshape it according to our desires.
Los Angeles Times

Compelling.... Necessary.... Laila Lalami’s mesmerizing The Moor’s Account presents us a historical fiction that feels something like a plural totality....a narrative that braids points of view so intricately that they become one even as we’re constantly reminded of the separate and often contrary strands that render the whole.
Los Angeles Review of Books

A bold and exhilarating bid to give a real-life figure muzzled by history the chance to have his say in fiction.
San Francisco Chronicle

Meticulously researched and inventive.... Those interested in the history of the Spanish colonization of the Americas will find much to like in The Moor’s Account, as will lovers of good yarns of faraway lands and times.
Seattle Times

Excellent historical fiction.... The way the Moor’s account differs from the Spaniards is amazing. It’s a play on perspective in more ways than one.
Ebony

An exciting tale of wild hopes, divided loyalties, and highly precarious fortunes.
New Yorker

Stunning.... The Moor’s Account sheds light on all of the possible the New World exploration stories that didn’t make history.
Huffington Post

Lalami's second novel is historical fiction of the first-order, a gripping tale of Spanish exploration in the New World set in the years 1527 to 1536, as told by a Muslim slave. Meticulously researched.... [t]his is a colorful but grim tale of Spanish exploration and conquest, marked by brutality, violence, and indifference to the suffering of native peoples.
Publishers Weekly

Assured, lyrical imagining of the life of one of the first African slaves in the New World—a native, like Lalami, of Morocco and, like her, a gifted storyteller.... Adding a new spin to a familiar story, Lalami offers an utterly believable, entertainingly told alternative to the historical record. A delight.
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 start a discussion for The Moor's Account:

1. What role does money—and the pursuit of money—play in this book? Early on, Estebanico's father warns him that "trade would open the door to greed and greed was an inconsiderate guest; it would bring its evil relations with it." What are the ways in which that prediction plays out in the novel?

2. Why does Estebanico sell himself into slavery?

3. Once a slave, Estebanico is taken to Spain where he is stripped of his name, Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori. What is the significance of that act—symbolically in the novel, as well as psychologically/spiritually in real life? What does it mean to deprive someone of his/her name? How does losing his name affect Estebanico?

4. Laila Lalami is concerned about the role that Arabs, Africans, and Muslims played in founding the New World. Why were people of color—non-Europeans—left out of historical accounts of New World discovery? How does the author develop her ideas of omission, particularly near the end of the novel when Estebanico finds the wooden charm in the shape of a hand?

5. In what way does Estebanico's account of the expedition differ from the official version by Cabeza de Vaca? What was omitted from the "official" version—and why?

6. Follow up to Question 5: Estebanico equates written records with power. What might he mean?

7. This story is very much about atonement. How does Estebanico remake himself? What events led to his desire to redeem himself? Talk about the way that Lalami portrays the Castilians as opposed to Moors and Native Americans? Why are Europeans seemingly beyond redemption in this story?

8. Why does Estebanico decide to write his own account of the expedition? Consider his thinking that "Maybe if our experiences, in all of their glorious, magnificent colors, were somehow added up, they would lead us to the blinding light of the truth." Keeping that passage in mind, talk about storytelling as a spiritual endeavor.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Moor's Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie, 1995
Knopf Doubleday
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679744665

Summary
Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 19, 1947
• Where—Bombay, Maharashtra, India
• Education—M.A., King's College, Cambridge, UK
• Awards—Booker Prize, 1981 (named the best novel to win
the Booker Prize in its first twenty-five years in 1993);
Whitbread Prize, 1988 and 1995
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on February 14, 1989.

Rushdie was appointed Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.

Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States, where he has worked at the Emory University and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book is Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the Satanic Verses controversy.

Career
Rushdie's first career was as a copywriter, working for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with "irresistibubble" for Aero and "Naughty but Nice" for cream cakes, and for the agency Ayer Barker, for whom he wrote the memorable line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. It was while he was at Ogilvy that he wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer. John Hegarty of Bartle Bogle Hegarty has criticised Rushdie for not referring to his copywriting past frequently enough, although conceding: "He did write crap ads...admittedly."

His first novel, Grimus, a part-science fiction tale, was generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next novel, Midnight's Children, catapulted him to literary notability. This work won the 1981 Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, was awarded the Best of the Bookers as the best novel to have received the prize during its first 25 and 40 years. Midnight's Children follows the life of a child, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with special powers and a connection to other children born at the dawn of a new and tumultuous age in the history of the Indian sub-continent and the birth of the modern nation of India. The character of Saleem Sinai has been compared to Rushdie. However, the author has refuted the idea of having written any of his characters as autobiographical, stating...

People assume that because certain things in the character are drawn from your own experience, it just becomes you. In that sense, I’ve never felt that I’ve written an autobiographical character.

After Midnight's Children, Rushdie wrote Shame, in which he depicts the political turmoil in Pakistan, basing his characters on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Shame won France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book) and was a close runner-up for the Booker Prize. Both these works of postcolonial literature are characterised by a style of magic realism and the immigrant outlook that Rushdie is very conscious of as a member of the Indian diaspora.

Rushdie wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua in 1987 called The Jaguar Smile. This book has a political focus and is based on his first-hand experiences and research at the scene of Sandinista political experiments.

His most controversial work, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 (see below). Rushdie has published many short stories, including those collected in East, West (1994). The Moor's Last Sigh, a family epic ranging over some 100 years of India's history was published in 1995. The Ground Beneath Her Feet presents an alternative history of modern rock music. The song of the same name by U2 is one of many song lyrics included in the book, hence Rushdie is credited as the lyricist. He also wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories in 1990.

Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels. His 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown received, in India, the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and was, in Britain, a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

In his 2002 non-fiction collection Step Across This Line, he professes his admiration for the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American writer Thomas Pynchon, among others. His early influences included James Joyce, Günter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Lewis Carroll. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter and praised her highly in the foreword for her collection Burning your Boats.

His latest novel is Luka and the Fire of Life, published in November 2010. Earlier in the same year, he announced that he was writing his memoirs, entitled Joseph Anton: A Memoir, which was published in September 2012.

In 2012, Salman Rushdie became one of the first major authors to embrace Booktrack (a company that synchronises ebooks with customised soundtracks) when he published his short story "In the South" on the platform.

Other Activities
Rushdie has quietly mentored younger Indian (and ethnic-Indian) writers, influenced an entire generation of Indo-Anglian writers, and is an influential writer in postcolonial literature in general. He has received many plaudits for his writings, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), and the Writer of the Year Award in Germany and many of literature's highest honours. Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006 and founder of the PEN World Voices Festival.

He opposed the British government's introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, something he writes about in his contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays by several writers.

In 2007 he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has also deposited his archives.

In May 2008 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Though he enjoys writing, Salman Rushdie says that he would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful. Even from early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood movies (which he later realised in his frequent cameo appearances).

Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his writings. He had a cameo appearance in the film Bridget Jones's Diary based on the book of the same name, which is itself full of literary in-jokes. On May 12, 2006, Rushdie was a guest host on The Charlie Rose Show, where he interviewed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, whose 2005 film, Water, faced violent protests. He appears in the role of Helen Hunt's obstetrician-gynecologist in the film adaptation of Elinor Lipman's novel Then She Found Me. In September 2008, and again in March 2009, he appeared as a panellist on the HBO program Real Time with Bill Maher.

Rushdie is currently collaborating on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel Midnight's Children with director Deepa Mehta. The film will be released in October, 2012.

Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund, a non-profit organisation which provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, an advocacy group representing the interests of atheistic and humanistic Americans in Washington, D.C. In November 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new liberal arts college that has adopted as its motto a Latin translation of a phrase ("free speech is life itself") from an address he gave at Columbia University in 1991 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Satanic Verses and the fatwa
The publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was perceived as an irreverent depiction of the prophet Muhammad. The title refers to a disputed Muslim tradition that is related in the book. According to this tradition, Muhammad (Mahound in the book) added verses (sura) to the Qur'an accepting three goddesses who used to be worshipped in Mecca as divine beings. According to the legend, Muhammad later revoked the verses, saying the devil tempted him to utter these lines to appease the Meccans (hence the "Satanic" verses). However, the narrator reveals to the reader that these disputed verses were actually from the mouth of the Archangel Gibreel. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities.

On February 14, 1989, a fatwa requiring Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam." A bounty was offered for Rushdie's death, and he was thus forced to live under police protection for several years. On March 7, 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy.

The publication of the book and the fatwa sparked violence around the world, with bookstores firebombed. Muslim communities in several nations in the West held public rallies, burning copies of the book. Several people associated with translating or publishing the book were attacked and even killed.

On September 24, 1998, as a precondition to the restoration of diplomatic relations with Britain, the Iranian government gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie."

