Sometimes I Lie 
Alice Feeney, 2018
Flatiron Books
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250144843


Summary
My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me:

1. I’m in a coma.

2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore.

3. Sometimes I lie.

Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea.

Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it.

Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Alice Feeney is a writer and journalist. She spent 15 years at the BBC, where she worked as a Reporter, News Editor, Arts and Entertainment Producer and One O’clock News Producer.

Alice is has lived in London and Sydney and has now settled in the Surrey countryside, where she lives with her husband and dog.

Sometimes I Lie (2018) is her debut thriller and has been published around the world. (From the pubiisher.)

Visit the author's website.

Book Reviews
Alice Feeney’s twisty psychological thriller, Sometimes I Lie, her debut novel, slides neatly into the company of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train. With its various plot twists, it’s a dizzying, disturbing read that becomes hard to put down once Amber tells us, "I’m back now and I remember everything." 
Minneapolis Star Tribune


A spine-tingling psychological thriller…the joy (and the stress) of this thriller is separating fact from fiction. The creepy feeling at the back of your neck is 100 percent real.
People


If you’re looking for a Gone Girl-esque fix, then this is the book for you.
Cosmopolitan


[An] insanely twisty thriller.
Entertainment Weekly


Almost nothing is as it initially appears in BBC News veteran Feeney’s bold if overambitious debut, a serpentine tale of betrayal, madness, and murder.… Feeney is definitely a writer to watch.
Publishers Weekly


A pathological liar, a woman in a coma,…an evil sister—this is an unreliable-narrator novel with all the options.…Though the novel eventually begins to sag under the weight of all its plot elements, fans of the psychological thriller will enjoy this ambitious debut.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. "Sometimes I lie." Amber lies to so many people throughout the novel—her husband, her sister, her colleagues, even herself. Do you think she always knew when she was lying? Don’t we all tell lies from time to time? Is it just human nature to tweak the truth?

2. "It took a lot of love to hate her the way I do." Amber spent over 20 years believing that Claire was keeping her safe, but does she love her? In Claire’s mind, the way she isolates and controls Amber is love—she genuinely thinks she’s being protective. But is it love or fear that destroys their relationship in the end?

3. Who is the real villain of this story? Madeline? Edward? Claire? Or Amber?

4. "I stand in front of the large range oven with my arms bent at the elbows. My fingers form the familiar shape: the index and middle finger finding the thumb on each hand. I whisper quietly to myself, whilst visually checking that everything is switched off, my fingernails clicking together. I do it again. I do it a third time." Amber’s OCD started after the fire in 1992. What other displays of OCD can you remember from the novel? How successful is Amber at hiding it from those around her?

5. What was your favorite twist in the novel?

6. "People say there’s nothing like a mother’s love, take that away and you’ll find there is nothing like a daughter’s hate." How much are the parents of both girls to blame for who their daughters grew up to become? Did you get the impression that Claire’s parents knew what she was capable of in the childhood diaries? Can Amber’s mother be forgiven for taking Claire in and wanting to save her despite how it made Amber feel? "I am the daughter they always had."

7. The color red is mentioned over 60 times in the novel (stolen red pens, red studio lights, red toothbrush, lipstick, traffic lights, wine, blood, and the robin’s red breast are just some examples). What other themes did you spot?

8. "For today’s phone-in, we’re inviting you to get in touch on the subject of imaginary friends… "Were you surprised to discover that Jo was an imaginary friend? When Jo leaves the hospital shortly before Amber wakes up, we never see her again. Why was Amber finally able to let her go at this point in her life?

9. "I can do 'Amber the friend,' or 'Amber the wife,' but right now it’s time for 'Amber from Coffee Morning.'" Don’t we all play different roles in life? Do you behave differently with your family/friends/colleagues? Do you feel able to be yourself with everyone you know?

10. "His success broke him and his failure broke us." Paul and Amber’s marriage is in trouble at the start of the novel—his struggles with his writing, her losing her TV reporter job, and their inability to have a child all seem to play a part. Why are they happier at the end? What "fixes" them?

11. Did you enjoy the nursery rhymes in the book?

12. "I hate hospitals. They are the home of death and regrets that missed their slots." What regrets do you think Amber is referring to when she says this? Do you think any other characters in the novel have regrets?

13. Let’s talk about that ending!

(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Somewhere in France:  A Novel of the Great War
Jennifer Robson, 2014
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062273451


Summary
A daring young woman will risk her life to find her destiny in this atmospheric, beautifully drawn historical debut novel—a tale of love, hope, and danger set during the First World War.

Lady Elizabeth Neville-Ashford wants to travel the world, pursue a career, and marry for love. But in 1914, the stifling restrictions of aristocratic British society and her mother’s rigid expectations forbid Lilly from following her heart. When war breaks out, the spirited young woman seizes her chance for independence. Defying her parents, she moves to London and eventually becomes an ambulance driver in the newly formed Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps—an exciting and treacherous job that takes her close to the Western Front.

Assigned to a field hospital in France, Lilly is reunited with Robert Fraser, her dear brother Edward’s best friend. The handsome Scottish surgeon has always encouraged Lilly’s dreams. She doesn’t care that Robbie grew up in poverty—she yearns for their friendly affection to become something more. Lily is the most beautiful—and forbidden—woman Robbie has ever known. Fearful for her life, he’s determined to keep her safe, even if it means breaking her heart.

In a world divided by class, filled with uncertainty and death, can their hope for love survive, or will it become another casualty of this tragic war? (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
Robson’s first novel examines the dynamic between love and duty in the midst of historical tragedy.... Robson’s skillful ability with detail and setting firmly relates the grotesqueries of war without gratuitous gore. Her deft touch as a storyteller keeps readers engaged in the story of the lovers, as well as illuminating the bigger picture of the war raging around them.
Publishers Weekly


Although Robbie and Lilly's love story dominates the narrative, debut novelist Robson never creates enough tension to leave the reader in any doubt about the romance's probable outcome, and Robbie remains a somewhat bland and underdeveloped figure throughout. Lilly's...unusual perspective as a female ambulance driver puts an interesting spin on the scenes of wartime carnage.
Library Journal


Adding to the growing popularity of WWI-era romances, Robson’s first novel evocatively captures the feeling of the time as it follows the adventures of independent Lady Elizabeth “Lilly” Neville-Ashford, who in 1914 is expected to adhere to the rigid roles for upper-class British ladies.... Robson intermingles the overarching themes of love, war, and societal strictures in this appealing read. —Julie Trevel
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. If you had the chance to grow up as the daughter of Lord and Lady Cumberland—knowing that you would live in unimaginable luxury but would also be denied an education, the chance to work, and very likely the chance to choose your own spouse—would you do it?

2. Do you feel Lady Cumberland's treatment of Lilly is motivated by sincere concern for her daughter's welfare? Or is it a case of her obsessively adhering to the conventions of aristocratic society, no matter the cost?

3. Do Robbie's motivations in pushing Lilly away after the bombardment of the 51st make sense to you? Do you sympathize with him or do you think he allows tunnel vision to cloud his judgment?

4. What about Lilly's motivations? Is she right to insist on staying at the 51st no matter what? Wouldn't it be reasonable for her to compromise and take up a position elsewhere in France?

5. Before reading Somewhere in France, if someone had mentioned the First World War to you, what would have come to mind? Has your perception of the First World War changed as a result?

6. Somewhere in France is set in the recent past, a century ago. Were there any aspects of life in the novel that surprised you by their modernity? Did its characters feel familiar to you, or more like inhabitants of "a different country," to paraphrase a well-known description of the past?

7. Do you think Robbie and Lilly's relationship would have been possible without the war and the changes it brought to British society?

8. Do you think it really would have been possible for Lilly to become friends with women like Annie and Bridget? Could such a disparity in wealth, privilege, and class truly be bridged in that era?

9. How do you think Lilly and her friends were changed by their experiences in the WAAC? Would it have been easy for them to return to ordinary life and the status quo after the war?

10. Do you think the war still matters? Why? It was fought a century ago, every one of its veterans is now dead, and memories of it are fading from our collective consciousness. Should we just leave it to the professional historians and concentrate on more recent events?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good (Mitford Series, 10)
Jan Karon, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399167447


Summary
After five hectic years of retirement from Lord’s Chapel, Father Tim Kavanagh returns with his wife, Cynthia, from a so-called pleasure trip to the land of his Irish ancestors.

While glad to be at home in Mitford, something is definitely missing: a pulpit. But when he’s offered one, he decides he doesn’t want it. Maybe he’s lost his passion.

His adopted son, Dooley, wrestles with his own passion—for the beautiful and gifted Lace Turner, and his vision to become a successful country vet. Dooley’s brother, Sammy, still enraged by his mother’s abandonment, destroys one of Father Tim’s prized possessions. And Hope Murphy, owner of Happy Endings bookstore, struggles with the potential loss of her unborn child and her hard-won business.

All this as Wanda’s Feel Good Café opens, a romance catches fire through an Internet word game, their former mayor hatches a reelection campaign to throw the bums out, and the weekly Muse poses a probing inquiry: Does Mitford still take care of its own?

Millions of fans will applaud the chance to spend time, once more, in the often comic and utterly human presence of Jan Karon’s characters. Indeed, they have never been more sympathetic, bighearted, and engaging. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1937
• Where—Lenoir, North Carolina, USA
• Education—N/A
• Awards—ABBY Honor Award
• Currently—lives in Blowing Rock, North Carolina


Jan Karon is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including the Mitford novels, the Father Tim novels, a popular cookbook, and several books for children. She lives near Mr. Jefferson’s Monticello, a World Heritage site in Central Virginia.

Jan Karon, born Janice Meredith Wilson in the foothills of North Carolina, was named after the title of a popular novel, Janice Meredith.

Jan wrote her first novel at the age of ten.

The manuscript was written on Blue Horse notebook paper, and was, for good reason, kept hidden from my sister. When she found it, she discovered the one curse word I had, with pounding heart, included in someone's speech. For Pete's sake, hadn't Rhett Butler used that very same word and gotten away with it? After my grandmother's exceedingly focused reproof, I've written books without cussin' ever since.

A number of years ago, Karon left a successful career in advertising to move to the mountain village of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and write books. "I stepped out on faith to follow my lifelong dream of being an author," she says. "I made real sacrifices and took big risks. But living, it seems to me, is largely about risk."

Enthusiastic booksellers across the country have introduced readers of all ages to Karon's heartwarming books. At Home in Mitford, Karon's first book in the Mitford series, was nominated for an ABBY by the American Booksellers Association in 1996 and again in 1997. Bookstore owner, Shirley Sprinkle, says, "The Mitford Books have been our all-time fiction bestsellers since we went in business twenty-five years ago. We've sold 10,000 of Jan's books and don't see any end to the Mitford phenomenon. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Karon knits Mitford's small-town characters and multiple story lines into a cozy sweater of a book.... Somewhere Safe hits the sweet spot at the intersection of your heart and your funny bone (4/4 stars).
USA Today


The faster and more impersonal the world becomes, the more we need...Mitford.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
 

Terrific…built on the foundation of the first nine Mitford novels, Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good is Karon’s best.
Richmond Times-Dispatch


Welcome home, Mitford fans...to Karon's gift for illuminating the struggles that creep into everyday lives—along with a vividly imagined world.
People


Fans of the Mitford novels, rejoice: Father Tim Kavanagh is back in town...[and] wrestling with the existential challenge of retirement.... It's a wonderful stew of small town characters.... The ending...is too emotionally prepackaged and drags out a long book. Fans should debate whether Father Tim has to cry as much as he does, but like him, they will welcome the return to Mitford.
Publishers Weekly


With the homecoming of much-beloved characters and a few new additions, Karon’s latest provides a return to a setting readers have been clamoring to revisit. Longtime readers will not be disappointed by the author’s latest cozy redemption tale.
Library Journal


Loyal fans of Karon’s Mitford novels and Father Tim will be delighted once again to spend time in this quintessential American village with its leading citizen and his colorful coterie of friends, family, and dependent souls.
Booklist


Father Tim Kavanagh ponders the pastand looks to the future in Mitford, his beloved North Carolina mountain town.... After a long hiatus, Karon has returned with a novel that offers somethingfor those who believe and those who do not. All the beloved quirky charactersare here, the past is neatly summarized and the future, full of hope.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Father Tim and Cynthia return to Mitford after five years of hectic retirement, drawn to the place that means home to them. What does home mean to you?

2. In your opinion, does Mitford still take care of its own? What does that phrase mean to you?

3. Do you think Mitford is a model for living a true and authentic life? Why or why not?

4. How is your local community similar to Mitford? In what ways is it different?

5. How has retirement changed Father Tim? Did Father Tim make the right decision declining the bishop’s offer? How do you think his life would have changed had he returned to his job as pastor?

6. Even though Father Tim no longer has an official pulpit, he’s still the lynchpin of his community. How does he serve the community, and do you think he’s more or less effective in his new role?

7. There are certain points throughout the novel where Father Tim feels “twelve years old again” (53, 143). Do you ever experience something similar, and if so, when?

8. Father Tim and Cynthia exchange love letters. What does this say about their marriage? Why is being “somewhere safe with somebody good” the source of ultimate happiness for Cynthia? Do you agree? If not, what would your source of ultimate happiness be?

9. Though Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good is mostly from Father Tim’s point of view, we’re occasionally treated to glimpses of Mitford life as seen through the eyes of others, such as Coot, Hope, and Esther. What purpose do you think these shifting views serve and how do they contribute to the story?

10. What do you think of Dooley and Lace’s decision? How do you think they will handle the next phase of their journey?

11. Sammy has come a long way since meeting Father Tim, but clearly still has a long way to go. Discuss his journey to becoming a happy, well-adjusted adult. Do you think that is possible for him? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Son
Philipp Meyer, 2013
HarperCollins
560 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062120397


Summary
Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim.

Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his homestead and take him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to Comanche life, carving a place as the chief's adopted son, and waging war against their enemies, including white men. But when disease, starvation, and overwhelming numbers of armed Americans decimate the tribe, Eli finds himself alone.

Neither white nor Indian, civilized or fully wild, he must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong—a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University
• Currently—near Ithaca, New York; Austin, Texas


Philipp Meyer is an American fiction writer, born in 1974, and is the author of the novel American Rust, as well as short stories published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and Esquire UK. He grew up in Hampden, a blue-collar Baltimore, Maryland, neighborhood often featured in the films of John Waters. His mother is an artist; his father is an electrician turned college biology instructor.

Meyer attended Baltimore city public schools, including Baltimore City College High School, until dropping out at age 16 and getting a GED. He spent the next five years working as a bicycle mechanic and occasionally volunteering at Baltimore’s Shock Trauma Center.

At age 20, while taking college classes in Baltimore, Meyer decided to become a writer. He also decided to leave his hometown and at 22, after several attempts at applying to elite colleges, was admitted to Cornell University. Meyer graduated Cornell with a degree in English but then took a job on Wall Street to pay off his student loans.

With the Swiss investment bank UBS, Meyer trained in London and Zurich and was given a position as a derivatives trader. After several years at UBS, he had written most of a novel (no relation to American Rust) and decided to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. When attempts at publishing that novel failed, a book he has called “an apprentice-level work,” Meyer took jobs as an emergency medical technician and construc-tion worker. He was preparing for a long-term career as a paramedic when, in 2005, he received a fellowship at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, where he wrote the majority of American Rust.

Not long after arriving in Austin, Meyer drove to New Orleans to do relief work during Hurricane Katrina. He arrived in the middle of the hurricane and spent several days doing emergency medical work for a local police department.

American Rust was an Economist Book of the Year in 2009, a Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2009, a New York Times Notable Book of 2009, a Kansas City Star Top 100 Book of 2009, and an Amazon Top 100 Book of 2009. Reviewers in the London Telegraph, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and Dayton Daily News have suggested it fits the category of "Great American Novel."

The book is a third person, stream-of-consciousness narrative influenced, according to Meyer, by writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Kelman. While a reviewer in The Baltimore Sun compared the novel to the work of Faulkner, various other reviewers, including Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, Ron Charles of the Washington Post, and Taylor Antrim writing in the Daily Beast, have favorably compared Meyer to a wide variety of more traditional writers, including Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and Dennis Lehane.

The Son, published in 2013, has been hailed a classic, even the "Great American Novel," by reviewers. It is a saga of the Texas Mccullough family—"the tale of the United States written in blood across the Texas plains, a 200-year cycle of theft and murder that shreds any golden myths of civilized development." (Ron Charles, Washington Post).

Meyer currently lives in rural areas outside Ithaca, New York, and Austin, Texas. (Adapted from Wikipedia..)

Book Reviews
What a pleasure it is…to see Meyer confirm all that initial enthusiasm [for American Rust] with a second book that's even more ambitious, even more deeply rooted in our troublesome economic and cultural history. With its vast scope—stretching from pre-Civil War cowboys to post-9/11 immigrants—The Son makes a viable claim to be a Great American Novel of the sort John Dos Passos and Frank Norris once produced. Here is the tale of the United States written in blood across the Texas plains, a 200-year cycle of theft and murder that shreds any golden myths of civilized development.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


The Son isn't just one of the most exciting Texas novels in years, it's one of the most solid, unsparing pieces of American historical fiction to come out this century.
Michael Schaub - National Public Radio


(Starred review.) In chronicling the settlement and scourge of the American West, from the Comanche raids of the mid-19th century into the present era, Meyer never falters. The sweeping history of the McCullough dynasty unfolds across generations and through alternating remembrances of three masterfully drawn characters.... Like all destined classics, Meyer’s second novel (after American Rust) speaks volumes about humanity—our insatiable greed, our inherent frailty, the endless cycle of conquer or be conquered.
Publishers Weekly


Eli McCullough, the first male child born in the Republic of Texas, is kidnapped at age 13 by Comanches, and from then on his life becomes a study in conflict.... [B]y the time he turns 16...he is set free. ... His son, Pete, is cut from a different cloth and rebels against his family's history of violence and....Pete's daughter, Jeanne Anne, struggles to be taken seriously as a rancher and oil tycoon. The broody McCulloughs gain in wealth but often pay dearly....Meyer (American Rust) brings the bloody, racially fraught history of Texas to life. Call it a family saga or an epic, this novel is a violent and harrowing read.  —Keddy Ann Outlaw, formerly with Harris Cty. P. L., Houston
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)

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

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The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller, 2012
HarperCollins
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062060617


Summary
Winner - 2012 Orange Prize

Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the kingdom of Phthia to be raised in the shadow of King Peleus and his golden son, Achilles. “The best of all the Greeks”—strong, beautiful, and the child of a goddess—Achilles is everything the shamed Patroclus is not. Yet despite their differences, the boys become steadfast companions. Their bond deepens as they grow into young men and become skilled in the arts of war and medicine—much to the displeasure and the fury of Achilles’ mother, Thetis, a cruel sea goddess with a hatred of mortals.

When word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, the men of Greece, bound by blood and oath, must lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.

Built on the groundwork of the Iliad, Madeline Miller’s page-turning, profoundly moving, and blisteringly paced retelling of the epic Trojan War marks the launch of a dazzling career. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 24, 1978
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Raised—New York, New York
• Education—B.A., M.A., Brown University
• Awards—Orange Prize-Fiction
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts


Madeline Miller was born in Boston and grew up in New York City, New York, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

She attended Brown University, where she earned her BA and MA in Classics. She has also studied at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and in the Dramaturgy department at Yale School of Drama, where she focused on the adaptation of classical texts to modern forms.

Miller has been teaching and tutoring Latin, Greek and Shakespeare to high school students for more than a decade. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Miller's first novel, The Song of Achilles (2011) won the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her second novel is Circe (2018). (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Only the finest of historical novelists are able to adequately convey the sheer strangeness and otherness of the past, particularly the ancient past. By this criterion alone, Madeline Miller shows exceptional promise...a remarkably fresh take on one of the most familiar narratives in western literature.... It is quite an achievement.
Nick Rennison - London Times


Miller draws on her knowledge of Classical sources wisely….[she] is particularly good at characterization…The novel is well paced, engaging and tasteful. For a writer of Miller’s training and talent, the characters of the Iliad and the Odyssey offer a wealth of further story-telling possibilities.
Carolyne Larrington - Times Literary Supplement (UK)


Miller’s prose is more poetic than almost any translation of Homer… This is a deeply affecting version of the Achilles story: a fully three-dimension man—a son, a father, husband and lover—now exists where a superhero previously stood and fought.
Guardian (UK)


For a whistlestop tour around the life and times of Achilles, you’d be hard pressed to find a better guide than Madeline Miller…This accomplished and enjoyable novel…is original, clever, and in a class of its own…an incredibly compelling and seductive read. Her skill is considerable: she has to make us believe in Achilles and Patroclus almost as if they were modern-day characters in a Hollywood movie…It’s an entirely successful piece of writing, sitting comfortably between literary and commercial genres. It does what the best novels do—it transports you to another world— as well as doing something that few novels bother to: it makes you feel incredibly clever.
Vic Groskop - Independent on Sunday (UK)


Extraordinary… Beautifully descriptive and heartachingly lyrical, this is a love story as sensitive and intuitive as any you will find.
Daily Mail (UK)


You don’t need to be familiar with Homer’s The Iliad (or Brad Pitt’s Troy, for that matter) to find Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles spellbinding....her explorations of ego, grief, and love’s many permutations are both familiar and new....[A] timeless love story.
O Magazine


(Starred review.) [S]urefooted....  [A] novel that combines the poetic drama of The Iliad with a 21st-century understanding of war, sex, sexual politics, and Trojan War heroism.... [Miller] breaks new ground retelling one of the world’s oldest stories about men in love and war, but it is the extraordinary women—Iphigenia, Briseis, and Thetis—who promise readers remarkable things to come as Miller carves out a custom-made niche in historical fiction.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Debut author Miller has chosen to retell [The Iliad] from the point of view of Patroclus, an exiled Greek prince who is taken in by Peleus, the father of Achilles. It isn't long before the lonely boy is befriended by Achilles. Over the years their tentative friendship grows into a deep and passionate love that stands firm in the face of the disapproval of their elders, dire prophecies, and the wrath of the gods themselves. Miller skillfully weaves tender scenes of the boys' relationship with breathtaking descriptions of battles and their bloody aftermath.... [A] masterly vision of the drama, valor, and tragedy of the Trojan War.  —Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage P.L., AK
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. In the Iliad, Patroclus is a relatively minor character. Why do you think the author chose him to be her narrator? Which other figures in the story might make interesting narrators?

2. Near the beginning of their friendship, Achilles tells his father that he values Patroclus because “he is surprising.” What do you think Achilles means by that? How is Patroclus different from the other foster boys? Why?

3. What do you think are the reasons behind Thetis’ opposition to Patroclus?

4. How do the boys change during their time with Chiron? Do the centaur’s lessons continue to be a guiding force in their lives?

5. On the island of Scyros, what motivates Deidameia’s desire to speak to Patroclus alone? What does she hope to achieve?

6. To what extent does Achilles’ ultimate destiny shape his choices? Is there such a thing as free will in this world?

7. Historical events can sometimes turn upon the will or personality of a single person. Aside from Achilles, are there other characters whose faults or virtues significantly affect the Trojan War’s outcome?

8. Myths are often called “timeless” for their insights into human behavior. What parallels do you see between the characters and conflicts of this novel and today? What pieces of Patroclus and Achilles’ story can be universalized?

9. What is the significance of song and music in the novel?

10. Patroclus is often a self-critical narrator. Consider how other characters in the novel regard him—do they see him in the same way he sees himself?

11. As represented in the novel, what are some of Odysseus’ defining qualities? Do you find him a sympathetic character? Why or why not?

12. Consider the explosive falling out between Achilles and Agamemnon. In what ways are each of them at fault for the rift? Could it have been avoided, or was it inevitable given that Achilles’s fate is determined?

13. Achilles and Briseis each claim Patroclus’ loyalty and affection. In what ways are they similar or different? What are the dynamics of each of their relationships with Patroclus?

14. What does the encounter between Priam and Achilles reveal about Achilles? Why do you think Achilles grants his request?

15. Near the end of the book, Odysseus comes to speak to Pyrrhus on Patroclus’ behalf. Why do you think he does this? How did it change (or not) your opinion of Odysseus?

16. Peleus warns his son that any mortal who visits the sea-nymphs in their caves beneath the sea does not return the same. How is this belief borne out by the character of Pyrrhus, who was raised there? In what way does Pyrrhus confirm or deny Patroclus’ fears about the gods?

17. In the final pages of the book, we learn more about Thetis. How does this affect our view of her?

18. Patroclus tells Thetis that he is “made of memories.” What does he mean by that? What role does memory—both personal and cultural—play in the novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Song of Hartgrove Hall 
Natasha Solomons, 2015
Penguin Publishing
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780147517593


Summary
A captivating novel that evokes the author’s The House at Tyneford

Natasha Solomons’s breathtaking new novel has it all: a love triangle, family obligations, and rediscovering joy in the face of grief, all set against the alluring backdrop of an English country estate perfect for fans of Downton Abbey

It's a terrible thing to covet your brother’s girl
 
New Year’s Eve, Dorset, England, 1946. Candles flicker, a gramophone scratches out a tune as guests dance and sip champagne—for one night Hartgrove Hall relives better days. Harry Fox-Talbot and his brothers have returned from World War II determined to save their once grand home from ruin.

But the arrival of beautiful Jewish wartime singer Edie Rose tangles the threads of love and duty, and leads to a devastating betrayal.
 
Fifty years later, now a celebrated composer, Fox reels from the death of his adored wife, Edie. Until his connection with his four-year old grandson—a music prodigy—propels him back into life, and ultimately to confront his past.

An enthralling novel about love and treachery, joy after grief, and a man forced to ask: is it ever too late to seek forgiveness? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Natasha Solomons is a British screenwriter and author of several novels: The Song of Hartgrove (2015), The Gallery of Vanished Husbands (2013), The House at Tyneford (2011), and Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English (2010). She lives with her husband in Dorset, England. (From the publisher.) 

See an interesting article on Solomon's dyslexia in London's Evening Standard.

Book Reviews
A delightful, moving, utterly believable family saga.
Times (UK)


[A] tender, lyrical novel of family and fame.
Sunday Express (UK)


Combines exceptional prose and absorbing story-telling with grace and beauty, and is still a page-turner.
Record (UK)


Solomon’s reliably lush prose holds its own.
Cleveland Plain Dealer


Part East of Eden, part Far From the Madding Crowd, The Song of Hartgrove Hall finds Solomons hitting perfect pitch in this symphony—sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, always entrancing—of life.
Richmond Times-Dispatch


A lush, historical story with plenty of romantic twists set against a musical backdrop.
Parkersburg News & Sentinel


The perfect mid-winter read, especially if you’re a Downton Abbey fan.... This novel spans decades, and includes a great British manor house and characters.... Whether you’re already a fan or a newcomer, this story will capture your mind and heart.
Washington Independent Review of Books


Solomons's engaging novel is the story of the three Fox-Talbot brothers, who return to their ancestral home after World War II to find their world in flux.... Devotees of television's Downton Abbey will be drawn in by this novel's historical detail and emotional story line. —Catherine Coyne, Mansfield P.L., MA
Library Journal


A composer looks back on [his] life.... The main source of suspense is how these reversals of fortune occurred. Despite a clichéd redemptive close, the principal characters are not sympathetic enough, nor does the love affair seem compelling enough, to make us care.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Hartgrove Hall is in and of itself an important character in the novel. How would you describe it? Discuss its many uses, both as a gathering space for personal and family functions and for the community. Do they change over time?