Hardliners in Iran have continued to reaffirm the death sentence. In early 2005, Khomeini's fatwa was reaffirmed by Iran's current spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a message to Muslim pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Additionally, the Revolutionary Guards have declared that the death sentence on him is still valid. Iran has rejected requests to withdraw the fatwa on the basis that only the person who issued it may withdraw it, and the person who issued it – Ayatollah Khomeini – has been dead since 1989.

Rushdie has reported that he still receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on February 14 letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him. He said, "It's reached the point where it's a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat."

A memoir of his years of hiding, Joseph Anton, was published in 2012. Joseph Anton was Rushdie's secret alias.

In 2012, following uprisings over an anonymously posted YouTube video denigrating Muslims, a semi-official religious foundation in Iran increased the reward it had offered for the killing of Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million dollars. Their stated reason: "If the [1989] fatwa had been carried out, later insults in the form of caricature, articles and films that have continued would have not happened."

Knighthood
Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours on June 16, 2007. He remarked, "I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour, and am very grateful that my work has been recognised in this way." In response to his knighthood, many nations with Muslim majorities protested. Several called publicly for his death. Some non-Muslims expressed disappointment at Rushdie's knighthood, claiming that the writer did not merit such an honour and there were several other writers who deserved the knighthood more than Rushdie.

Al-Qaeda has condemned the Rushdie honour. The Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is quoted as saying in an audio recording that Britain's award for Indian-born Rushdie was "an insult to Islam", and it was planning "a very precise response."

Religious Beliefs
Rushdie came from a Muslim family though he is an atheist now. In 1990, in the "hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him," he issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam in his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world. However, Rushdie later said that he was only "pretending".

Personal Life
Rushdie has been married four times. He was married to his first wife Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar (born 1980). His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; they were married in 1988 and divorced in 1993. His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan (born 1999). In 2004, he married the Indian American actress and model Padma Lakshmi, the host of the American reality-television show Top Chef. The marriage ended on July 2, 2007, with Lakshmi indicating that it was her desire to end the marriage.

In 1999 Rushdie had an operation to correct ptosis, a tendon condition that causes drooping eyelids and that, according to him, was making it increasingly difficult for him to open his eyes. "If I hadn't had an operation, in a couple of years from now I wouldn't have been able to open my eyes at all," he said.

Since 2000, Rushdie has "lived mostly near Union Square" in New York City. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
I was raised neither a Catholic nor a Jew. I was both and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was—what's the word these days? atomized. Yessir: a real Bombay mix." So says Moraes Zogioby, known as Moor, the narrator of The Moor's Last Sigh. Salman Rushdie's first novel in seven years is his best work since 1980's brilliant Midnight's Children. Moor, who has a disorder that causes him to age at twice the normal speed, is the last surviving member of a crazy clan of wealthy South Indian spice merchants. He tells their insane, incestuous, violent domestic saga, which spans four generations. It centers on his beautiful mother, Aurora da Gama, a stubborn, passionate, Christian artist who, at 15, falls in love with the handsome Abraham Zogioby, a penniless, 35-year-old Jewish employee of her family. They marry and have four children: Ina, Minnie, Mynah and Moor. Betrayal, murder, and mayhem ensue.

Rushdie, the author of nine previous books—including The Satanic Verses, which prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue his death sentence in 1989—alludes often to his own exile, the story of modern India and the dangers of art. At first the hyperbole, didactic asides, verbal puns, lyrical and lewd jokes, and slapstick routines seem a bit much, but if you stick with it, a cumulative magic takes hold. Rushdie's satiric, hysterically funny, political family tragedy is a masterpiece.
Susan Shapiro - Salon

This novel, looked at as a work of literary art, is a triumph, an intricate and deceptive one.... The grand deception in this book is to conceal a bitter cautionary tale within bright, carnivalesque wrappings.
Norman Rush - New York Times

The most complete and gratifying work to emerge from Salman Rushdie's imagination.... The Moor's Last Sigh is an exotic story, in its setting, in its characters, in its punning extravagance, and in its deeply human core. It is an extraordinary family saga...full of wonderful characters, and the insight born of genuine reflection.... A remarkable spell of creativity.
Edmonton Journal

One of the most wonderful works of political art I have encountered, a novel to rival Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, or Dante's Divine Comedy.... The Moor's Last Sigh is one of the most admirable novels I've ever read.
Ottawa Citizen

Moraes Zogoiby, the product of a mixed marriage, is a self-described "cathjew nut" living in the multicultural stewpot of Bombay. His freethinking mother, Aurora, heiress to a vast spice trade fortune and reputedly a descendant of Vasco da Gama, decorates his nursery with murals featuring American cartoon characters instead of the traditional Hindu deities. Young Moraes's cultural identity is so confused that his favorite Indian is Tonto, from The Lone Ranger. Aurora is also a renowned artist, and the book's title refers to her masterpiece, which has been stolen by a rival and smuggled out of the country. Moraes's frantic search for the painting is complicated by the fact that he ages at twice the normal speed and is quickly running out of time. This rich and very readable novel is filled with playful allusions to postwar Indian history, world literature, pop culture, and Rushdie's own recent travails. On a par with the marvelous Midnight's Children, this is Rushdie's best work in years. —Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. Why does Rushdie use the device of a "double-quick" [p. 143] life for the Moor? What does the idea of such speed add to the novel? What is the significance of the Moor's deformed right hand to his character and function within the story?

2. Rushdie has stated that the idea of a portrait of a mother painted over because the father did not like it—the "lost image"—was the original inspiration for this novel. The image of the "palimpsest, " a painting over which a second work has been superimposed, is central to The Moor's Last Sigh. How does the palimpsest become a metaphor for other of the novel's themes, i. e., love, God, the cultures of India?

3. Would you call Aurora a "good" mother? How directly is she responsible for the tragic lives of Ina, Minnie, Mynah, and the Moor? Why did Vasco Miranda paint Aurora without her children, and how does that image correspond with the picture of India painted by Rushdie?

4. Aurora's role as a mother is clearly central, but what about her role as wife and lover? What strategies does she use to deal with the men in her life, in particular Abraham, Vasco, and Raman Fielding? What do the notions of love, fidelity, and infidelity mean to her?

5. "Motherness—excuse me if I underline the point—is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest: the land as mother, the mother as land, as the firm ground beneath our feet" [p. 137]. In India, the mother is traditionally associated with the idea of the nation. How does Rushdie use the mythology of the mother goddess to depict his country? How did Indira Gandhi use it to propagandize her own national role, and what do you infer Rushdie's opinion of such mythmaking to be? How is Auroramade to represent the Indian nation itself in its maternal role?

6. What do the key historical events referred to by the narrator—the Spanish reconquista of Granada and the expulsion of the Moors, the founding of the spice trade between Europe and India, Portuguese colonial expansion, political events of twentieth-century India—have to do with the story of the Zogoiby and da Gama families? How do these references contribute to the story's impact?

7. "The family in the novel reflects a truth about Bombay society in the past thirty or so years, " Rushdie has said. "Which is that the rich have got very much richer and the poor very much poorer." How is this economic disparity dealt with in the novel? How do the changing fortunes of the da Gama-Zogoiby clan reflect the economic condition of India? Can you find parallels with the changes that have taken place in American society over the past twenty years?

8. Do you think that Rushdie's elegiac representation of Bombay owes something to his exile from his native city? Where else in the novel does the theme of exile arise? Which characters might be considered, at one time or another, exiles?

9. How does Rushdie depict Hinduism? How does Raman Fielding's Mumbai Axis distort the tenets of Hinduism [pp. 296-301], and to what purpose? Is his political/cultural agenda pure fascism, and how closely does it resemble the most famous fascist regime of the century, Adolf Hitler's? Are the Moor's reasons for joining Fielding convincing to you? Does Rushdie imply that religious fundamentalism is essentially inimical to democracy? Do you believe that Rushdie implies a link between religion and madness? Between religion and disease?

10. Rushdie has given his characters names that are resonant within Portuguese, Spanish, Jewish, and Indian culture: Abraham, Carmen, Camoens, da Gama, Prince Henry the Navigator, Isabella, Vasco, Adam Braganza, Castile, etc. What significance does each name carry within the narrative and within the thematic structure Rushdie has given his novel?

11. Over and over Rushdie stresses, through his narrator the Moor, the beauty of plurality. Speaking of his family's history, the Moor asks, "Christians, Portuguese and Jews; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy ladies, skirts-not-saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crownsÉcan this really be India?" [p. 87]. How does the narrator represent, in his own person, India's pluralism and the pluralism of the entire world? How does the golden age of Granada, as imagined by Aurora in her paintings, comment upon the Zogoibys' story and the political history of the late twentieth century? Is Aurora's vision confirmed or denied by the novel's events?

12. How do the changes and developments in Aurora's painting style comment upon the nature and function of the artist? What about her evolving subject matter—how does it reflect the events within her family, and the larger events occurring in the nation and the world? How does Vasco Miranda's second-rate, kitsch art contradict, or compliment, Aurora's vision?