2. In  the  “A  Note  on  Song  Collecting”  section  that  follows  the  novel’s  conclusion, Solomons discusses the tradition of song collecting. How does song collecting relate to cultural identity? At which points does Fox feel an urgency to preserve history in The Song of Hartgrove Hall?

3. The theme of maternal loss is present throughout The Song of Hartgrove Hall. How does Fox seek out his mother’s memory? How do his daughters cope with the loss of their mother? When does Fox feel their grief most acutely?

4. On page 3 of the book, Fox reveals that “So many people think they knew [Edie]. The Little Nightingale. England’s perfect rose.” Why don’t these people actually know Edie? What aspects of her history and personality was Edie most hesitant to share? Why do you think she was able to confide in Fox?

5. Early in the novel it is revealed that Edie suffers from crippling stage fright,yet she performs consummately. Discuss the difference between her personal and professional identities and how they manifest in various social situations. Which version of herself is Edie most comfortable displaying? How does she transition between the two?

6. Discuss Fox’s role as a grandfather, both before and after discovering Robin’s piano acumen. Is he comfortable being a grandparent? how do memories of Edie help guide him as he assumes this role?

7. Who most influenced Fox’s career as a composer? When the music in his head stops after Edie’s death, what restores his musicality?

8. How is masculinity discussed within the novel? What type of masculinity does the General value? Is Fox’s idea of masculinity different? When does Fox feel insecure about himself?

9. Discuss Fox’s relationship with his daughters. How would you characterize their interactions? How does Fox’s relationship with Clara change after her divorce?

10. Compare Fox’s relationship with Jack to his relationship with George. What do the brothers have in common? After their decision to turn Hartgrove Hall into a working farm, how does their relationship change?

11. Discuss the sojourn to Scotland that takes place in 1948. How is this trip restorative for Fox? How does he grow during this time?

12. The Song of Hartgrove Hall is a novel about grieving as much as it is one about healing. Discuss the intimate moments wherein Fox reveals his grief over Edie’s death to the reader. Is his sadness alleviated over time? How does his state of mind change throughout the novel?

13. Edie’s Jewish identity is revealed suddenly and cruelly to Fox by the General, but Fox does not discuss it with her directly for years. Why do you think he is hesitant to approach the topic? Does Fox seem accepting of her cultural heritage?

14. As the plot shifts between the past and the present, Solomons lowly reveals each character’s motivations. Who surprised you the most?

15. Recall the scene on page 196 in which Marcus reveals to Fox that he is dying. How does that conversation affect Fox? What actions does he take to ensure that his friend feels comforted during this time?

16. Edie and Fox’s relationship is a storied romance, yet it is borne out of deceit and manipulation. Did the revelation of their infidelities affect your understanding of each character?

17. Discuss Fox’s decision to reconcile with Jack. Why do you think he brought Robin with him to Florida? Were you surprised by how Jack received them? How did you interpret their last scene together?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Song of Solomon 
Toni Morrison, 1977
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400033423


In Brief 
Winner, National Book Critics Circle Award

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly.

With this novel, Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world. (From the publisher.)

More
Toni Morrison is perhaps the most celebrated contemporary American novelist. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, Morrison powerfully evokes in her fiction the legacies of displacement and slavery that have been bequeathed to the African-American community.

Song of Solomon (1977) is perhaps the most lyrical of her novels, following Milkman Dead as he struggles to understand his family history and the ways in which that history has both been damaged by and transcended the horror of slavery. All of Morrison's fiction, from her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970) Paradise (1998), explores both the need for and the impossibility of real community and the bonds that both unite and divide African-American women. (Also from the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Aka—Chloe Anthony Wofford
• Birth—February 18, 1931
• Where—Lorain, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Howard University; M.A.,  Cornell,
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1993, National Book Critics' Circle
   Award, 1977; Pulitzer Prize, 1988.
• Currently—lives in Princeton, NJ and New York, NY


With her incredible string of lyrical, imaginative, and adventurous modern classics Toni Morrison lays claim to being one of America's best novelists. Race issues are at the heart of many of Morrison's most enduring novels, from the ways that white concepts of beauty affect a girl's self image in The Bluest Eye to themes of segregation in Sulu and slavery in her signature work Beloved. Through it all, Morrison relates her tales with lyrical eloquence and spellbinding mystery.

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison's unique approach to writing stems from a childhood spent steeped in folklore and mythology. Her family reveled in sharing these often tales, and their commingling of the fantastic and the natural would become a key element in her work when she began penning original tales of her own.

The other majorly influential factor in her writing was the racism she experienced firsthand in, as Jet magazine described it, the "mixed and sometimes hostile neighborhood" of Lorain, Ohio. When Morrison was only a toddler, her home was set afire by racists while her family was still inside of it. During times such as these, she found strength in her father, who instilled in her a great sense of dignity. This pride in her cultural background would heavily influence her debut novel.

In The Bluest Eye, an eleven-year old black girl named Pecola prays every night for blue eyes, seeing them as the epitome of feminine beauty. She believes these eyes, symbolizing commonly held white concepts of attractiveness, would put an end to her familial woes, an end to her father's excessive drinking and her brother's meandering. They would give her self-esteem and purpose. The Bluest Eye is the first of Toni Morrison's cries for racial pride and it is an auspicious debut told with an eerie poeticism.

Morrison next tackled segregation in Sulu, which chronicles the friendship between two women who, much like the author, grew up in a small, segregated village in Ohio. Song of Solomon followed. Arguably her first bona fide classic and certainly her most lyrical work, Song of Solomon breathed with the mythology of Morrison's youth, a veritable modern folktale pivoting on an eccentric whimsically named Milkman Dead who spends his life trying to fly. This is one of Morrison's most breathtaking, most accomplished and fully dimensional novels, a story of powerful convictions told in an unmistakably original manner.

In Song of Solomon, Morrison created a distinct world where the supernatural commingles comfortably with the mundane, a setting that would reappear in her masterpiece, Beloved. Beloved is a ghost story quite unlike any other, a tale of guilt and love and the horrendous legacy of slavery. Taking place not long after the end of the Civil War, Beloved finds Sethe, a former slave, being haunted by the daughter she murdered to save the child from being sold into slavery. It is a gut wrenching story that is buoyed by its fantastical plot device and the sheer beauty of Morrison's prose.

Beloved so moved Morrison's literary peers that forty-eight of them signed an open letter published in the New York Times demanding she be recognizing for this major effort. Subsequently, the book won her a Pulitzer Prize. A year after publishing her next novel Jazz in 1992, she would become the very first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Towards the end of the century, Morrison's work became increasingly eclectic. She not only published another finely crafted, incendiary novel in Paradise, which systematically tracks the genesis of an act of mob violence, but she also published her first children's book The Big Box. In 2003, she published Love, her first novel in five years, a complex meditation on family and the way one man fuels the obsessions of several women. The following year she assembled a collection of photographs of school children taken during the era of segregation. What makes Remember: The Journey to School Integration so particularly haunting is that Morrison chose to compose dialogue imagining what the subjects of each photo may have been thinking. In 2008, Morrison published A Mercy.

That imagination, that willingness to take chances, to examine history through a fresh perspective, is such an integral part of Morrison's craft. She is as vital as any contemporary artist, and her stories may focus on the black American experience, but the eloquence, imaginativeness, and meaningfulness of her writing leaps high over any racial boundaries.

Extras
• Chloe Anthony Wofford chose to publish her first novel under the name Toni Morrison because she believed that Toni was easier to pronounce than Chloe. Morrison later regretted assuming the nom de plume.

• In 1986, the first production of Morrison's sole play Dreaming Emmett was staged. The play was based on the story of Emmett Till, a black teen murdered by racists in 1955.

• Morrison's prestigious status is not limited to her revered novels or her multitude of awards. She also holds a chair at Princeton University. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
A stunningly beautiful book.... I would call the book poetry, but that would seem to be denying its considerable power as a story. Whatever name you give it, it's full of magnificent people, each of them complex and multilayered, even the narrowest of them narrow in extravagant ways.
Washington Post Book World - Anne Tyler

Morrison's prose is a delight, full of the lyrical variety and allusiveness that distinguish a rich folkloric tradition. Her real gift, though, is for characterization, and Song of Solomon is peopled with an amazing collection of losers and fighters, innocents and murderers, followers of ghosts and followers of money, all of whom add to the pleasure of this exceptionally diverse novel.
Atlantic Monthly

Exuberant.... An artistic vision that encompasses both a private and a national heritage.
Time

A fine novel exuberantly constructed.... So rich in its use of common speech, so sophisticated in its use of literary traditions and language from the Bible to Faulkner...it is also extremely funny.
Hudsen Review

Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstance and personality, and reveling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs.
The New Yorker

Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison's lyrical third novel, begins with an arresting scene—a man on a roof threatening to jump, a woman standing on the ground, singing, and another woman entering labor. The child born of that labor is Macon "Milkman" Dead III; Song of Solomon is the epic story of his life-time journey toward an understanding of his own identity and ancestry. Milkman is born burdened with the materialistic values of his father and the weight of a racist society; over the course of his odyssey he reconnects to his deeper family values and history, rids himself of the burden of his father's expectations and society's limitations, and literally learns to fly.

When the novel opens, Milkman is clearly a man with little or no concern for others. Like his father, he is driven only by his immediate sensual needs; he is spoiled and self-centered and pursues money and sexual gratification at all costs. The novel centers around his search for a lost bag of gold that was allegedly taken from a man involved in his grandfather's murder and then abandoned by his Aunt Pilate. The search for gold takes Milkman and his friend Guitar, a young black militant, to Shalimar, a town named for his great-grandfather Solomon, who according to local legend escaped slavery by taking flight back to Africa on the wind. On his journey, under the influence of his Aunt Pilate, a strong, fearless, natural woman whose values are the opposite of Milkman's father's, Milkman begins to come to terms with his family history, his role as a man, and the possibilities of his life apart from a cycle of physical lust and satisfaction.

In telling the story of Milkman's quest to discover the hidden history of the Deads, Morrison expertly weaves together elements of myth, magic, and folklore. She grapples with fundamental issues of class and race, ancestry and identity, while never losing sight of Milkman's compelling story. The language in Song of Solomon, Morrison's only novel with a male protagonist, is earthy and poetic, the characters eccentric, and the detail vivid and convincing. The result is a novel that is at once emotionally intense, provocative, and inspiring in its description of how one man rediscovered the latent power within him.

Song of Solomon is considered to be Toni Morrison's masterpiece and is in the top echelon of literary works produced by any American writer. It is also her breakthrough novel in both critical and commercial success: It was the first African American novel since Native Son to be a main selection of the Book of the Month club and it won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award among others. The book received a second life, and best-seller status, twenty years after its initial publication when talk show host Oprah Winfrey announced it as a selection for her on-air book club.
Sacred Fire

Discussion Questions 
1. You might talk about Morrison's treatment of flight and what it represents (i.e., both abandonment and freedom). Also consider how Morrison's use of flying places her work in the genre of magical realism.

2. Much of Morrison's work deals with the search for identity and particularly how savery degrades self-identity, strips it from the soul. You might talk about the importance of identity and how family history plays a role in defining the self. What does it mean to be without family history or self-knowledge?

3. Oppression is very much a motif in this work. You might talk about the kinds of oppression characters experience.

4. Characters have Biblical names, which relate them to a transcendant, universal pattern of experience, a pattern that surpasses time and place. Try to identify parallels with the old testament stories?

5. Discuss the role that songs play in this work...as a form of oral history.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Shank of the Song 
Jeffrey Renard Allen, 2014
Graywolf Press
608 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781555976804


Summary
A contemporary American masterpiece about music, race, an unforgettable man, and an unreal America during the Civil War era...

At the heart of this remarkable novel is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century slave and improbable musical genius who performed under the name Blind Tom.

Song of the Shank opens in 1866 as Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to adjust to their fashionable apartment in the city in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere—inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots—who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother.

As the novel ranges from Tom’s boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers and militant prophets. In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Ph.D., University of Illinois, Chicago
• Awards—PEN Discovery Prize; Whiting Writer’s Award (see more below)
• Currently—New York, New York


Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of the novels Rails Under My Back (2000) and Song of the Shank (2014), and the story collection Holding Pattern (2008), as well as two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits (1999) and Stellar Places (2007).

In writing about his fiction, reviewers often note his lyrical use of language and his playful use of form to write about African American life. His poems tend to focus on music, mythology, history, film, and other sources, rather than narrative or autobiographical experiences.

Background
Allen was born in 1962 in Chicago and raised on the Southside of Chicago, a neighborhood that he says informs the setting of his first novel Rails Under My Back and the stories in his collection Holding Pattern. For Allen, the 1980s in Chicago and other black communities across American represented an “apocalyptic moment“ with the introduction of crack cocaine and the violence and other forms of destruction and devastation it brought, experiences that he feels have been underrepresented in literary fiction. (Source: interview with Michael Antonucci)

Allen attended public schools in Chicago, then completed all of his university education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he holds a Ph.D. in English (Creative Writing). He is married to Zawadi Kagoma, who is originally from native Tanzania, and is the father of three children. He resides in Bronx, New York.

Teaching
Allen is currently Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York and a faculty member in the writing program at the New School and in the low residency MFA writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

In addition, he has taught in the writing program at Columbia University and in many distinguished writers’ conferences and programs around the world including: Cave Canem, the Summer Literary Seminars Program in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Kwani? LitFest in Kenya, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, North Country Retreat for Writers of Color, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Farafina Trust Workshop in Lagos, the American Writers Festival in Singapore, and VONA.

He is the fiction director for the Norman Mailer Center’s Writers Colony. He is the co-founder and president of the Pan African Literary Forum, an international, non-profit literary organization that aids to help writers on the African continent.

Africa
In recent years, Allen has worked with developing writers around the African Continent. In 2006, he taught for the Kwani? Literary festival in Nairobi, Kenya. With fellow author Arthur Flowers, he founded the Pan African Literary Forum, which held an international writers’ conference in Accra, Ghana in July 2008 that featured more than one hundred participants. The following fall he became deathly ill with malaria (and resulting complications) he had contracted while in West Africa, and spent more than six weeks in the hospital.

In August 2012, Allen taught for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Farafina Trust Workshop in Lagos, Nigeria. That same year, he also served as the Program Director for Literature for the Jahazi Literary and Jazz Festival in Zanzibar. And in his work with the Norman Mailer Center’s Writers’ Colony, he has worked with a number of emerging writers from the African continent, including A. Igoni Barrett, Yewande Omotoso, Samuel Kolawole, and Victor Ehikhmamenor.

Under the auspices of the Pan African Literary Forum, in 2012 Allen organized a national reading tour for South African Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile. The Pan African Literary Forum has also collaborated on readings and panel discussions at the New School and for the National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College.

In the essay “Water Brought Us“ published in Callaloo in 2007, Allen examines how his travels on the African continent were reshaping his thoughts about race, slavery, and place. In subsequent interviews, he has talked about how the time he spent on the Swahili islands of Lamu (off the Kenyan coast) and Zanzibar in East Africa helped shape his creation of the fictional island called Edgemere in his 2014 novel Song of the Shank.

Writings
His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including the Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Bomb, Hambone, The Antioch Review, StoryQuarterly, African Voices, St. Petersburg Review, African American Review, Callaloo, Arkansas Review, Other Voices, Black Renaissance Noire, Writer's Digest, and XCP:Cross Cultural Poetics. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, Chicago Noir, Homeground: Language for an American Landscape, and Best African American Fiction 2010. He is presently at work on a collection of stories and novellas called Radar Country that in part uses his travels on the African continent to frame an exploration of subjects such as place, race, religion and faith, music and culture, identity, and family.

Editing
Allen is an advisory editor for the journal Black Renaissance Noire, which is published under the auspices of New York University’s Institute of African American Affairs. He was the guest editor for the Spring 2014 issue of Kweli Literary Magazine, as well as the Winter 2009 issue of Literary Review, which focused on emerging writers from the African continent. He was also the guest poetry editor for the Spring 2014 issue of Fifth Wednesday, a special section honoring the work of blues poet Sterling Plumpp.

Awards and fellowships
Allen was awarded The P.E.N. Discovery Prize in 1989. His widely celebrated novel, Rails Under My Back won Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction. His story collection Holding Pattern  won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. He has also been awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award, a support grant in Innovative Literature from Creative Capital, Chicago Public Library’s Twenty First Century Award, Recognition for Pioneering Achievements in Fiction from the African American Literature and Culture Association, the 2003 Charles Angoff Award for Fiction from The Literary Review, and special citations from the Society for Midlands Authors and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation. He has been a fellow at The Dorothy L. and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, a John Farrar Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and a Walter E Dakins Fellow in Fiction at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/21/2014 .)

Book Reviews
The novel...sagely explores themes of religion, class, art and genius, and introduces elements of magic realism (mermaids and mermen appear, as does a man who is inexplicably healed of short leg syndrome), resulting in the kind of imaginative work only a prodigiously gifted risk-taker could produce.... Song of the Shank brilliantly portrays the story of Blind Tom while providing keen insight into the history of Reconstruction. But at its heart, it also reminds us denizens of never-will-be postracial America of one simple but ­everlasting essential truth: “Them chains is hard on a man. Hard.“
Mitchell S. Jackson - New York Times Book Review


[A]mbitious but unwieldy.... Both the conception and the underlying history behind this story will leave readers with a profound understanding of the inhumanity of slavery and 19th century racial attitudes. This is a dense and admirable book that invites an important excavation of the past, yet ultimately provides neither intimacy nor perspective.
Publishers Weekly


This long and obscure novel by the PEN Discovery Prize winner of Rails Under My Back.... Verdict: There is no reason to doubt this highly regarded author's seriousness of purpose, but this remains a challenging work: long, dense, uncompromising, and mysterious. For sophisticated readers. —James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) In the extraordinarily talented hands of Allen, Tom is a mysterious and compelling figure.... Amid the larger drama of slavery and its injustices, Allen offers the more intimate drama of one young boy’s life and the financial and emotional investments involved in the question of what’s to be done with his exceptional talent. A brilliant book, with echoes of Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist


(Starred review.) One of America’s most gifted novelists projects dark and daring speculations upon the incredible-but-true 19th-century story of a child piano prodigy who was blind, autistic and a slave.... Allen’s psychological insight and evocative language vividly bring to life all the black and white people in Tom’s life.... Allen’s visionary work...should propel him to the front rank of American novelists.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

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

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Song Yet Sung 
James McBride, 2008
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594483509


Summary
In the days before the Civil War, a runaway slave named Liz Spocott breaks free from her captors and escapes into the labyrinthine swamps of Maryland's eastern shore, setting loose a drama of violence and hope among slave catchers, plantation owners, watermen, runaway slaves, and free blacks.

Liz is near death, wracked by disturbing visions of the future, and armed with "the Code," a fiercely guarded cryptic means of communication for slaves on the run. Liz's flight and her dreams of tomorrow will thrust all those near her toward a mysterious, redemptive fate.

Filled with rich, true details—much of the story is drawn from historical events—and told in New York Times bestselling author James McBride's signature lyrical style, Song Yet Sung is a story of tragic triumph, violent decisions, and unexpected kindness. (From the publisher.)

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
Anyone handling such material runs the risk of reprising Uncle Tom's Cabin, which, however effective it was as propaganda, has no real claim to the truth of art. McBride's portrayal of the situation is more lucid, better controlled and in the end much more convincing…Edward P. Jones, who may be the first black American to have written about slavery without rancor, has said that his measured portrayal of the slave masters of Virginia in The Known World was like writing about Hitler from Hitler's mother's point of view. In Song Yet Sung, McBride has captured a version of Jones's dispassionate tone, which can deliver the cauterizing power of anger without the corrosive effects of bitterness. That's a radically new way of telling this old story, and it just might turn out to be balm for a wound that has so far stubbornly refused to heal.
Madison Smartt Bell - New York Times

In a complex, ever-tightening, increasingly suspenseful web that rises toward a dramatic climax..., McBride shows the complexity of his characters' inner lives and dilemmas — particularly his black characters. The cadence of their speech, the way they interact, the small details of their thoughts, desires, fears and hopes: These the author renders with exquisite ease. In scene after scene McBride shows the many ways blacks worked to aid each other to freedom. "The Code" is part of this, a secret language of actions, signs, symbols and words by which the slaves communicate messages of resistance right under their masters' noses. The novel does have its weaker moments. At times McBride's exposition seems rushed, as if he's got more information to give than time to give it. His action scenes can feel like stage directions for a film. Some may groan that Liz's prescience is forced, especially as she sees further and further into the future, right up to bejeweled rappers spitting violence and misogyny. And some may point out the convenience of Liz's only predicting a future up to our present.... [Nontheless,] McBride...does have the ability to captivate, compel and challenge those of us still working to shape those tomorrows
David Anthony Durham - Washington Post

Escaped slaves, free blacks, slave-catchers and plantation owners weave a tangled web of intrigue and adventure in bestselling memoirist (The Color of Water) McBride's intricately constructed and impressive second novel, set in pre-Civil War Maryland. Liz Spocott, a beautiful young runaway slave, suffers a nasty head wound just before being nabbed by a posse of slave catchers. She falls into a coma, and, when she awakes, she can see the future—from the near-future to Martin Luther King to hip-hop—in her dreams. Liz's visions help her and her fellow slaves escape, but soon there are new dangers on her trail: Patty Cannon and her brutal gang of slave catchers, and a competing slave catcher, nicknamed "The Gimp," who has a surprising streak of morality. Liz has some friends, including an older woman who teaches her "The Code" that guides runaways; a handsome young slave; and a wild inhabitant of the woods and swamps. Kidnappings, gunfights and chases ensue as Liz drifts in and out of her visions, which serve as a thoughtful meditation on the nature of freedom and offer sharp social commentary on contemporary America. McBride hasn't lost his touch: he nails the horrors of slavery as well as he does the power of hope and redemption.
Publishers Weekly

McBride's second novel, following Miracle at St. Anna (soon to be a Spike Lee-directed major motion picture), might better be titled Novel Yet Edited: the review copy, at least, reads like a very rough first draft. Its setting-a small Chesapeake Bay town just before the outbreak of the Civil War, a place where the reality of slavery was more ambiguous than in other parts of the country-certainly lends it potential. The mature reader, however, learns very little new about the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, or the feelings of either the oppressed or the oppressors. Indeed, the novel largely seems written for a YA audience. The pace of the action is slowed by implausibility, repetitive and often cartoonish description, fairly obvious anachronisms, and a tremendous amount of unnecessary detail to the exclusion of the feelings of the (mostly flat) main characters. This is particularly disappointing given McBride's poignant 1996 memoir, The Color of Water. Recommended with reservations to public libraries.
Library Journal

The slave-owning culture of Maryland's eastern shore in the 1850s comprises the world of McBride's second novel (following Miracle at St. Anna, 2002, and the bestselling memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, 1996). Recaptured runaway slave Liz Spocott, wounded by a musket blast and chained to fellow runaways in the attic of "trader"-crime boss Patty Cannon, learns "the Code" by which embattled slaves communicate and survive from a skeletal woman ("The old Woman With No Name") and, acting on a chance opportunity, escapes again. The novel then assumes the shape of a series of quests and pursuits. Liz wanders along a perilous route which she hopes will lead her to the Freedom Train, hence northward to safety-accompanied and bedeviled by prophetic "visions" that reach far into "the future of the colored race." The latter are often eerily compelling, but when "the Dreamer" Liz "sees" rap and hip-hop performances, and eventually Martin Luther King's "Free At Last" speech, the novel groans under the weight of forced Significance. Far more compelling are parallel tales: of the Woolman, a gigantic black who lives in a swamp and keeps an alligator named Gar; widowed landowner Kathleen Sullivan, unhinged by sexual longing for her handsome young slave Amber; and Denwood Long, a former slave-catcher lured out of retirement to return Liz to her irate owner Colonel Spocott. While its language is frequently stiff and unconvincing, the book has great compensatory strengths. McBride views the "peculiar institution" of slavery from an impressive multiplicity of involved characters' and observers' viewpoints. He describes emotionally charged, hurried actions superbly, and he makes expert use of folklore, legend and the eponymous unsung song (which we do eventually hear). In Denwood's grim, fatalistic pursuit of his destiny, McBride has fashioned a myth of retribution and sacrifice that recalls both William Faulkner's sagas of blighted generations and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Explosively dramatic.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. When we first meet Liz, she is on the run from her master. Yet throughout the book she refuses offers of passage to the North, saying “I’m free here.” What do you think Liz’s plan was when she first ran away? If she was planning to go North, what changed her mind? Or did she simply wish to die in the wilds of Maryland?

2. Discuss the author’s use of language. How does he evoke the speech patterns of an earlier era? What techniques does he use to bring the rural Maryland eastern shore to life?

3. Although he is a notorious slave catcher, Denwood Long—“the Gimp”—commands a degree of respect even from those he has caught. But he himself claims, “I’m going to hell in spite of redemption.” Based on his actions in the book, do you think he is worthy of respect? Do you find him sympathetic? Do you think he has found any measure of redemption by the end of the story?

4. Late in the book, it becomes clear that the singer of the “song yet sung” is Martin Luther King. Given that Liz’s nightmare vision of tomorrow, with its evocation of rap music and gang culture, clearly postdates King, why do you think the author chose him to fill this role?

5. Discuss the death of the Woolman. What motivates Liz to kill him? Is it an act of mercy? Do you think she has any thought of saving the Gimp? If so, why?

6. Amber believes that “Some [people] is up to the job of being decent, and some ain’t.” What do you think of this assessment? Is decency an inherent trait, or is it a conscious choice? Based on the characters and events in this book, what do you think the author’s answer to this question would be?

7. Throughout the book, Liz becomes more and more attuned to the world around her: “a kind of clarity seemed to settle upon her… at times she felt so sensitive to the elements about her, she felt as if her skin were ready to fly off her body.” What is the connection, if any, between this growing sensitivity and Liz’s visions of the future? How does Liz’s “two-headedness” allow the author to develop the larger themes of the novel?

8. Consider the ending of the novel—the violent deaths and Liz’s precarious future. At the same time, Amber is free, Kathleen’s future is secure, and Woolman’s son offers a link to the far-off coming of the song yet sung. Overall, did this novel leave you with a sense of hope? Did it provide you with any new insights on human nature? On America?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Songs for the Missing
Stewart O'Nan, 2008
Penguin Group USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143116028

Summary
“It was the summer of her Chevette, of J.P. and letting her hair grow.” It was also the summer when, without warning, popular high school student Kim Larsen disappeared from her small Midwestern town. Her loving parents, her introverted sister, her friends and boyfriend, must now do everything they can to find her. As desperate search parties give way to pleading television appearances, and private investigations yield to personal revelations, we see one town’s intimate struggle to maintain hope, and finally, to live with the unknown.