13. Uma Sarasvati's is presented by the author and by Aurora herself as a foil to Aurora. Does her character—and the more theoretical, "post-modern" nature of her art [pp. 261-2]—function as the opposite of Aurora's, or as its compliment? Does Uma exist as a character in her own right, or purely as an incarnation of evil? Is Abraham, too, an incarnation of evil?

14. What does Rushdie imply about the position and role of women through female characters such as Aurora, Belle, Uma, Carmen, and Nadia Wadia, and what, if anything, do these women have in common? How do they use the force of their characters to redress any cultural disadvantages they might have as women? How might one describe Rushdie's vision of the balance between the sexes?

15. In his opening pages, the Moor presents himself as a variation on Dante, "without benefit or need of Virgils, in what ought to be the middle pathway of my life" [p. 4], and the structure of the book is guided in part by that of The Divine Comedy. What other works of literature—fairy tales, religious texts, mythologies, epics, plays—help to give The Moor's Last Sigh its shape? How do their themes contribute to and enrich Rushdie's own?

16. How does Rushdie use the Benengeli section of the novel to explore the theme of parasitism, and do you think that he intends Benengeli to represent the parasitism of the modern world? Rushdie equates Vasco Miranda with Bram Stoker's Dracula; with Helsing, the Larios sisters, and the Benengeli Parasites he makes other references to the Dracula tale. What does he achieve by making this comparison? What does the presence of Aoi U' within Vasco's nightmarish castle signify?

17. The Moor's Last Sigh can be seen as an argument for tolerance over dogmatism, educated scepticism over intractible zeal. How does Rushdie's imagined ideal of "Mooristan" encapsulate this interpretation? Do you believe that the novel delivers a message of pessimism or of optimism?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Morality for Beautiful Girls (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series #3)
Alexander McCall Smith, 2001
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400031368

Summary
The quick-witted, good-natured detective Mma "Precious" Ramotswe shines in this irresistible bestseller. Between intriguing new cases and troubling personal developments, Precious' hands are full.

The four Miss Beauty and Integrity pageant finalists may have questionable moral fiber, and the brother of an important government worker has allegedly been poisoned. On top of all that, Precious' reliable fiance might be hiding something. (From the publisher.)

In 2009, he donated the short story "Still Life" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project—four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. McCall Smith's story was published in the Air collection. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
There's a good deal of bustle in the series' first volume, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, but hardly any suspense. And by the time you've made your way through the second, Tears of the Giraffe, and landed in the third, Morality for Beautiful Girls, you've realized that all this activity is much less about whodunit than why. It's also very much about the variety and resilience of a nation to which Smith (who grew up in what is now Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana) seems utterly devoted. As, of course, is Mma Ramotswe, who recognizes the difficulties her country faces—poverty, disease and drought, to name just a few—but would never choose to live anywhere else. Not even America.
Alida Becker - New York Times Book Review

In Morality for Beautiful Girls, Ramotswe tangles with a feral child, the finalists in a beauty pageant and a suspicious cook.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions

1. The values of courtesy, respect, and politeness—proper forms of greeting and speech, in particular—are stressed throughout the Precious Ramotswe novels. Which characters in Morality for Beautiful Girls adhere to these traditional courtesies? Which characters violate them? What are the moral implications of upholding or ignoring such traditions?

2. How surprising is it that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni suffers from depression in Morality for Beautiful Girls? What might be the causes of that depression? What seems to bring him out of it?

3. Clovis Anderson, author of The Principles of Private Detection, writes that there is 'very little drama' in being a detective and that 'those who are looking for romance should lay down this manual...and do something else' [p. 59]. Most detective novels do, however, rely on adventure and 'drama' to sustain their readers' interest. What makes the Precious Ramotswe novels so engaging even in the absence of such drama?

4. In considering a friend who treated her maid badly, Mma Ramotswe thinks that 'such behaviour was no more than ignorance; an inability to understand the hopes and aspirations of others. That understanding...was the beginning of all morality. If you knew how a person was feeling, if you could imagine yourself in her position, then surely it would be impossible to inflict further pain. Inflicting pain insuch circumstances would be like hurting oneself' [p. 77]. Which characters in the novel demonstrate this ability to empathize with others? Which characters fail to do so? Why, ultimately, is this kind of compassion so important?

5. Clovis Anderson also warns against making 'prior assumptions' and deciding 'in advance what's what and who's who' [p. 125]. In what instance does Mma Ramotswe make this mistake? Where else in the novel do assumptions turn out to be false? In what ways are being a reader and being a detective similar, in terms of this matter of making assumptions?

6. How is Mma Makutsi able to transform Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's lazy, irresponsible apprentices into hard-working mechanics? What qualities of character does she display in her management of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors? Why do these boys respond to her so well?

7. Early in the novel, Mma Makutsi relates an article she has read about the anthropologist, Richard Leaky, which shows that the human species originated in East Africa. Mma Ramotswe asks, 'so we are all brothers and sisters, in a sense?' To which Mma Makutsi replies, 'We are.... We are all the same people. Eskimos, Russians, Nigerians. They are the same as us. Same blood. Same DNA' [p. 12]. What are the implications, for the moral questions that the novel raises, of this statement? What does it suggest about distinctions based on race?

8. In trying to find a morally suitable girl to win the beauty contest, Mma Makutsi believes, 'the difficulty was that good girls were unlikely to enter a beauty competition in the first place. It was, in general, not the sort of thing that good girls thought of doing' [p. 204]. What does this passage suggest about the relationship between beauty and morality, or between appearance and essence? Is Mma Makutsi right about all this?

9. The later chapters of Morality for Beautiful Girls alternate between Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi and their respective investigations. What does this parallel narrative structure add to the novel?

10. What enables Mma Ramotswe to discover what is really happening with the Government Man's brother and his farm? In what ways do her intelligence, intuition, experience, and keen observation serve her in arriving at the truth of the situation?

11. The plot of Morality for Beautiful Girls revolves not around the unraveling of a crime, or the intent to commit a crime, but around discovering the absence of such intent. In most detective novels, this outcome would be a disappointment, at the very least. Why is it a satisfying and appropriate ending for this story?

12. One reviewer observed that 'for all their apparent simplicity, the Precious Ramotswe books are highly sophisticated' [The Spectator]. In what ways do these books appear simple? What accounts for their underlying sophistication? What do they teach us about ourselves?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Morality Tale
Sylvia Brownrigg, 2008
Counterpoint Press
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781458771964

Summary
Morality Tale is a novel about the triangular complications in a modern marriage, and the comedy that flows from them.

When this novel's unnamed narrator meets the elusive but exciting Richard (an envelope salesman with a nice layman's line in Zen philosophies), he offers her a friendly escape from her dreary domestic life.

Burdened by her husband's ongoing negotiations with his angry ex-wife, the strains of looking after two stepchildren, and the lingering ghost of her own past betrayals, she finds that the life of a “second marryer” leaves much to be desired. As their friendship develops, so grows the shadow cast over her marriage, and when they make a late, illicit bay crossing on a ferryboat, the story gathers momentum under California's Mount Tamalpais.

There, in the fabled Golden State, Sylvia Brownrigg shows how even a layman's Zen can lead to some important revelations about the need to look forward, not back. Bristling with honesty and wit, Morality Tale explores the triangular complications that can befall a modern marriage and the tragicomic forces that surround them. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Raised—Los Altos, California, USA
• Education—Yale University, Johns Hopkins Uiversity
• Awards—Lamda Award for Fiction
• Currently—lives in Berkeley, CA

Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction: four novels, Morality Tale, The Delivery Room, Pages for You, and The Metaphysical Touch, and a collection of stories, Ten Women Who Shook the World.

Sylvia's works have been included in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times lists of notable fictions and have been translated into several languages, and she has won a Lambda award for fiction.

Her short stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All Story, the art journal Frieze, and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as several anthologies. "The Bird Chick" was read on BBC Radio 4 and "Amazon" was one of NPR's Selected Shorts. In addition to writing fiction, Sylvia Brownrigg has also taught at the American University in Paris and been widely published as a reviewer and critic. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
"Isn't attraction mysterious?" asks the narrator of Morality Tale, Sylvia Brownrigg's divinely deadpan fourth novel, about an undernourished marriage and a love affair of the unconsummated kind.... Brownrigg's writing will remind readers of Carol Shields, whose quirky adjectives gave texture to her writing in a way that seemed effortlessly engaging and astute. Brownrigg describes an oversize diamond as "garish and nervous" and reduces a man's lost love to "'an overwhelming sense memory of the taste of her pound cake." Breathes there a more or less happily domesticated man or woman who hasn't experienced an extramarital crush? How interesting then, and how brave to tell a quiet, patient, witty tale in which "the 3 a.m. fantasies of our bodies together, Richard's and mine, were going to remain in their packaging, unopened, untested."
Elinor Lipman - New York Times Book Review

Brownrigg's quirky style makes every line count; she employs a kind of lively writing which recalls the work of Laurie Colvin. In fact, her narrative is punctuated with such concentrated wit that by this point in the story, more than halfway through the book, one may have forgotten its title and intent. Yet for all its crazy humour and diverting jumble of events, it is a morality tale. Good must be rewarded and the wicked punished, although there is nothing predictable about the route to this almost-happy ending.
Times Literary Supplement (London)

A tragicomic tale of woe told in chirpy tones.... Pan is spirited, with a talent for caricature. She sharply dissects the plight of a second wife. Surely, the moral she draws from her story—that husbands and wives need to treat each other with regard—is a worthy lesson.
Los Angeles Times

A witty parable, a slight but subtle dissection of modern marriage, its ideals and banalities, ghosts and bit-part players.... Illuminated by its sympathy toward its oddly innocent cast of characters, it presents the dilemmas of daily commitment and redemption in a form even burnt-out cynics might find palatable.
San Francisco Chronicle

Pan, the curiously nicknamed narrator of Brownrigg's trim latest novel, has come to realize the truth in the old saying, "What goes around comes around." It's been five years since her husband, Alan, left his wife for her, and she's disenchanted that their married lovemaking isn't as passionate as their adulterous action was. Plus, Alan barely helps around the house, Pan's not exactly enamored of her stepsons, and Alan is still hopelessly entangled with his combative ex, Theresa. So when Richard, a kindhearted envelope salesman, walks into the stationery store where Pan clerks, a harmless one-sided romance blooms in the form of letters Richard leaves for her. Of course, when Alan finds Richard's letters, he's less than understanding. The early charms of this novel, including an absorbing rendering of a suffocating and dreary marriage, soon wear thin: Pan becomes increasingly precious as an episode from her past is clumsily offered as an explanation for her disaffection, and her obtuseness about her meanness toward Theresa is frustrating. The setup is there, but the follow-through doesn't deliver.
Publishers Weekly

Emma Bovary wannabe ponders an alternative to her mundane domestic lifestyle in this dreamlike but grating modern fable. The unnamed narrator of Brownrigg's fifth work of fiction has grown tired of the life that her husband Alan has constructed for them, seemingly with little input from her. She quietly passes her days working in a stationary store; she puts up with Alan's constant contact with his ex-wife Theresa; and she reluctantly though tenderly helps him raise his two sons, Alan and Ryan. While she doesn't like admitting that anything is wrong with her marriage, she finds herself inexplicably drawn to Richard, a burly envelope salesman who visits her at work and initiates a series of weekly lunch dates at a nearby falafel stand. The two grow increasingly attached, though they don't act on any physical impulses, and the narrator is hard pressed to understand her attraction to Richard or his place in her life. Things unravel when Alan catches them holding hands in a park, then finds a pile of affectionate notes from Richard in her purse. His jealousy leads to a spiral of squabbles, spying and joint therapy sessions. But just when the narrator seems ready to rebel and run, a trip to her childhood home with Richard and the news that he is moving back to Chicago makes her understand that her life with Alan hasn't ended, that it just needs work. Because Brownrigg seems so dedicated to pinpointing the minute details often to blame for the downfall of a marriage, the melodramatic climax and optimistic ending seem inconsistent and a bit contrived. Her ability to lend an otherworldly feel to such a contemporary story, however, is commendable. Slow plotting and an exhaustingly cerebral narrator muffle the impact of the author's interesting experiments with tone.
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 Morality Tale:

1. What's wrong—or what does Pan find wrong—with her marriage? Why has she become dissatisfied? Is her dissatisfaction well-grounded?

2. Pan doesn't seem capable of understanding why she's attracted to Richard. Why is she?

3. Although drawn to one another, Pan and Richard restrain their physical involvement. Does that make any difference in terms of whether they are committing adultery? Are their luncheons, letter exchanges, etc. immoral?

4. Do you find Pan a sympathetic character. How would you describe her—is she funny, wise, witty, mean-spirted, irritating or tiresome?

5. What does Pan come to realize on the trip to Chicago...and why?

6. Do you like the book's ending. Is it convincing...or do you find it a bit manipulative and, perhaps, too pat?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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More Than Words
Jill Santopolo, 2019
Penguin Publishing
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735218307

Summary
A tender and moving new novel about a woman at a crossroads after the death of her father, and caught between the love of two men—from the bestselling author of The Light We Lost.

Nina has always known who she's supposed to be. But is that who she truly is?

Nina Gregory has always been a good daughter. Raised by her father, owner of New York City's glamorous Gregory Hotels, Nina was taught that family, reputation, and legacy are what matter most.

And Tim--her devoted boyfriend and best friend since childhood--feels the same. But when Nina's father dies, he leaves behind a secret that shocks Nina to her core.

As her world falls apart, Nina begins to see the men in her life—her father, her boyfriend, and unexpectedly, her boss, Rafael--in a new light. Soon Nina finds herself caught between the world she loves, and a passion that could upend everything.

More Than Words is a heartbreaking and romantic novel about grief, loss, love, and self-discovery, and how we choose which life we are meant to live. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1981
• Raised—Hewlett, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University; M.F.A., Vermont College of Fine Ats
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Jill Santopolo is the author of children's and young-adult books, as well as adult novels, including The Light We Lost (2017) and More Than Words (2019). She grew up in Hewlett New York, on the South Shore of Long Island.

Santopolo received a BA in English literature from Columbia University and an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. In addition to her work as the editorial director of Philomel Books (an imprint of Penguin Young Readers group), she is an adjunct professor in The New School’s MFA program. Santopolo lives in New York City and travels the world to speak about writing and storytelling. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
A smart, sexy, delicious novel.
People

Another gorgeously heart-breaking and romantic read.… This one is certainly going to sweep you up in feelings.
Bustle

[An] emotional, romantic story.
AARP Magazine

If you and your book-loving friends are fans of Reese Witherspoon’s book club, this book needs to be your next club pick.
Parade

[A] heartfelt story about life, love, and taking chances in the aftermath of loss.… This is a charming and sexy crowd-pleaser.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review) [A] a fascinating look into the lives of New York City's superwealthy and political elite.…This breezy read is full of drama and romance, but at its core is a story of family and self-identity that will please women's fiction fans. —Kristen Calvert, Dallas P.L., TX
Library Journal

The latest from bestselling author Santopolo is a bittersweet and reflective novel of grief, loss, and coming into one’s own.
Booklist

[P]ropulsive and compelling. The depiction of Nina's grief for her father is vividly raw, made more real by her eventual understanding that he was an imperfect human being. Full of drama, scandal, and romance, [More Than Words] is sure to delight fans
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Nina and Tim have been best friends from childhood. Do you have a friend you’ve known your entire life? Has your relationship with him or her changed over time? How do you think this background affects a romantic relationship?

2. Is Nina’s father, Joseph Gregory, a good father? Why or why not? How does he shape Nina?

3. How is marriage portrayed in the novel? What did you think of Nina’s perception of her parents’ marriage? How does her perception change after her father’s death?

4. Why does Nina agree to marry Tim? How does she feel about her decision? Why do you think she agrees despite her doubts?

5. After Joseph’s death, Nina feels like "she’d walked into a movie about herself, where… the main character was left rudderless" (p. 198). Have you ever lost someone you loved? Did you relate to Nina’s experience? Why or why not?

6. Were you surprised by Joseph’s secret? Why or why not? How does this revelation affect Nina?

7. On p. 51, Rafael tells Nina he thinks of people like poems, that someone can be "haiku, or a villanelle, or a cinquain sonnet." What does he mean? What type of poem do you think you’d be?

8. Why do you think Nina and Tim grow apart? Do you think this is a common feeling? Have you ever been surprised by a new direction in your own life?

9. Are you Team Tim or Team Rafael? Why?

10. Why do you think Nina decides to change her entire wardrobe when she goes shopping with Pris (p. 244)? What does Nina’s new look mean to her? Why do you think it took her so long to find a style she loves? What do you think your personal style says about you? Have you ever made a surprising fashion decision?

11. Nina must choose between the life she’s always envisioned and a life that excites her. Why does she make the choice she does? Do you think it’s the right choice? Would you have made a different one?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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More Than You Know
Beth Gutcheon, 2000
HarperCollins
269 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060959357

Summary
More Than You Know is a haunting novel that bridges two centuries, two mother-daughter relationships, and two tragic love stories. In a small town called Dundee on the coast of Maine, an old woman named Hannah Gray begins her story by saying "Somebody said 'true love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about, and few have seen.' I've seen both, and I don't know how to tell you which is worse."

Hannah has a passionate and painful story of true love and loss: the story of a ghost that appeared in her life, and in the life of Conary Crocker, the wild and appealing boy who loved her.