Stewart O’Nan’s new novel begins with the suspense and pacing of a thriller and soon deepens into an affecting family drama of loss. On the heels of his critically acclaimed and nationally bestselling Last Night at the Lobster, Songs for the Missing is an honest, heartfelt account of one family’s attempt to find their child. With a soulful empathy for these ordinary heroes, O’Nan draws us into the world of this small Midwestern town and allows us to feel a part of this family. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 4, 1961
• Raised—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.S., Boston University; M.F.A., Cornell University
• Awards—Drue Heinz Literature Prize; Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize
• Currently—lives in Avon, Connecticut


Stewart O'Nan is an American novelist, born in 1961 to John Lee O'Nan and Mary Ann O'Nan, (nee Smith). He and his brother were raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He earned his B.S. at Boston University in 1983. While in Boston, O'Nan became a fan of the Red Sox. On October 27, 1984, he married Trudy Anne Southwick, his high school sweetheart. They moved to Long Island, New York, and he went to work for Grumman Aerospace Corporation in Bethpage, New York, as a test engineer from 1984 to 1988.

Encouraged by his wife to pursue a career in writing, they moved to Ithaca, New York, and O'Nan returned to college and graduated with his M.F.A. from Cornell University in 1992. His family and he then moved to Edmond, Oklahoma, and he taught at the University of Central Oklahoma and the University of New Mexico.

O'Nan's first book, and only collection of short stories, In the Walled City, was awarded the 1993 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. The same year, he was able to find a publisher for his second book, and first novel, Snow Angels—based on the story "Finding Amy" from his In the Walled City collection—when the manuscript earned him the first Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize for the Novel, awarded by the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans. In 2007 Snow Angels was adapted for a film of the same title, directed by David Gordon Green, who also wrote the screenplay, and starring Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale.

In 1995, his family and he moved to Avon, Connecticut. He was a writer-in-residence and taught creative writing at Trinity College in nearby Hartford until 1997. The research he did for his novel The Names of the Dead led to the creation of a class that studied Vietnam War memoirs as a form of literature, which he also initially taught. In 1996, Granta named him one of America's Best Young Novelists.

In a 2002 article, "Finding Time to Write," O'Nan wrote:

Very simple things like keeping the manuscript with you at all times. Always keep it with you. That way you can always go back to it. Doesn't have to be the whole manuscript. Another way to do this is to bring only the very last sentence that you worked on--where you left off, basically. Bring it with you on a sheet of paper or index card. Keep it on your person so that if you're running around the building where you're working, you take that five seconds to pull it out and look at it and say, "Okay, oh, maybe I'll do this with it. Maybe I'll do something else with it. Maybe I'll fix it there.

In the spring of 2005 O'Nan spoke at the Lucy Robbins Welles Library in Newington, Connecticut, as the featured author in its One Book, 4 Towns program. When asked about Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season, the book he co-authored with Stephen King, O'Nan replied, "Who would have thought that writing a book about the Red Sox would be the luckiest thing I ever did in my life."

In 2008, Lonely Road Books sold out its pre-orders for O'Nan's latest writing, a screenplay simply titled Poe. It is a dramatic retelling of the life of Edgar Allan Poe. The screenplay was released as a limited edition of 200 copies and as a lettered edition of 26 copies. It features a foreword by Roger Corman and frontispieces by Jill Bauman.

Works
1993 - In the Walled City (Stories)
1987 - Transmission
1994 - Snow Angels
1996 - The Names of the Dead
1997 - The Speed Queen
1998 - A World Away
1999 - A Prayer for the Dying
2000 - The Circus Fire (Nonfiction)
2001 - Everyday People
2002 - Wish You Were Here
2003 - The Night Country
2004 - Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans... (Nonfiction w/ Stephen King)
2005 - The Good Wife
2007 - Last Night at the Lobster
2008 - Songs for the Missing
2008 - Poe (Screenplay)
2011 - Emily, Alone
2012 - A Face in the Crowd (Novella e-book w/ Stephen King)
2012 - The Odds
2015 - West of Sunset
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/16/2015.)

Book Reviews
O'Nan proves that uncertainty can be the worst punishment of all in this unflinching look at an unraveling family. In the small town of Kingsville, Ohio, 18-year-old Kim Larsen—popular and bound for college in the fall—disappears on her way to work one afternoon. Not until the next morning do her parents, Ed and Fran, and 15-year-old sister, Lindsay, realize Kim is missing. The lead detective on the case tells the Larsens that since Kim is an adult, she could, if the police find her, ask that the police not disclose her location to her parents. When Kim's car later turns up in nearby Sandusky, Ed, desperate to help, joins the official search. Meanwhile, Fran stays home putting all her energy into community fund-raisers, and Lindsay struggles to maintain a normal life. Through shifting points of view, chiefly those of the shell-shocked parents and the moody Lindsay, O'Nan raises the suspense while conveying the sheer torture of what it's like not to know what has happened to a loved one. When—if ever—do you stop looking?
Publishers Weekly

Stewart O'Nan has quietly written his way to the top rank of American novelists working today, and Songs for the Missing showcases his skill for molding character-driven novels remarkable for their clarity of vision and an unflinching eye for situations that lay bare human emotion..
Bookmarks Magazine

O’Nan’s latest novel delves with uncanny empathy into the tangled emotions of a family in sustained crisis.... O’Nan brings each character to life so perceptively, the reader becomes completely enmeshed in this sad story. —Deborah Donovan
Booklist

Taut prose and matter-of-fact detail enrich this compelling portrait of teenage life in small-town Ohio, as the disappearance of a popular girl on the cusp of leaving home for college changes the communal dynamic of family and friends. The latest from O'Nan (Last Night at the Lobster, 2007, etc.) initially reads like a whodunit, but who or why become less important than the character of the vanished Kim Larsen from the differing memories of those who knew her best—or thought they did—and the ways in which Kim's disappearance allows all sorts of revelations to come to light. The opening chapter is the only one that views Kim's life from her own perspective: the job she tolerates, the little sister who occasionally annoys her, the parents whose tension between them sometimes rises to the surface, the friends with whom she shares routines and some confidences, the boyfriend with whom she isn't serious enough to stay with past the summer. She anticipates college as an escape from the town where "every night they fought a war against boredom and lost," yet she's understandably apprehensive about living away from home. Then she disappears, putting her parents into a panic, forcing her friends to decide which secrets to reveal, uniting the community in its attempts to aid the search and offer support to the family. Will Kim's disappearance end her parents' marriage or make it stronger? Is there a logical explanation, a motive, or is this simply evidence of "the world's incoherence"? Though the author sustains narrative momentum through the conventions of the police procedural (with chapter headings such as "Description of the Person, When Last Seen" and "Known Whereabouts"), ultimately the novel is less about a possible crime than about the interconnections of small-town life. "The problem was that everything was connected," thinks one of Kim's friends. "One lie covered another, which covered a third, which rested against a fourth. It all went back to Kingsville being so goddamn small." A novel in which every word rings true.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Early on in the police investigation there’s a question of whether Kim ran away or was abducted. How does this issue get resolved and do you believe it’s the right conclusion?

2. Kim’s family disapproves of her involvement with J.P. What do you make of his character? Is he a bad influence or a normal teenager?

3. Kim’s friends hide the truth about Kim’s private life from her parents. What impact does this have on the search to find her? Are they right to protect her privacy or are they selfish for trying to protect themselves?

4. What are Lindsay’s feelings about her sister’s disappearance and how does the experience ultimately change her?

5. How do Kim’s parents cope individually and collectively with her absence? Where do they differ and how?

6. What significance does the butterfly pendant have for Kim’s mom?

7. Kingsville is a distinctively Midwestern small town. Could this story have taken place in another setting? How might it be different?

8. Kim is only physically present in one scene in the book but much of the description of her character comes through her friends’ and family’s point of view. Do you feel that you “know” her? Do you feel that her friends and family know her? What don’t they know or understand about her?

9. The Larsens are dissatisfied with the police’s efforts. How would you rate the police performance in the search for Kim? Have they done enough or could they have done more?

10. In the beginning of the book, O’Nan places us in Kim’s point of view as she ponders “the sins of the Midwest.” She says, “flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?” How do these sentiments resonate throughout the story? Why did the author choose to include them?

11. At the end of the book the reader still knows very little about what really happened to Kim. Does this matter to you? Do you find the ending satisfying?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Songs of Willow Frost 
Jamie Ford, 2013
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345522030


Summary
Set against the backdrop of Depression-era Seattle, Songs of Willow Frost is a powerful tale of two souls—a boy with dreams for his future and a woman escaping her haunted past—both seeking love, hope, and forgiveness.

Twelve-year-old William Eng, a Chinese American boy, has lived at Seattle’s Sacred Heart Orphanage ever since his mother’s listless body was carried away from their small apartment five years ago. On his birthday—or rather, the day the nuns designate as his birthday—William and the other orphans are taken to the historical Moore Theatre, where William glimpses an actress on the silver screen who goes by the name of Willow Frost. Struck by her features, William is convinced that the movie star is his mother, Liu Song.

Determined to find Willow and prove that his mother is still alive, William escapes from Sacred Heart with his friend Charlotte. The pair navigate the streets of Seattle, where they must not only survive but confront the mysteries of William’s past and his connection to the exotic film star. The story of Willow Frost, however, is far more complicated than the Hollywood fantasy William sees onscreen.

Shifting between the Great Depression and the 1920s, Songs of Willow Frost takes readers on an emotional journey of discovery. Jamie Ford’s sweeping novel will resonate with anyone who has ever longed for the comforts of family and a place to call home. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 9, 1968
• Born—Eureka, California, USA
• Raised—Ashland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington, USA
• Education—Art Institute of Seattle
• Awards—Asian/Pacific American Award-Best Adult Fiction
• Currently—lives in Montana


Jamie Ford is an American author. He is best known for his debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. The book received positive reviews after its release, and was also awarded best "Adult Fiction" book at the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature. The book was also named the #1 Book Club Pick for Fall 2009/Winter 2010 by the American Booksellers Association.

Background
Ford was born in Eureka, California, but grew up in Ashland, Oregon, and Port Orchard and Seattle, Washington. His father, a Seattle native, is of Chinese ancestry, while Ford’s mother is of European descent.

His Western last name "Ford" comes from his great grandfather, Min Chung (1850-1922), who immigrated to Tonopah, Nevada in 1865 and later changed his name to William Ford. Ford's great grandmother, Loy Lee Ford, was the first Chinese woman to own property in Nevada.

Ford earned a degree in Design from the Art Institute of Seattle and also attended Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts.

Writings
Ford is best known for his debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. The book received positive reviews after its release, and was also awarded best “Adult Fiction” book at the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature.

In 2013, he released his second book, Songs of Willow Frost, and his third, Love and Other Consolation Prizes in 2017.

His stories have also been included in Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology and the The Apocalypse Triptych, a series of three anthologies of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. (Excerpted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/28/2017 .)

Book Reviews
[Ford's] new work depicts another star-crossed romance, but the real love here is between mother and son. On a movie outing, William Eng, a Chinese American boy at the repressive Sacred Heart Orphanage in 1930s Seattle, sees the beautiful actress Willow Frost on-screen and is convinced that she is his mother.... He finds her quickly...then hears her plaintive tale.... Writing in simple, unaffected language befitting both William and the young Willow, Ford delivers a tale his fans will certainly relish. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


William awakens to yet another morning of beatings for bed-wetters at the Sacred Heart orphanage. In 1931, lots of children have been orphaned or left with the sisters because their parents could not care for them.... [He] joins the other boys on a trip to the theater. Just before the movie begins, a beautiful woman appears on screen.... Soon, William and his best friend, Charlotte...concoct a plan to escape the orphanage and find the mysterious singer named Willow Frost.... Ford writes of American life in the 1920s and '30s, bustling with go-getters and burdened with trampled masses.... A heartbreaking yet subdued story.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. William’s life at Sacred Heart is, he feels, a hard one. Do you agree? In the long run, do the caregivers at Sacred Heart do more to help or harm their young wards?

2. The orphans at Sacred Heart share a collective “birthday,” one for boys and one for girls. What would it be like to celebrate such an event? Would it feel less special without a focus on the individual, or even more joyful to share it with a community?

3. On May 4, 1931, the first bookmobile hit the streets of Seattle, where it did indeed visit the historical Sacred Heart Orphanage (as well as Boeing Field). Why do you think there was such a need to bring the library to its patrons, rather than allowing those patrons to visit the library as they chose?

4. What qualities does Liu Song share with her mother? How are their lives similar or different?

5. Does Liu Song’s mother represent strength, weakness, or a little of both? Do you think she knew she was a second wife?

6. Why doesn’t Liu Song study Cantonese Opera instead of pursuing a career in film and stage?

7. What do you think happened to Mr. Butterfield after the loss of his music store? Personally and professionally, how would he react to Liu Song’s newfound fame as Willow?

8. Imagine that you are Liu Song and pregnant under her circumstances. What would you do? Who might you tell? And would you keep the baby?

9. The novel explores the subject of abandonment, whether by willful desertion or by circumstance. What forms does such abandonment take among contemporary families?

10. In the time period the novel is set in, economic and social classes were clearly defined, and while change was desired by some, it was feared by others. Do you think the time we live in today is more just and fair, or are we in fact worse off?

11. The social worker Mrs. Peterson represents an outside authority at a time when mothers had fewer rights to their children than fathers. When did that begin to change and why?

12. During the early years of the silent-film era, studios and production companies could be found in most states. So why had much of the film industry congregated in Hollywood a decade later?