Interwoven with their love story is a story of a marriage that took place in Dundee a hundred years earlier. As the parallels and differences between the two families are revealed, the reader comes to understand that someone in the nineteenth-century story has become the very unquiet soul haunting the twentieth. But not until the end do we learn (as Hannah never can) what force of mischance and personality has led to so much damage, and no one knows if such damage is ever at an end. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 18, 1945
• Where—Sewickley, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Currently—New York, NY

Beth Gutcheon grew up in western Pennsylvania. She attended the Sewickley Academy, Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, and Harvard College, where she took an honors B.A. in English literature. She has spent most of her adult life in New York City, except for sojourns in San Francisco and on the coast of Maine.

In 1978, she wrote the narration for a feature-length documentary on the Kirov ballet school, The Children of Theatre Street, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and she has made her living as a full-time storyteller (novels and occasional screenplays) since then. Gutcheon's novels have been translated into 14 languages (if you count the pirated Chinese edition of Still Missing), plus large-print and audio formats. Still Missing was made into a feature film called Without a Trace and was also published in a Reader's Digest Condensed version, which particularly pleased the author's mother. (From the author's website.)

More
From a 2005 Barnes and Noble interview:

"When my second novel was in manuscript, a subsidiary rights guy at my publisher secretly sent a copy of it to a friend who was working in Hollywood with the producer Stanley Jaffe, who had made Goodbye Columbus, The Bad News Bears, and Kramer v. Kramer, run Paramount Pictures before he was 30, and met the queen of England. My agent had an auction set up for the film rights of Still Missing for the following Friday, with some very heavy-hitter producers and such, which was exciting enough. Two days before the auction, Stanley Jaffe walked into my agent's office in New York and said,

"I want to make a pre-emptive bid for Beth Gutcheon's novel."
"But you haven't read it," says Wendy.
"Nevertheless," says Stanley.
"There's an auction set up. It'll cost a lot to call it off," says Wendy.
"I understand that," says Stanley.
Wendy named a number.
Stanley said, "Done," or words to that effect.

To this day, remembering Wendy's next phone call to me causes me something resembling a heart attack. When, several weeks later, Stanley called and asked me if I had an interest in writing the screenplay of the movie that became Without a Trace, I said, ‘No.' He quite rightly hung up on me.

I then spent twenty minutes in a quiet room wondering what I had done. A man with a shelf full of Oscars, on cozy terms with Lizzie Windsor, had just offered me film school for one, all expenses paid by Twentieth Century Fox. He knew I didn't know how to write screenplays. He wasn't offering to hire me because he wanted to see me fail. Who cares that all I ever wanted to see on my tombstone was ‘She Wrote a Good Book?' The chance to learn something new that was both hard and really interesting was not resistible. I spent the rest of the weekend tracking him from airport to airport until I could get him back on the phone. (This was before we all had cell phones.)

I was sitting in my bleak office on a wet gray day, on which my newly teenaged son had shaved his head and I had just realized I'd lost my American Express card, when the phone rang. "Is this Beth Gutcheon?" asked a voice that made my hair stand on end. I said it was. ‘This is Paul Newman,' said the voice.

It was, too. The fine Italian hand of Stanley Jaffe again, he'd recommended me to work on a script Paul was developing. Paul invited me to dinner to talk about it. My son said, "For heaven's sake, Mother, don't be early and don't be tall." I was both. We did end up writing a script together; it was eventually made for television with Christine Lahti, and fabulous Terry O'Quinn in the Paul Newman part, called The Good Fight."

Extras
• I read all the time. My husband claims I take baths instead of showers because I can't figure out how to read in the shower, and he's right.

• I started buying poetry for the first time since college after 9/11, but wasn't reading it until a friend mentioned that she and her husband read poetry in the morning before they have breakfast. She is right — a pot of tea and a quiet table in morning sunlight is exactly the right time for poetry. I read the New York Times Book Review in the bath and on subways because it is light and foldable. I listen to audiobooks through earphones while I take my constitutionals or do housework. I read physical books for a couple of hours every night after everyone else is in bed—usually two books alternately, one novel and one biography or book of letters.

• I have a dog named Daisy Buchanan. She ran for president last fall; her slogan was ‘No Wavering, No Flip-flopping, No pants.' She doesn't know yet that she didn't win, so if you meet her, please don't tell her.

• When I was in high school I invented, by knitting one, a double-wide sweater with two turtlenecks for my brother and his girlfriend. It was called a Tweter and was even manufactured in college colors for a year or two. There was a double-paged color spread in Life magazine of models wearing Tweters and posing with the Jets football team. My proudest moment was the Charles Addams cartoon that ran in The New Yorker that year. It showed a Tweter in a store window, while outside, gazing at it in wonder, was a man with two heads.

• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is her answer:

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Dickens often manages to be both dramatic and funny, while telling a thundering great story, but in Great Expectations, in spite of the unforgettable gargoyles like Miss Havisham and charming Wemmick with his Aged P, it's a very human story about the difference between how things look and how they really are. When Pip recognizes how he has fooled himself, and what he must accept about reality, you see that while Dickens has been amusing you with any number of major and minor melody lines that all seemed to be tripping along by themselves, he has in fact been in perfect control, building up to a major chord, every note right and every instrument contributing at just the right moment. I understood that to make a novel pay off like that, you have to know from the get-go what story you are telling, how it ends, what it means, and exactly what you want the reader to feel and know when it's over. It was the book that made me start thinking like a writer, not just as a passionate reader, about how stories are made.

(Author bio and interview from Barnes and Noble.)

Book Reviews
While Gutcheon cannily evokes the ephemerality of passion, she also evinces, with stark and elemental resonance, the way love and hatred shape lives.
Megan Harlan - New York Times

Even without the supernatural element, this is a haunting novel.... Shattering and harrowing.
Boston Sunday Globe

Few literary fiction writers do justice to Edgar Allen Poe, but Beth Gutcheon writes one scary haunting.
Los Angeles Times Book Review

It's a rare author who can combine a humdinger of a ghost tale with a haunting story of young love, and do so with literary grace and finesse. Gutcheon does just that and she acquits herself beautifully in this poignant novel. What's more, she adroitly manages alternating narratives, set a century apart, raising the level of suspense as the characters in each period approach the cusp on which a life turns, in parallel events that will irrevocably define the future for all of them. The novel is essentially two stories of doomed love and its consequences for future generations. Narrator Hannah Gray is an elderly widow when she relates the circumstances of the summer when she fell in love with Conary Crocker, a charming young man from a poor family in Dundee on the coast of Maine. Brought to Dundee from Boston during the Depression by her abusive stepmother, Hannah learns about the fate of distant ancestral relatives of hers and Conary's, who lived on now-deserted Beal Island in the mid 1800s. The reader learns the horrifying details in the same small increments that Hannah does, via the alternating point of view of Claris Osgood, who in 1858 defies her parents and marries taciturn Danial Haskell, moving with him to the island where, too late, she discovers her new husband's narrow-minded religious fundamentalism and corrosively mean personality. The union, which produces two children, becomes increasingly rancorous and will end in murder. Meanwhile, in her own time, Hannah is terrified by the appearances of a wildly sobbing ghost with "gruesome burning eyes," who exudes almost palpable hatred. Tantalizing clues about the identity of the macabre specter, and the eventual tragedy it causes, hum through the narrative like a racing pulse. Gutcheon adds depth and texture through lovely descriptions of the Maine coast and the authentic vernacular of its residents, whom she depicts with real knowledge of life in a seacoast community. Her sophisticated prose and narrative skill mark this novel, her sixth (after Five Fortunes), as a breakthrough to a wide readership.
Publishers Weekly

As an old woman, Hannah Gray looks deep into her past at the great and tragic love of her life with the wild and handsome Conary Crocker. Drawn together by a frightening apparition from the previous century and by their mutually miserable family lives, the young lovers make an urgent bid to outrun fate and solve a murder from their own ancestral gene pools. In 1886 someone planted an ax in the head of Daniel Haskell, kin to Conary. The likeliest suspects were his wife Claris or his daughter Sallie—both relatives of Hannah. Gutcheon traces the wrenching unraveling of Claris and Daniel's love, done in by the cruel and twisted ways of a marriage run dreadfully amok. Gutcheon, author of five previous novels (including Domestic Pleasure and Five Fortunes), uses her incandescent storytelling gifts to ignite the parallel tales of Hannah and Conary's and Claris and Daniel's love—ruined beyond repair by circumstance, hatred, and a desperate angry ghost. It is the rare writer indeed who can end every single chapter with deliciously suspenseful foreboding. Highly recommended. —Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal

Gutcheon expertly manages both joy and horror; her touches of the supernatural seem rooted naturally in their Maine location like ancient trees. Unputdownable. —GraceAnne A. DeCandido.
Booklist

Elderly Hannah Gray narrates this enthralling tale of events that occurred in her 17th summer when she accompanied her grim stepmother to a small village on the Maine coast. Their rented cottage was a converted schoolhouse that had been brought to the mainland from a nearby island. Hannah sees visions of a tormented, ghostlike figure in the house and she hears mysterious sounds emanating from the upper-floor rooms. She learns that a young woman was accused, tried, and acquitted of killing her father there 75 years earlier. Alternating chapters tell the sad story of Claris Osgood, the lonely daughter of a happy, talented, and prosperous family in the village in the 1800s. In search of independence, she insists on marrying a quiet, brooding man, and they move out to the island. Misfortune strikes Claris's family as they struggle in silent combat among themselves. While Hannah is trying to avoid spending time with her dour, disapproving stepmother, she roams the village and becomes friendly with a young man whose family has deep roots in the area. They visit the now-uninhabited island where they come face to face with the past. Teens will enjoy these parallel stories of love between people from different backgrounds and be saddened by the dual tragedies that strike them. Suspense keeps the plot moving at a rapid clip. —Penny Stevens, Centreville Regional Library, Fairfax, VA
School Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. What does the title mean? To whom, other than the "boy of my heart" (p. 229), does it refer?

2. Hannah begins the story by writing "Some-body said 'True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about, and few have seen.' I've seen both, and I don't know how to tell you which is worse" (p. 1). What does this mean? Why doesn't Hannah know how to tell which is worse? What prevents her?

3. Both Amos and Conary die tragically at young ages. What are the similarities and differences between the two deaths?

4. Much of the tension in More Than You Know derives from knowledge and mystery. What do characters' relationships to the search for truth and truth itself reveal about each character? What is your relationship to the truth in this nove?

5. Misunderstandings and arguments between Edith and her stepdaughter leave Hannah feeling utterly alone and desperate to get out of the house. What is Sallie's relationship with her mother? What role do Hannah's and Sallie's rather detached fathers play in their daughters' lives?

6. Hooks probes the gap between the values many people "claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice" (p. 90). How does our culture reward those who nurture this gap? What changes would we have to make in society to nurture and inspire the closing of this gap?

7. Why does the ghost serve as the catalyst for Conary's death just as he's chosen to return to Dundee with Hannah?

8. If Hannah is the narrator of her own story, and if Mercy takes over the telling of the Haskell family story with excerpts taken from her manuscript, who is the narrator from whom Mercy's manuscript takes over? Who is telling that story? What is the effect of switching perspectives?

9. Discuss the way in which Beth Gutcheon uses music in this novel.

10. Hannah, Claris, and Sallie struggle with their families and feel hemmed in by parental strictures. How do their familial relationships prepare them for love? Is romantic love any less true if it serves as the vehicle for escape from troubles at home?

11. What binds the two stories together? Is it an accident of geography, or is there a greater force at work?

12. "I know there are feelings that survive death, but can they all? What if only the bitterest and most selfish are strong enough?" (p. 266) are Hannah's final questions. Does the novel provide answers?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Moriarty
Anthony Horowitz, 2014
HarperCollins
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062377180

Summary
Internationally bestselling author Anthony Horowitz's nail-biting new novel plunges us back into the dark and complex world of Detective Sherlock Holmes and Professor James Moriarty—dubbed "the Napoleon of crime"—in the aftermath of their fateful struggle at the Reichenbach Falls.

Days after Holmes and Moriarty disappear into the waterfall's churning depths, Frederick Chase, a senior investigator at New York's infamous Pinkerton Detective Agency, arrives in Switzerland. Chase brings with him a dire warning: Moriarty's death has left a convenient vacancy in London's criminal underworld. There is no shortage of candidates to take his place—including one particularly fiendish criminal mastermind.

Chase is assisted by Inspector Athelney Jones, a Scotland Yard detective and devoted student of Holmes's methods of deduction, whom Conan Doyle introduced in The Sign of Four. The two men join forces and fight their way through the sinuous streets of Victorian London—from the elegant squares of Mayfair to the shadowy wharfs and alleyways of the Docks—in pursuit of this sinister figure, a man much feared but seldom seen, who is determined to stake his claim as Moriarty's successor.

Riveting and deeply atmospheric, Moriarty is the first Sherlock Holmes novel sanctioned by the author's estate since Horowitz's House of Silk. This tale of murder and menace breathes life into Holmes's fascinating world, again proving that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however im- probable, must be the truth. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 5, 1955
• Where—Stanmore, Middlesex, UK
• Education—University of York
• Awards—Lancashire Children's Book of the Year Award
• Currently—lives in London, England

Anthony Horowitz, OBE is a prolific English novelist and screenwriter specialising in mystery and suspense. His work for children and teenagers includes The Diamond Brothers series, the Alex Rider series, and The Power of Five series (aka The Gatekeepers). His work for adults includes the novel and play Mindgame (2001) and two Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk (2011) and Moriarty (2014). He has also written extensively for television, contributing numerous scripts to ITV's Agatha Christie's Poirot and Midsomer Murders. He was the creator and principal writer of the three ITV series—Foyle's War, Collision and Injustice.

Personal life
Horowitz was born in Stanmore, Middlesex, into a wealthy Jewish family, and in his early years lived an upper-middle class lifestyle. As an overweight and unhappy child, Horowitz enjoyed reading books from his father's library. At the age of eight, Horowitz was sent to the boarding school Orley Farm in Harrow, Middlesex. There, he entertained his peers by telling them the stories he had read. Overall, however, Horowitz described his time in the school as "a brutal experience," recalling that he was often beaten by the headmaster. At age 13 he went on to Rugby School and discovered a love for writing.

Horowitz adored his mother, who introduced him to Frankenstein and Dracula. She also gave him a human skull for his 13th birthday. Horowitz said in an interview that it reminds him to get to the end of each story since he will soon look like the skull. From the age of eight, he knew he wanted to be a writer, realizing "the only time when I'm totally happy is when I'm writing." He graduated from the University of York with a lower second class degree in English literature and art history in 1977.

Horowitz's father was associated with some of the politicians in the "circle" of prime minister Harold Wilson, including Eric Miller. Facing bankruptcy, he moved his assets into Swiss numbered bank accounts. He died from cancer when his son Anthony was 22, and the family was never able to track down the missing money despite years of trying.

Horowitz now lives in Central London with his wife Jill Green. They have two sons whom he credits with much of his success in writing. They help him, he says, with ideas and research. He is a patron of child protection charity Kidscape.

Early writing
Horowitz published his first children's book, The Sinister Secret of Frederick K Bower in 1979 and, in 1981, a second, Misha, the Magician and the Mysterious Amulet. In 1983 he released the first of the Pentagram series, The Devil's Door-Bell, which was followed by three more in the series until the final in 1986.

In between his novels, Horowitz worked with Richard Carpenter on the Robin of Sherwood television series, writing five episodes of the third season. He also novelized three of Carpenter's episodes as a children's book under the title Robin Sherwood: The Hooded Man (1986). In addition, he created Crossbow (1987), a half-hour action adventure series loosely based on William Tell.

Starting in 1988, Horowitz published two Groosham Grange novels, partially based on his boarding school years. The first won the 1989 Lancashire Children's Book of the Year Award.

The major release in his early career was The Falcon's Malteser (1986), which became the first in the eight-book Diamond Brothers series. The book was filmed for television in 1989 as Just Ask for Diamond. The series' final installment was issued in 2008.

Midcareer writing
Horowitz wrote numerous stand alone novels in the 1990s, but in 2000 he began the Alex Rider novels—about a 14-year-old boy becoming a spy for the British Secret Service branch MI6. The series is comprised of nine books (a tenth is connected but not part of it) with the final installment released in 2011.

Another series, The Power of Five (The Gatekeepers in the U.S.) began in 2005 with Raven's Gate—"Alex Rider with witches and devils," Horowitz called it. Five books in all were published by 2012

Horowitz also turned to playwrighting with Mindgame, which opened Off Broadway in 2009 at the Soho Playhouse in New York City. The production starred Keith Carradine, Lee Godart, and Kathleen McNenny; it was the New York stage directorial debut for Ken Russell

The estate of Arthur Conan Doyle selected Horowitz as the writer of a new Sherlock Holmes novel, the first such effort to receive an official endorsement. The resulting book, The House of Silk, came out in 2011, followed by Moriarty in 2014.

Horowitz was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to literature.

TV and film
Horowitz's association with televised murder mysteries began with the adaptation of several Hercule Poirot stories for ITV's popular Agatha Christie's Poirot series during the 1990s.

Starting in 1997, he wrote the majority of the episodes in the early series of Midsomer Murders. In 2001, he created a drama anthology series of his own for the BBC, Murder in Mind, an occasional series which deals with a different set of characters and a different murder every one-hour episode.