13. What factors contributed to the eventual demise of the grand movie palaces of the 1920s and ’30s?

14. Willow always knew where her son was, so why didn’t she come back sooner, especially as she gained success?

15. Why does Willow die in all of her films?

16. How do you think Charlotte’s death impacted Sister Briganti?

17. In the end, Willow comes back for William. What do you think happened to them after the novel’s conclusion? What happened to her career?

18. Overall, do you think the story is one of hope and promise or suffering and sacrifice?

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

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Songs without Words
Ann Packer, 2007
Knopf Doubleday
322 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375727177

Summary
Ann Packer’s debut novel, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, was a nationwide best seller that established her as one of our most gifted chroniclers of the interior lives of women.

Now, in her long-awaited second novel, she takes us on a journey into a lifelong friendship pushed to the breaking point. Expertly, with the keen introspection and psychological nuance that are her hallmarks, she explores what happens when there are inequities between friends and when the hard-won balances of a long relationship are disturbed, perhaps irreparably, by a harrowing crisis.

Liz and Sarabeth were childhood neighbors in the suburbs of northern California, brought as close as sisters by the suicide of Sarabeth’s mother when the girls were just sixteen. In the decades that followed—through Liz’s marriage and the birth of her children, through Sarabeth’s attempts to make a happy life for herself despite the shadow cast by her mother’s act—their relationship remained a source of continuity and strength.

But when Liz’s adolescent daughter enters dangerous waters that threaten to engulf the family, the fault lines in the women’s friendship are revealed, and both Liz and Sarabeth are forced to reexamine their most deeply held beliefs about their connection.

Songs Without Words is about the sometimes confining roles we take on in our closest relationships, about the familial myths that shape us both as children and as parents, and about the limits—and the power—of the friendships we create when we are young.

Once again, Ann Packer has written a novel of singular force and complexity: thoughtful, moving,and absolutely gripping, it more than confirms her prodigious literary gifts. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Stanford, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—James Michener Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
• Currently—lives in Northern California


Ann Packer is an American novelist and short story writer, perhaps best known for her critically acclaimed first novel The Dive From Clausen's Pier. She is the recipient of a James Michener Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

Personal life
Packer was born in Stanford, California. She is the daughter of Stanford University professors Herbert Packer and Nancy (Huddleston) Packer.

Her mother was a student of novelist Wallace Stegner at the Stanford Writing Program; she later joined the Stanford faculty as professor of English and creative writing. Ann's father was on the faculty of Stanford Law School, where he highlighted the tensions between Due Process and Crime Control. In 1969, when Ann was 10 years old, he suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body. He committed suicide three years later. Her brother, George Packer, is a novelist, journalist, and playwright.

Packer currently lives in Northern California with her two children.

Early career
Packer was an English major at Yale University, but only began writing fiction during her senior year. She moved to New York after college and took a job writing paperback cover copy at Ballantine Books. She attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop from 1986 to 1988, selling her first short story to The New Yorker a few weeks before receiving her M.F.A. degree.

In 1988 Packer moved to Madison, Wisconsin as a fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. During her two years in Wisconsin she published stories in literary magazines, including the story "Babies," which was included in the 1992 O. Henry Award prize stories collection. The New Yorker story, "Mendocino," became the title story of her first book, Mendocino and Other Stories, published by Chronicle Books in 1994.

Recent career
Packer spent almost 10 years writing The Dive From Clausen's Pier. Geri Thoma of the Elaine Markson Agency agreed to take on the book and sold it almost immediately to the editor Jordan Pavlin at Alfred A. Knopf. It was published in 2002 and became the first selection of the Good Morning America "Read This!" Book Club. It also received a Great Lakes Book Award, an American Library Association Award, and the Kate Chopin Literary Award. The novel was adapted into a 2005 cable television film. 

Packer’s next two books were also published by Knopf: a novel, Songs Without Words (2007), and a collection of short fiction, Swim Back to Me (2011). "Things Said or Done," one of the stories in Swim Back to Me, was included in the 2012 O. Henry Award prize stories collection. In 2015 another novel, The Children's Crusade, was published by Scribner.

In addition to fiction, Packer has written essays for the Washington Post, Vogue, Real Simple, and Oprah Magazine.  (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/13/2015.)

Book Reviews
After the keenly observed realism she demonstrated in her much more penetrating Dive From Clausen's Pier, Ms. Packer this time treats pedestrian, domestic details about her characters strategically, as if they captured physical manifestations of interior currents.... Ms. Packer's most intuitive point her is that mother-daughter dynamics and neediness linger throughout life, even among apparent peers, in ways that become sharper over time.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

Packer solidifies the reputation she established in the enormously successful The Dive from Clausen's Pier as an uncannily observant chronicler of contemporary American domestic life. Songs Without Words touches every nerve exposed by the solidly middle-class dilemmas of today's parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers.... Packer is no ironist; she is not Claire Messud or Zadie Smith, whose most recent novels unspool under the cool panoramic gaze of a social critic. The characters in Packer's novels are not so much exposed as they are understood.... Packer is devoted to her characters, and it is her pleasure as a novelist—and ours as her readers—to watch these people move through the intensely familiar and intimate hours of their days and nights...her pursuit is so unnervingly attentive that it becomes revelatory. Middle-of-the-night readers...who cannot put down Songs Without Words will surely look up at the darkest hour with the sense that they are being watched.
Carrie Brown - Washington Post

This time Packer is telling a messier, meandering story about family, friendship, and deperession. The startlingly pointed truths are still there, but the momentum is different. Where Dive hurtled its heroine from inexperience toward maturity, Songs is more of a meditation on the nature of maturity itself.
Janice P. Nimura - Newsday

The psychology is skin deep, but Packer writes about adult female friendship with a nuanced understanding of its emotional intensity.... One of Packer’s strengths as a writer is her ability to subtly shift tone and voice to bring us into the interior of very different characters. The narrative moves with ease.
Lost Angeles Times Book Review

Sometimes whole sections seem like filler, as if this story should have been a novella.
Cleveland Plain Dealer

Readers will be pleased to find Packer’s remarkable talent for characterization in the pages of her second novel, Songs Without Words.... In this novel, commonplace events and everyday gestures reveal not only sorrow, but the complex, interior lives of characters. There is no heavy-handed foreshadowing by the author. Instead, every exchange between characters, each fleeting doubt or frail hope, is given equal weight. Relationships fray and falter, love is rekindled or lost, often surprising the characters themselves, and the reader.... If the story sags slightly under the uneven weight of five characters' ruminations,...Lauren’s sections are pitch-perfect.... It is Lauren who gives this novel its enormous heart.”
Charlotte Observer

Packer follows her well-received first novel, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, with a richly nuanced meditation on the place of friendship in women's lives. Liz and Sarabeth's childhood friendship deepened following Sarabeth's mother's suicide when the girls were 16; now the two women are in their 40s and living in the Bay Area. Responsible mother-of-two Liz has come to see eccentric, bohemian Sarabeth, with her tendency to enter into inappropriate relationships with men, as more like another child than as a sister or mutually supportive friend. When Liz's teenage daughter, Lauren, perpetuates a crisis, Liz doubts her parenting abilities; Sarabeth is plunged into uncomfortable memories; and the hidden fragilities of what seemed a steadfast relationship come to the fore. Packer adroitly navigates Lauren's teen despair, Sarabeth's lonely longings and Liz's feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Although Liz's husband, Brody, and other men in the book are less than compelling, Packer gets deep into the perspectives of Liz, Sarabeth and Lauren, and follows out their conflicts with an unsentimental sympathy.
Publishers Weekly

Expanding her canvas from The Dive from Clausen's Pier (2001, etc.), Packer explores a friendship and a family wounded by a teenager's attempted suicide. While she confined herself to the first-person narrator's point of view in her bestselling first novel, here the author persuasively enters the heads of five different people in northern California: Liz and Sarabeth, best friends since the suicide of Sarabeth's mother 30 years ago; Liz's husband, Brody, a business-development executive; their severely depressed 15-year-old, Lauren; and her carefully well-adjusted younger brother, Joe. Sarabeth is unmarried, a designer who gussies up for-sale houses and apartments with custom-made lampshades or pillows. She's the "creative" one, Liz the contented housewife who doesn't mind hand-holding her turbulent friend. But when Lauren slashes her wrists and Sarabeth doesn't call for days after finding out, Liz feels betrayed. Things are also rocky with Brody when Lauren comes home from the hospital; the different approaches the spouses take with their still-raw daughter drive them apart. At first, it's hard to sympathize with Packer's privileged, self-absorbed characters. Lauren seems to be wallowing in her distress; Sarabeth and Liz nurse their grievances instead of talking honestly about them; Brody flings himself into e-mail and business trips; Joe vanishes to soccer games and sleepovers. There isn't a lot of action to grab readers' attention. Slowly and carefully, Packer shows her characters putting their lives back together after a traumatizing blow. Lauren slowly regains her self-esteem and sense of humor; Brody and Liz reaffirm a deep, satisfying marital love; Sarabeth battles depression and makes new friends, understanding that she can't always lean on Liz. The two old friends' moving reconciliation closes a quiet narrative whose emotions, we come to realize, run deep and true. A slight sophomore slump after a pitch-perfect debut, but commendably ambitious and ultimately rewarding.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Ann Packer has been praised for the lifelike quality of her fiction. Do you feel that the friendship depicted here seems especially true to life? Do you find yourself choosing sides with either Liz or Sarabeth?

2. Why does Lauren attempt to kill herself? What are the immediate and the more suppressed causes? How does Lauren herself explain it?

3. Liz tells Brody that she feels completely guilty for Lauren’s suicide attempt. “I know, it sounds crazy,” she says, “but the point is: if it was your fault, then you weren’t powerless—you weren’t at the mercy of stuff just happening.” To which Brody replies: “You’re always going to be at the mercy of stuff just happening, no matter what” [p. 293]. What different ways of looking at life do these two positions represent? To what extent are they “at the mercy of stuff just happening”?

4. Thinking back over her relationship with her daughter, Liz imagines herself “bowing to Lauren, acknowledging Lauren. Had she somehow failed to do that? She couldn’t think of anything more important for a mother to do” [p. 127]. Why would nothing be more important than this kind of acknowledgment of one’s child? Why does Liz choose the word “bowing”?

5. After Lauren has returned from the hospital, Liz admits to Lauren that she and Sarabeth are “having some problems.” After that, Lauren occasionally asks her mother about her relationship with Sarabeth. Do you think Lauren is intentionally pressuring Liz to talk to her? Do you think it’s Lauren’s place to pressure her mother about Sarabeth?

6. Liz and Sarabeth have a long history together. Do you think that, without Lauren’s attempted suicide, Liz and Sarabeth would have ended up in the same place anyway?

7. Why do you think Lauren is drawn to Sarabeth? Do you think it has more to do with Sarabeth’s experience with depression and suicide, or with Sarabeth’s knowledge of art and her less-conventional life? Or something else entirely?

8. Why doesn’t Sarabeth call Liz immediately when she learns of Lauren’s suicide attempt? Is her reaction selfish or merely self-protective?

9. Why does Liz tell Sarabeth, “I’m not your mother” [p. 226]? Is she justified in saying this? How does it affect Sarabeth, immediately and ultimately?

10. Brody describes Sarabeth as “five feet of chaos” [p. 278]. In what ways is this statement true of Sarabeth?

11. What is the effect of tragedy—the suicide of Sarabeth’s mother and Lauren’s attempted suicide—occurring in such seemingly ordinary, and in Lauren’s case loving, families?

12. Near the end of the novel, after Joe has won at poker, he thinks: “The cards didn’t really matter. What mattered was how you played. What mattered was your face” [p. 314]. In what ways might this apply to the lives of the characters in the novel?

13. How are Liz and Brody able to repair their marriage? Why does Lauren’s attempted suicide create such anger and distance between them?

14. What do you think about the hostility between Sarabeth and Brody? Do you think they would have gotten along better if not for their relationships with Liz?

15. How are Liz and Sarabeth able to restore their friendship? Why is the gift of the bench so important?

16. What is the turning point in Lauren’s recovery? What is it that really begins to restore her optimism and interest in life?

17. Songs Without Words, though much of it is concerned with suffering, depression and suicide, ends happily, with the restoration of Liz and Sarabeth’s friendship and Lauren choosing to embrace rather than hide from life. Why does this ending feel right? How does Packer keep the novel from achieving too easy a closure?

18. What does Songs Without Words reveal about both the strength and fragility of human relationships?
(Questions from the publisher.)

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Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty 
Ramona Ausubel, 2016
Penguin Publishers
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594634888


Summary
From the award-winning author of No One Is Here Except All of Us, an imaginative novel about a wealthy New England family in the 1960s and '70s that suddenly loses its fortune—and its bearings.

Labor Day, 1976, Martha's Vineyard.
Summering at the family beach house along this moneyed coast of New England, Fern and Edgar—married with three children—are happily preparing for a family birthday celebration when they learn that the unimaginable has occurred: There is no more money.

More specifically, there's no more money in the estate of Fern's recently deceased parents, which, as the sole source of Fern and Edgar's income, had allowed them to live this beautiful, comfortable life despite their professed anti-money ideals.

Quickly, the once-charmed family unravels. In distress and confusion, Fern and Edgar are each tempted away on separate adventures: she on a road trip with a stranger, he on an ill-advised sailing voyage with another woman. The three children are left for days with no guardian whatsoever, in an improvised Neverland helmed by the tender, witty, and resourceful Cricket, age nine.

Brimming with humanity and wisdom, humor and bite, and imbued with both the whimsical and the profound, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty is a story of American wealth, class, family, and mobility, approached by award-winner Ramona Ausubel with a breadth of imagination and understanding that is fresh, surprising, and exciting. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1978-79
• Raised—Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
• Education—M.F.A., University of California, Irvine
• Awards—PEN Center USA for Literary Fiction (more below)
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay area of California


Ramona Ausubel is an American writer, the author of two novels and a short story collection. She grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and now lives with her husband and children in the San Francisco Bay area. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine.