He is also less-favourably known for the creation of two short-lived and sometimes derided science-fiction shows, Crime Traveller (1997) for BBC One and The Vanishing Man (pilot 1996, series 1998) for ITV. The successful 2002 launch of the detective series Foyle's War, set during the Second World War, helped to restore his reputation as one of Britain's foremost writers of popular drama.

He devised the 2009 ITV crime drama Collision and co-wrote the screenplay with Michael A. Walker. Horowitz is the writer of a feature film screenplay, The Gathering, released in 2003 and starring Christina Ricci. He wrote the screenplay for Alex Rider's first major motion picture, Stormbreaker. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/1/2014.)

Book Reviews
Thrilling and compelling, with a stunning twist, this is written as if Conan Doyle were at Horowitz’s shoulder, and is—in my view—the finest crime novel of the year.
Daily Mail (UK)

In this skilfully executed follow on, Horowitz takes up the Conan Doyle baton and creates a suitably stylish and twisty detective story.
Sunday Mirror (UK)

Is there nothing Anthony Horowitz touches that doesn’t turn to gold? ...He captures Conan Doyle’s narrative technique to perfection. Gory murders, honest thieves, brilliant disguises, breathless chases and red herrings abound.
Daily Express (UK)

Though Horowitz dishes up the gore and violence with relish, he also offers all the tropes one might expect from a Holmes yarn, including baffling coded messages, impossible murders and clever red herrings... its plotting just as brilliantly gnarly but its tone more self-aware and laced with in-jokes.
Financial Times

A page-turning novel for all ages that continues the story of Sherlock Holmes’s greatest enemy…crammed with references to some of [Doyle’s] best-loved stories.
Independent (UK)

In this disappointing follow-up to Horowitz’s brilliant first Holmes pastiche, The House of Silk (2011), Sherlock Holmes appears only in passing, in a prologue in which narrator Frederick Chase, a Pinkerton operative, details the plot holes in Watson’s account of the fatal encounter between the great detective and the Napoleon of crime.... [A] pale shadow of Holmes and Watson.
Publishers Weekly

Horowitz's mystery bona fides are impeccable.... Here he reimagines what happened after the presumably lethal scuffle between Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.
Library Journal

(Starred review.) A stunning riff on the Holmes-Moriarty clash. It’s full of allusions to the Holmes cannon that Sherlockians will congratulate themselves for spotting, then wince moments later when Horowitz gently reveals the prank.... Horowitz spins his tale in pitch-perfect Watsonian prose…setting readers up for a finale that is truly jaw-dropping.
Booklist

(Starred review.) A Sherlockian pastiche without Holmes and Watson? Yes indeed, and it's a tour de force quite unlike any other fruit from these densely plowed fields.... Readers who aren't put off by the Hollywood pacing, with action set pieces less like Conan Doyle than the Robert Downey Jr. movies, are in for a rare treat, a mystery as original as it is enthralling.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our 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 more one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you, the reader, begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers are skillful at hiding clues in plain sight. How well does the author hide the clues in this work?

4. Does the author use red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray?

5. Talk about plot's twists & turns—those surprising 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 do the twists & turns feel forced and preposterous—inserted only to extend the story.

6. Does the author ratchet up the story's suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? How does the author build suspense?

7. What about the ending—is it satisfying? Is it probable or believable? Does it grow out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 2). Or does the ending come out of the blue? Does it feel forced...tacked-on...or a cop-out? Or perhaps it's too predictable. Can you envision a better, or different, 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.)

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Morning Glory
Sarah Jio, 2013
Penguin Group (USA)
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142196991

Summary
Sarah Jio imagines life on Boat Street, a floating community on Seattle’s Lake Union, home to people of artistic spirit who for decades protect the dark secret of one startling night in 1959

Fleeing an East Coast life marred by tragedy, Ada Santorini takes up residence on houseboat number seven on Boat Street. She discovers a trunk left behind by Penny Wentworth, a young newlywed who lived on the boat half a century earlier.

Ada longs to know her predecessor’s fate, but little suspects that Penny’s mysterious past and her own clouded future are destined to converge. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1978
• Where—Washington State, USA
• Education—B.A., Western Washington University
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington

Sarah Jio is a veteran magazine writer and the health and fitness blogger for Glamour magazine. She has written hundreds of articles for national magazines and top newspapers including Redbook, O, The Oprah Magazine, Cooking Light, Glamour, SELF, Real Simple, Fitness, Marie Claire, Hallmark magazine, Seventeen, The Nest, Health, Bon Appetit, Gourmet, The Seattle Times, Parents, Woman’s Day, American Baby, Parenting, and Kiwi. She has also appeared as a commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition.

Sarah has a degree in journalism and writes about topics that include food, nutrition, health, entertaining, travel, diet/weight loss, beauty, fitness, shopping, psychology, parenting and beyond. She frequently tests and develops recipes for major magazines.

Her first novel The Violets of March, published in April, 2011, was chosen as a Best Book of 2011 by Library Journal. Her second novel, The Bungalow, was published in December of the same year. Blackberry Winter came out in 2012. The Last Camellia and Morning Glory were both issued in 2013.

Sarah lives in Seattle with her husband, Jason, and three young sons. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Ada Santorini...rents a houseboat on Seattle’s Lake Union.... Yet her new home has its own tragedy—the disappearance in 1959 of a local woman.... [F]lashbacks to 1959 are so strong that readers may lose patience with the present-day narrative....[yet] the depth of feeling in her writing overcomes the drawbacks
Publishers Weekly

[Ada Santorini] discovers that [her] houseboat was once the home of a woman [whose]....disappearance back in 1959...the neighbors won't discuss. Ada asks a friend back home who works for the NYPD to help her investigate....The author maintains a steady succession of questions...to create suspense. [A] treat for fans.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why does Ada feel like she needs to leave New York? Is she going to Seattle for the “right reasons,” as Dr. Evinson puts it?

2. When Jim meets Ada for the first time he says, “No matter what, home is home. It’s where you belong.” How is this concept played out over the course of the book? What is “home” for Ada?

3. How does their mutual loneliness draw Jimmy and Penny together? What do the two have to offer to each other?

4. Collin tells Penny that he lives by a certain Mark Twain quote: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Do any of the other characters live this way? What prevents people from “throwing off the bowlines?”

5. The details of both Ada and Alex’s pasts are revealed slowly over the course of the novel. How does this parallel Ada’s discoveries about Penny? Why do you think the author chose to structure the novel this way?

6. What kind of kinship does Ada feel with Penny? Does trying to solve the mystery of her disappearance help Ada heal from the loss of James and Ella? Why does Ada blame herself for their deaths?

7. What role does faith play in the novel? Does Ada’s relationship with Alex alter her faith at all? Why are “the signs” she asks for so necessary for her to move on?

8. What do you make of Dexter? Did your opinion of him change as you read? How so? Why did he treat Penny so poorly? Did Penny truly understand how he felt about her?

9. How does the notion that “some of life’s most beautiful things grow out of the darkest moments” become a theme of the novel? Do you agree?

10. Do Penny’s suspicions about Dexter’s “indiscretions” in some way free her to fall in love with Collin? Is she reluctant to leave Dexter in some ways? Why? Why does Collin sail away from Penny on the dock that night?

11. Were you surprised to discover who Penny’s attacker was? Did you understand his motivations?

12. Water is often a symbol of rebirth and new beginnings. Is that the case in Morning Glory? How so?

13. Discuss the epilogue. Were you surprised by its revelations? What kind of a future do you imagine for Alex and Ada?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Most Dangerous Place on Earth
Lindsey Lee Johnson, 2017
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812997279

Summary
An unforgettable cast of characters is unleashed into a realm known for its cruelty—the American high school—in this captivating debut novel.

The wealthy enclaves north of San Francisco are not the paradise they appear to be, and nobody knows this better than the students of a local high school.

Despite being raised with all the opportunities money can buy, these vulnerable kids are navigating a treacherous adolescence in which every action, every rumor, every feeling, is potentially postable, shareable, viral.

Lindsey Lee Johnson’s kaleidoscopic narrative exposes at every turn the real human beings beneath the high school stereotypes. Abigail Cress is ticking off the boxes toward the Ivy League when she makes the first impulsive decision of her life: entering into an inappropriate relationship with a teacher.

Dave Chu, who knows himself at heart to be a typical B student, takes desperate measures to live up to his parents’ crushing expectations.

Emma Fleed, a gifted dancer, balances rigorous rehearsals with wild weekends. Damon Flintov returns from a stint at rehab looking to prove that he’s not an irredeemable screw-up. And Calista Broderick, once part of the popular crowd, chooses, for reasons of her own, to become a hippie outcast.

Into this complicated web, an idealistic young English teacher arrives from a poorer, scruffier part of California. Molly Nicoll strives to connect with her students—without understanding the middle school tragedy that played out online and has continued to reverberate in different ways for all of them.

Written with the rare talent capable of turning teenage drama into urgent, adult fiction, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth makes vivid a modern adolescence lived in the gleam of the virtual, but rich with sorrow, passion, and humanity. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1980
• Where—Mill Valley, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California-Davis; M.A., University of Southern California.
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Lindsey Lee Johnson is an American author raised in Mill Valley in California's Marin County (north of San Francisco). Her novel, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth, was published in 2016.

Education
Johnson earned her BA in English from the University of California at Davis and an MA in professional writing from the University of Southern California (USC). She has taught writing at USC, Clark College, and Portland State University. She has also served as a tutor and mentor at a private learning center where her focus has been teaching writing to teenagers.

Early career
After getting a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California at Davis, and a master of professional writing from the University of Southern California, Johnson got a teaching fellowship at USC. But when the recession hit, her teaching contract wasn't renewed, should could no longer afford her newly purchased house...and she broke up with her boyfriend.

So it was back home to Mill Valley, with tail between her legs, to live in her parents' home. She took what work she could find and ended working with students at Sage Educators, a tutoring and SAT prep firm. After four years, Johnson says she gained a real taste for what life is like today for teenagers.

Writing
“I’ve always wanted to be a novelist,” Johnson told an interviewer for the Marin County Independent Journal. When she was 24, she took her stab at writing a book. It was so bad that she “sat down and wrote another one.” It took four or five attempts before she turned out her first published novel, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth.

Johnson is now married and lives with her husband in Los Angeles, California. (Adapted from the author's website and from Marin Independent Journal.)

Book Reviews
[An] alarming, compelling and coolly funny debut novel…Ms. Johnson's characters are unpredictable, contradictory and many things at once, which make them particularly satisfying…Here's high school life in all its madness…For its compassion, its ability to see the humanity inside even the most apparently hopeless person and the shimmering intelligence of its prose, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth reminded me a bit of Rick Moody's great 1994 novel, The Ice Storm. You end up sympathizing with and aching for even characters who appear to be irredeemable.
Sarah Lyall - New York Times

Johnson beautifully lays out the complex factors that lead Cally and her friends to brutally bully a fellow student. The cruel episode has a tragic momentum that is hard to read, and also hard to put down. Johnson's novel possesses a propulsive quality, an achievement in a book of, after the initial traumatic event, short character sketches. Yet it moves forward relentlessly, towing the reader with it. I read this book in one, long sitting. A young high school teacher stumbles on buried secrets in this engrossing, multilayered drama.
Trine Tsouderos - Chicago Tribune

If you are cruising for a quality read that’s also an unputdownable quickie, reach for Lindsey Lee Johnson’s debut novel, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth. It’s a high-wire high school drama.
Elle

The characters in Lindsey Lee Johnson’s debut novel affected me in a way I can’t remember feeling since I binge-watched all five seasons of Friday Night Lights. . . . You’ll walk away feeling like you could revisit a hallway drama armed with bulletproof perspective.
Glamour

(Starred review.) Johnson allows [her] dramas to unfold through various shifting perspectives..., keeps the action brisk and deepens readers’ investment, culminating in high school party that goes wrong. Readers may find themselves so swept up in this enthralling novel that they finish it in a single sitting.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Johnson's polished debut novel puts a human face to the details of today's daily headlines of teen life. The characters' wildly risky behaviors are somewhat offset by their ability to excel academically, athletically, and artistically, if not emotionally. This bleak, potent picture will scare the pants off readers. —Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal

[A]cutely observed novel [may] have been more successful if the author hadn't felt compelled to include all of the following scenarios: A boy…jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge… A girl preyed on by a pedophile middle school teacher… [A] popular athlete...acting in pornographic gay films. Hella effort but may not make bank.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for The Most Dangerous Place on Earth...then take off on your own:

1. What does the quote from Milton's Paradise Lost have to do with the novel at hand? Why might the author have opened her book with the epigraph?

2. What kind of place is Mill Valley, California, the novel's setting? What kind of life does it provide for the teens involved? Describe the inner lives of these youngsters. What about their parents? What pressures, both familial and peer, face the teens in this novel? Are both teens and problems realistically portrayed?

3. Which of the characters—if any do—you find sympathetic? What about Molly Nicoll, who desperately wants to connect with her students? In what way would you say she is overly invested in their struggles?

4. Talk about teenagers' capacity for cruelty. Does this novel exaggerate the ugly behavior, or is it a realistic description? Is the issue that the novel presents—"rich kids have problems too"—overblown? Or is it serious?

5. Follow-up to Question 4: Consider your own school days? Were your compeers as mean-spirited, petty, or even as vicious as the way Lindsey Lee Johnson portrays her characters? If not...do you think today's teenagers are crueler? Or is it that they have social media to do more damage?

6. What would you like to say to any one, or all, of these young people? What advice would you offer? Or what admonishment?

7. What do you think of the choice of titles? Is it appropriate, or is there one you think might be better?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Most Fun We Ever Had
Claire Lombardo, 2019
Knopf Doubleday
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385544252

Summary
When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that awaits them.

By 2016, their four radically different daughters are in a state of unrest.

Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men;

Violet, a litigator turned stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt;

Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves;

Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects.

With the arrival of Jonah Bendt—a child placed for adoption by one of the daughters fifteen years before—the Sorensons will be forced to reckon with the rich and varied tapestry of their past: years marred by adolescent angst, infidelity, and resentment, but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile. (From the publisher.)

The book is being adapted for an HBO series.

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Oak Park, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Illinois, Chicago; M.S.W., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois

Claire Lombardo earned her MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Prior to writing The Most Fun We Ever Had, she spent several years doing social work in Chicago. She was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
A rich, engrossing family saga, spiked with sisterly malice… [rendered] with such skill and finely tuned interest that it feels like a quiet subversion of the traditional family saga.
New York Times Book Review

Ambitious and brilliantly written.
Jane Smiley - Washington Post

If ever there were to be a literary love child of Jonathan Franzen and Anne Tyler, then Claire Lombardo’s outstanding debut, which ranges from ebullience to despair by way of caustic but intense familial bonds, would be a worthy offspring…. This is a novel epic in scope—emotionally, psychologically and narratively. Combining a broad thematic canvas with impressive emotional nuance, it’s an assured and highly enjoyable debut.
Guardian (UK)

An assured first novel…. The fun—well, that’s in the reading of the novel, which nicely blends comedy with pathos and the sharp- with the soft-edged.
Wall Street Journal

[A] remarkable first-time novel offering such an intimate picture of people’s interior lives I feel as if every one of these characters is now a close friend. Lombardo has the remarkable ability to delve into people’s minds so deeply that the most quotidian moments become utterly fascinating.
Ruth Reichl - Los Angeles Times

A wonderfully immersive read that packs more heart and heft than most first novels…A deliciously absorbing novel with—brace yourself—a tender and satisfyingly positive take on family.
NPR

The big family saga of the summer, unfurling the fallout of a long-buried secret and persisting rivalries between four sisters across 50 transformative years.
Entertainment Weekly

This juicy saga spans more than four decades…You’ll be glad this loopy family isn’t yours, but reading about them is a treat.
People

[I]mpressive…. Lombardo captures the complexity of a large family with characters who light up the page with their competition, secrets, and worries. Despite its length and number of plotlines, the momentum never flags, making for a rich and rewarding family saga.
Publishers Weekly

Unfortunately, the author's attempt to flesh out these tropes makes the story bloated and overstuffed. [Although] the novel would have benefited from fewer characters and a tighter plot, readers of women's fiction… may delight in the episodic approach. —Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD
Library Journal

A family epic…. It resembles other sprawling midwestern family dramas, like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001)…The result is an affectionate, sharp, and eminently readable exploration of the challenges of love in its many forms.
Booklist

Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale…. Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Gingko leaves and trees show up many times during the course of the novel—during the opening scene and when David and Marilyn first fall in love, just to name a couple. How do gingkoes function as a symbol in the book? What do they represent?

2. Who is your favorite character in the novel? Who are you most similar to?

3. By the end of The Most Fun We Ever Had, we’ve seen decades of David and Marilyn’s marriage unfold through many ups and downs. What do you see as the key to their successful and enduring marriage?

4. Do you think the way Wendy surprised Violet with Jonah was ethical? Do you think Violet’s reaction was warranted?

5. Were you surprised by Violet’s secret that gets revealed toward the end of the novel? How would you react if you were Wendy?

6. Many readers share that reading The Most Fun We Ever Had was an emotional experience. What was the most emotional scene for you to read? Why?

7. The narration switches between the perspective of each family member throughout the course of the book. What did this style add to the novel as a whole? How would the book be different if the author only focused on one character?

8. The book starts and ends with Marilyn’s perspective. Why do you think the author made this choice?

9. In what ways is the Sorenson family like your own family?

10. What did you think about the book’s ending? What do you think will happen to the Sorenson family after the book ends?

11. What other books, movies, and TV shows does this novel remind you of?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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