Writing
Ausubel's novels include Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (2016) and No One is Here Except All of Us (2012). Her collection of stories is titled A Guide to Being Born (2013).

Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, One Story, Electric Literature, FiveChapters, Green Mountains Review, Slice, among others. It has been collected in The Best American Fantasy, Paris Review online.

Her stories have also been included a list of "100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2008″ in the Best American Short Stories and three times as a "Notable" story in the Best American Non-Required Reading.
 
Recognition and honors
Ausubel is a winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She has also been a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Story Award and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. She has also been a finalist for the Puschart Prize and a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. While in graduate school, she won the Glenn Schaeffer Award in Fiction and served as editor of Faultline Journal of Art & Literature.

Ausubel has taught and lectured at the University of California, Irvine, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Pitzer College and the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has served as a mentor for the PEN Center USA Emerging Voices program. Currently, she is a faculty member of the Low-Residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Ausubel's often whimsical prose is in top form yet again as she imbues the story with her signature touch of magic. This one's just lovely.
Elle.com


"There's no more money." This stark discovery by a golden couple triggers a series of funny, touching adventures.... Set in the anything-goes '70s, this story inspires surprising happiness.
Good Housekeeping


Coming from moneyed backgrounds, married couple Edgar and Fern Keating react in a surprising fashion to their impending insolvency.... Ausubel offers an incisive look at...this couple and...family.... There is true wit in the author’s depiction...and with characters this memorable, the pages almost turn themselves.
Publishers Weekly


Ausubel offers a piercing view of the subtleties of class and privilege and what happens when things go awry.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Fortunes and hearts are lost and found in a modern fairy tale set in the 1960s and '70s. Ausubel's trademark combination of realist narrative with fabulist elements shines.... [Her] magical, engrossing prose style perfectly fits this magical, engrossing story.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if they're made available. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty...then take off on your own:

1. Describe the main characters, Fern and Edgar Keating. Is Edgar a hypocrite, for example, or does he simply live by his own idiosyncratic code of behavior? How do you feel about both of the Keatings, and do those feelings change by the end? Do either of them learn, change, or grow during the course of the novel?

2. Talk about Cricket, James, and Will and how they fend for themselves after their parents' abandonment. Do you find irony in their ability to cope without so-called "adult" supervision...and without dependence on family money? (Who, by the way, are more responsible: parents or children?)

3. Sons and Daughters portrays different reactions to wealth—for instance, taking pleasure in the things money makes possible or viewing wealth as a burden. How do the various characters—Edgar and Fern and the families they came from—approach wealth?

4. Discuss your own attitudes toward money? Given the situation the Keatings find themselves in, how might you react? Is the adage true that money doesn't lead to happiness? Why or why not? Is there a qualifier to that saying?

5. Ramona Ausubel inserts fabulist, folktale-like elements in her otherwise realistic novel. Do these magical additions add to or detract from the story in your opinion?

6. How is the cultural ethos of the 1960s and '70s portrayed in this novel? Talk about how the era's values (or lack of) shape the characters' beliefs and actions. Why might the author have chosen this era as the setting for her story?

7. Will the characters ever achieve happiness? Does the book hint one way or another? What do you think lies in store for the Keating family members?

8. How are animals used to telegraph foreboding in the plot?

9. Given today's political discussions surrounding the 1%, income disparity, a shrinking middle-class, and minimum wage, what were your attitudes toward the privileged when you began reading Sons and Daughters, and has the book altered—or confirmed—your attitudes?

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

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Sorry for Your Trouble:  Stories
Richard Ford, 2020
HarperCollins
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062969804


Summary
In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss.

"Displaced" returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator’s sorrow after his father’s death.

"Driving Up" follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life.

"The Run of Yourself," a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death.

And "Nothing to Declare" follows a man and a woman’s chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after twenty years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them.

Typically rich with Ford’s emotional lucidity and lyrical precision, Sorry for Your Trouble is a memorable collection from one of our greatest writers. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 16, 1944
• Where—Jackson, Mississippi, USA
• Education—B.A., Michigan State University; M.F.A., University of California, Irvine
• Awards—PEN/Faulkner Award; Pulitzer Prize (more below)
• Currently—lives in Boothbay, Maine


Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novels that form the Bascombe quartet: The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), and Let Me Be Frank with You (2014). He has also published several short story collections, the stories of which have been widely anthologized.

Early years
Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the only son of Edna and Parker Carrol Ford. Parker was a traveling salesman for Faultless Starch, a Kansas City company. Of his mother, Ford has said, "Her ambition was to be, first, in love with my father and, second, to be a full-time mother." When Ford was eight years old, his father had a major heart attack, and thereafter Ford spent as much time with his grandfather, a former prizefighter and hotel owner in Little Rock, Arkansas, as he did with his parents in Mississippi. Ford's father died of a second heart attack in 1960.

Ford's grandfather had worked for the railroad. At the age of 19, before deciding to attend college, Ford began work on the Missouri Pacific train line as a locomotive engineer's assistant, learning the work on the job.

Ford received a B.A. from Michigan State University. Having enrolled to study hotel management, he switched to English. After graduating he taught junior high school in Flint, Michigan, and enlisted in the US Marines but was discharged after contracting hepatitis. At university he met Kristina Hensley, his future wife; the two married in 1968.

Despite mild dyslexia, Ford developed a serious interest in literature. He has stated in interviews that his dyslexia may, in fact, have helped him as a reader, as it forced him to approach books at a slow and thoughtful pace.

Ford briefly attended law school but dropped out and entered the creative writing program at the University of California, Irvine, to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree, which he received in 1970. Ford chose this course simply because "they admitted me, he confessed in a profile in Ploughshares (7/8/2010):

They admitted me. I remember getting the application for Iowa, and thinking they'd never have let me in. I'm sure I was right about that, too. But, typical of me, I didn't know who was teaching at Irvine. I didn't know it was important to know such things. I wasn't the most curious of young men, even though I give myself credit for not letting that deter me.

As it turned out, Oakley Hall and E. L. Doctorow were teaching there, and Ford has been explicit about his debt to them. In 1971, he was selected for a three-year appointment in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows.

Early writing
Ford published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, the story of two unlikely drifters whose paths cross on an island in the Mississippi River, in 1976; he followed it with The Ultimate Good Luck in 1981. In the interim he briefly taught at Williams College and Princeton. Despite good notices the books sold little, and Ford retired from fiction writing to become a writer for the New York magazine Inside Sports. Speaking for same the Ploughshares profile, he said:

I realized there was probably a wide gulf between what I could do and what would succeed with readers. I felt that I'd had a chance to write two novels, and neither of them had really created much stir, so maybe I should find real employment, and earn my keep.

In 1982, the magazine folded, and when Sports Illustrated did not hire Ford, he returned to fiction writing with The Sportswriter, a novel about a failed novelist turned sportswriter who undergoes an emotional crisis following the death of his son. The novel became Ford's "breakout book", named one of Time magazine's five best books of 1986 and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Ford followed the success immediately with Rock Springs (1987), a story collection mostly set in Montana that includes some of his most popular stories, adding to his reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation.

Dirty realism
Reviewers and literary critics associated the stories in Rock Springs with the aesthetic movement known as dirty realism. This term referred to a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff—two writers with whom Ford was closely acquainted—along with Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, Larry Brown, and Jayne Anne Phillips, among others.

Those applying this label point to Carver's lower-middle-class subjects or the protagonists Ford portrays in Rock Springs. However, many of the characters in the "Frank Bascombe" books (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank With You), notably the protagonist himself, enjoy degrees of material affluence and cultural capital not normally associated with the "dirty realist" style.

Mid-career and acclaim
Although his 1990 novel Wildlife, a story of a Montana golf pro turned firefighter, met with mixed reviews and middling sales, by the end of the 1980s Ford's reputation was solid. He was increasingly sought after as an editor and contributor to various projects. Ford edited the 1990 Best American Short Stories, the 1992 Granta Book of the American Short Story, and the 1998 Granta Book of the American Long Story, a designation he claimed in the introduction to prefer to the novella.

In 1995, Ford's career reached a high point with the release of Independence Day, a sequel to The Sportswriter, featuring the continued story of its protagonist, Frank Bascombe. Reviews were positive, and the novel became the first to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In the same year, Ford was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre. He ended this prodigiously creative and successful decade of the 1990s with a well-received story collection Women with Men published in 1997.

Later life and writings
Ford lived for many years on lower Bourbon Street in the French Quarter and then in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, where his wife Kristina was the executive director of the city planning commission. He now lives in East Boothbay, Maine.[12] In between these dwellings, Ford has lived in many other locations, usually in the U.S., though he's pursued an equally peripatetic teaching career.

He took up a teaching appointment at Bowdoin College in 2005, but remained in the post for only one semester. In 2008 Ford served as an Adjunct Professor at the Oscar Wilde Centre with the School of English at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, teaching on the Masters programme in creative writing. But at the end of 2010, Ford assumed the post of senior fiction professor at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 2011, replacing Barry Hannah, who died in March 2010.

Ford's intense creative pace (writing, teaching, editing, publishing) did not subside, either, as a new decade (and a new century) commenced. He published another story collection A Multitude of Sins (2002), followed by The Lay of the Land (2006), which continues (and, according to Ford's explicit statements made at this time, was to have ended) the Frank Bascombe series.

However, in April 2013, Ford read from a new Frank Bascombe story without revealing to the audience whether or not it was part of a longer work. But by 2014, it was confirmed that the story would indeed appear as part of a longer work to be published in November of that year. Titled Let Me Be Frank With You, it is a work consisting of four interconnected novellas (or "ong stories"), all narrated by Frank Bascombe.

Also, as he did in the preceding decade, Ford continued to assist with various editing projects. In 2007, he edited the New Granta Book of the American Short Story, followed by the Library of America's two-volume edition of the selected works of fellow Mississippi writer Eudora Welty. Ford's latest novel, Canada, was published in 2012. That same year, he became the Emmanuel Roman and Barrie Sardoff Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Writing at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

Critical opinion
Richard Ford's writings demonstrate "a meticulous concern for the nuances of language ... [and] the rhythms of phrases and sentences." Ford has described his sense of language as "a source of pleasure in itself—all of its corporeal qualities, its syncopations, moods, sounds, the way things look on the page."

This "devotion to language" is closely linked to what he calls "the fabric of affection that holds people close enough together to survive." Comparisons have been drawn between Ford's work and the writings of John Updike, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Walker Percy.

Ford's works of fiction "dramatize the breakdown of such cultural institutions as marriage, family, and community." His...

marginalized protagonists often typify the rootlessness and nameless longing... pervasive in a highly mobile, present-oriented society in which individuals, having lost a sense of the past, relentlessly pursue their own elusive identities in the here and now.*

Ford "looks to art, rather than religion, to provide consolation and redemption in a chaotic time."

Awards and honors
2013 - Prix Femina Etranger for Canada
2013 - Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for Canada
2001 - PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction
1995 - PEN/Faulkner Award[9] for Independence Day
1995 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Independence Day
1995 - Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement in that genre. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/20/2014.)

*Huey Guagliardo, Perspectives on Richard Ford: Redeemed by Affection, University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

Book Reviews
Ford has a gift for nimble interior monologues and a superb ear for the varieties and vagaries of human speech.… Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked, complex protagonists brought toward difficult recognitions.
New York Times Book Review


[B]oth a coherent work of art and a subtle and convincing portrait of contemporary American life among the moneyed middle class.…This is America, and Richard Ford is its chronicler. In these superbly wrought tales he catches, with exquisite precision… the irresistible melancholy that is the mark of American life.
Wall Street Journal


Richard Ford remains an author hostage to the mysterious simplicities of emotional sentiment, commendably so.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution


Ford’s unrelenting exploration of life’s bleakness and sadness makes these stories enervating, particularly compared to his previous work, though his clear, nuanced prose continues to impress. Ford is a supremely gifted writer, but he’s not at his best here.
Publishers Weekly


A son recalls mourning his father's death in his Mississippi youth. A past-her-prime American woman heads to Canada to say good-bye to an old lover who's dying. And a New Orleans lawyer attempts to get beyond his wife's death. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Ford in short form.
Library Journal


(Starred review) Once again, virtuoso Ford deftly sails the seas and storms of consciousness.
Booklist


[A]bout lives shattered by divorce or death, with protagonists discovering that the pieces they are trying to put together no longer fit, and perhaps never did.…  Powerfully unsettling stories in which men nearing the end of their lives wonder, befuddled, if that's all there is.
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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Sotah
Naomi Ragen, 2002
St. Martin's Press
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312570248

Summary
Beautiful, fragile Dina Reich, a young woman in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox haredi enclave, stands accused of the community’s most unforgivable sin: adultery.

Raised with her sisters to be an obedient daughter and a dutiful wife, Dina secretly yearned for the knowledge, romance, and excitement that she knew her circumscribed life would never satisfy. When her first romance is tragically thwarted, she willingly enters into an arranged marriage with a loving but painfully quiet man.

Dina’s deeply repressed passions become impossible to ignore, finding a dangerous outlet in a sudden and intense obsession with a married man, with terrible consequences. Exiled to New York City, Dina meets Joan, a modern secular woman who challenges all she knows of the world and herself.

Set against the exotic backdrop of Jerusalem’s glistening white stones and ancient rituals, Sotah is a contemporary story of the struggle to reconcile tradition with freedom, and faith with love. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 10, 1949
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Brooklyn College; M.A., Hebrew University
   of Jerusalem
• Currently—lives in Jerusalme, Israel

Naomi Ragen is the author of seven novels, including several international bestsellers, and her weekly email columns on life in the Middle East are read and distributed by thousands of subscribers worldwide. An American, she has lived in Jerusalem for the past thirty-nine years and was recently voted one of the three most popular authors in Israel. (From the publisher.)

More
Ragen’s first three novels, which described the lives of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women in Israel and the United States, dealt with themes that had not previously been addressed in that society's literature: wife-abuse (Jephte’s Daughter: 1989), adultery (Sotah: 1992) and rape (The Sacrifice of Tamar: 1995). Reaction to these novels in the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities was mixed. Some hailed her as a pioneer who for the first time exposed and opened to public discussion problems which the communities had preferred to pretend did not exist, while others criticized her for “hanging out the dirty laundry” for everyone to see, thus embarrassing the rabbis who were believed by many to be effectively dealing with these problems “behind the scenes” and also putting “ammunition in the hands of the anti-Semites.”

Her next novel (The Ghost of Hannah Mendes: 1998) told the story of a Sephardic family brought back from the abyss of assimilation by the spirit of their ancestor Gracia Mendes (a true historical figure), a 16th century Portuguese crypto-Jew who risked her life and her considerable fortune to practice her religion in secret.

Chains Around the Grass (2002) is a semi-autobiographical novel of the author’s childhood which dealt with the failure of the American dream for her parents.

In The Covenant (2004) Ragen dealt with the contemporary theme of an ordinary family sucked into the horror of Islamic terrorism.

The Saturday Wife (2007), the story of a rabbi's wayward wife, is loosely based on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and is a satire of modern Jewish Orthodoxy.

Ragen is also known as a playwright. Her 2001 drama, Women’s Minyan, tells the story of an ultra-Orthodox woman who, upon fleeing from her adulterous and abusive husband, finds that he has manipulated the rabbinical courts to deprive her of the right to see or speak to her twelve children. The story is based on a true incident. Women’s Minyan ran for six years in Israel's National Theatre and has been staged in the United States, Canada and Argentina. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Most non-Jewish and many nonorthodox Jews have a skewed view of what life is like in the Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jewish communities. For the most part, these communities are viewed as one homogeneous stereotypical prototype. The result of this is that the diversity and vibrancy of the different communities tend to become blended into a monotone image. This distorted ideal is often found in literature. Naomi Ragen has written a number of books that look at the lives of Haredi women, and which do not adhere to the common stereotypical banalities. In Sotah, Naomi Ragen takes an honest and unapologetic look at the lives led by three sisters in one close-knit community. In this book she paints a portrait that is as varied as the players portrayed, and which shows both positive and negative aspects of the culture.
Rochelle Caviness - The Jewish Eye.com

Ragen's second novel (after Jephte's Daughter) revisits the insular world of ultrareligious Jews, focusing on the Reich family's three daughters and how they fare in the elemental rite of passage—marriage. In the Haredi community (made up of Jews who observe "the tiniest dictate of law" and have "boundless contempt" for all things secular), a matchmaker handles—and sometimes mishandles—nuptials based on dowry, piety and family ties, and only incidentally on love or compatibility. Harsh as these customs may seem, Ragen's detailed and thoughtful evocations of daily life in such an enclave offer insights into its members' beliefs. The drama centers on the Reichs' devout middle daughter, Dina, who tries to reconcile her desires and dreams within the confines of her narrow world. How she becomes a sotah (a woman suspected of adultery), her banishment from seeing her husband and young child, and the ultimate reconciliation of her strict faith with the meaningful aspects of a secular society form the heart of this very readable, but at times simplistic novel. Ragen is most successful when she tells the story from the vantage point of the haredi world, less so when her characters are secular Jews. A stronger work of fiction than Jephte's Daughter, the narrative holds the reader's attention throughout.
Publishers Weekly

Love-conquers-all genre takes on deep philosophical questions as Ragen (Jephte's Daughter, 1989) continues her exploration of orthodox Jewish life in this story of a woman accused of adultery—the sotah. The setting is the ultraorthodox milieu of Jerusalem, where the men study the Torah in yeshivas while their wives bear numerous children, clean and cook, and find outside work to supplement their meager incomes. Here, heroine Dina's struggle to be independent and still religiously observant provides the more profound concerns of a story that, despite its religious background, is basically your typically rosy fade-out into a technicolor sunset, with all problems—and they are not insubstantial—wrapped up in the last chapter. Dina Reich, the beautiful and dutiful daughter of Rabbi Reich and his remarkably energetic and saintly wife, yearns for love, for knowledge of a wider world than the narrow one she is confined to. A brief romance, ended because her family could not pay the requisite dowry, means that Dina must accept a husband chosen by the sect's matchmaker and approved by her parents. She marries good but painfully inarticulate Judah, a carpenter; bears a child; then, bored and lonely, begins a relationship with a more worldly neighbor. Though it's not consummated, religious vigilantes threaten her, and at their behest she flees to New York, where she works as a maid for a wonderful family, who, when she breaks down, do all they can to bring about the inevitable happy ending. Not only is Dina reunited with Judah, whose virtues she now appreciates, but she also finds a satisfactory compromise between the comforting security of religion and tradition and the more fulfilling aspects of sectarian life. Richness of faith and family lovingly.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The Sotah was a woman accused of adultery who had to go through a purifying ritual to prove her innocence, or ascertain her guilt. Read Numbers 5, 11-28. How do the events in Sotah parallel the biblical ritual? What is Dina Reich guilty of? Does she reach purification, or teshuva?

2. Female family relationships are very important in Sotah. Describe the relationship between Dina and her sisters, the girls and their mother.

3. Joan opens Dina's eyes to the greater world, but Dina open's Joan's eyes and her heart to many things this modern woman is equally ignorant of. Describe their relationship and what they teach each other.

4. In the beginning of Sotah, we encounter Dina Reich as a young girl. In the course of the story she matures and changes. How would you describe the kind of transformation that takes place in her?

5. The word "sift" describes a pivotal concept in Sotah. Can you describe when the word is used, and what it means in terms of the story?

6. Attempts to find Dina a husband without the use of a matchmaker result in disaster. Describe the positive role of the matchmaker in the haredi world.

7. Compared to modern Western rituals of dating and marriage, the haredi world seems very narrow. Can you see anything positive in the haredi customs?

8. Statistics show that haredi women have a lower life expectancy than their husbands do. What elements in the life of Dina's mother and her sisters do you think could lead to that?

9. Moishe writes Dina: "I guess being a Chasid is pretty good training " (for being a soldier). What does he mean? Do you agree with him?

10. The idea of "chesed" is very important in Sotah. What is "chesed?" Can you describe acts of chesed in the book?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Soul of an Octopus:  A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
Sy Montogmery, 2015
Atria Books
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451697728


Summary
In this astonishing book from the author of the bestselling memoir The Good Good Pig, Sy Montgomery explores the emotional and physical world of the octopus—a surprisingly complex, intelligent, and spirited creature—and the remarkable connections it makes with humans.

Sy Montgomery’s popular 2011 Orion magazine piece, "Deep Intellect," about her friendship with a sensitive, sweet-natured octopus named Athena and the grief she felt at her death, went viral, indicating the widespread fascination with these mysterious, almost alien-like creatures.

Since then Sy has practiced true immersion journalism, from New England aquarium tanks to the reefs of French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico, pursuing these wild, solitary shape-shifters.

Octopuses have varied personalities and intelligence they show in myriad ways: endless trickery to escape enclosures and get food; jetting water playfully to bounce objects like balls; and evading caretakers by using a scoop net as a trampoline and running around the floor on eight arms.

But with a beak like a parrot, venom like a snake, and a tongue covered with teeth, how can such a being know anything? And what sort of thoughts could it think?

The intelligence of dogs, birds, and chimpanzees was only recently accepted by scientists, who now are establishing the intelligence of the octopus, watching them solve problems and deciphering the meaning of their color-changing camouflage techniques. Montgomery chronicles this growing appreciation of the octopus, but also tells a love story.

By turns funny, entertaining, touching, and profound, The Soul of an Octopus reveals what octopuses can teach us about consciousness and the meeting of two very different minds. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 7, 1958
• Where—Frankfurt, Germany
• Education—3 B.A. degrees, Syracuse University (USA)
• Currently—lives in Hancock, New Hampshire, USA


Sy Montgomery is a naturalist, author and scriptwriter who writes for children as well as adults. She is author of more than 20 books, including The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness (2015), which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a New York Times Bestseller. Her most popular book is The Good Good Pig (2007), the bestselling memoir of life with her pig, Christopher Hogwood.

Her other notable titles include Journey of the Pink Dolphins, Spell of the Tiger, and Search for the Golden Moon Bear. She has been described as "part Indiana Jones, part Emily Dickinson".[1] Her book for children, Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea was the recipient of the 2007 Orbis Pictus Award and was selected as an Honor book for the ALA Sibert Award.[2]

For a half-hour National Geographic TV segment, she scripted and appeared in Spell of the Tiger, based on her book of that title. Also for National Geographic TV she developed and scripted Mother Bear Man based on the work of Ben Kilham, who raises and released orphaned black bears, which won a Chris Award. [3]

Author Vicki Croke asked Sy what she has learned, not just about an animal’s natural history, but lessons about life. Sy answered: “How to be a good creature. How do you be compassionate?… I think that animals teach compassion better than anything else and compassion doesn’t necessarily just mean a little mouse with a sore foot and you try to fix it. It means getting yourself inside the mind and heart of someone else. Seeing someone’s soul, looking for their truth. Animals teach you all of that and that’s how you get compassion and heart.”

Book Reviews
Charming and moving...with extraordinary scientific research.
Guardian (UK)


Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus does for the creature what Helen Macdonald 's H Is for Hawk did for raptors.
New Statesman (UK)


An engaging work of natural science... There is clearly something about the octopus’s weird beauty that fires the imaginations of explorers, scientists, writers.
Daily Mail (UK)


Fascinating…touching… informative.… Entertaining books like The Soul of an Octopus remind us of just how much we not only have to learn from fellow creatures, but that they can have a positive impact on our lives.
Daily Beast


Journalistic immersion…allows Montgomery to deliver a deeper understanding of the "other," thereby adding to our understanding of ourselves. A good book might illuminate something you knew little about, transform your world view, or move you in ways you didn't think possible. The Soul of an Octopus delivers on all three.
New Scientist


Informative and entertaining, part memoir and part scientific exploration, reminds us that if we are the best creatures on the planet at thinking, we can benefit by thinking about the creatures that may be doing it in some other way.
Columbus Dispatch


Sweet moments are at the heart of Montgomery's compassionate, wise and tender new book.… Only a writer of her talent could make readers care about octopuses as individuals.… Joins a growing body of literature that asks us to rethink our connection to nonhumans who may be more like us than we had supposed.
St. Paul Pioneer Press


Montgomery's deep love of these creatures often causes her to excessively anthropomorphize them, but her depictions of her intimate experiences with her cephalopod friends ring true, allowing readers to see them in an entirely new light.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Naturalist Montgomery admirably demonstrates the complexity, intellect, and personalities of the octopuses…without ever resorting to easy anthropomorphism. Her science is accessible but not overly simple, and the details she offers about these creatures bring them into sharp focus. —Lisa Peet
Library Journal


(Starred review.) In prose as gripping and entwining as her subjects’ many arms, Montgomery chronicles the octopus’ phenomenal strength, dexterity, speed.… She also tells funny and moving stories…[and] profoundly recalibrates our perception of consciousness.
Booklist


Naturalist Montgomery chronicles her extraordinary experience bonding with three octopuses.… With apparent delight, Montgomery puts readers inside the world of these amazing creatures. A fascinating glimpse into an alien consciousness.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Sy Montgomery writes about her scientific and emotional attraction to octopuses. Did anything surprise you in her poetic, sensuous language about the octopuses? Does she make clear what science cannot explain about octopuses?

2. How does Montgomery describe the different personalities that the octopuses have? Do you agree with her assessments of their attributes? Can you relate to the emotions that she interprets them to have?

3. Otherness is a central issue in the book—the otherness of the octopus with its nature so dramatically different from that of other mollusks as well as the differences between cephalopods and people. How does Montgomery use the otherness of the octopus to show the ways the human characters in the story can feel that they don’t fit in or belong? How do the human characters with their varied backgrounds find ways of coming together and belonging?

4. The similarities between octopuses and humans are another theme. What are the similarities that Montgomery sees? Would you share her point of view or do you see the differences more than the similarities?

5. What does Montgomery reveal about what constitutes consciousness, in humans and animals? Does she show that octopuses have consciousness?

6. Does Montgomery address and answer the question of whether an octopus can have a soul? If so, how does she show the animal has a soul? If not, does she explain that the animal does not have a soul?

7. What is anthropomorphism? Given what science knows now about the consciousness of animals, is anthropomorphism a problem? If so, why?

8. What are the issues involved in collecting wild octopuses from the oceans and studying them in an aquarium?

9. Many cultures consume octopuses as food. Do you see any issues regarding eating octopuses?

10. For a book that imparts a wealth of scientific information about octopuses, Montgomery uses humor and also a deep sense of feeling and respect for the octopus and all of nature. How does Montgomery convey the major conservation issues, such as global warming and the health of the oceans, in the stories she tells in this book about people and animals?

11. Has your view of human consciousness changed after reading this account? Has your view of animal consciousness changed? What information specifically influenced you?

12. Has your perspective on nature and on octopuses been influenced by this book? What views has the book reinforced and what views has it changed your mind about?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Soul Thief
Charles Baxter, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400034406

Summary
As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable.

But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. In this extraordinary novel of mischief and menace, we see a young man's very self vanishing before his eyes. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 13, 1947
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B. A., Macalester College; Ph.D., State University
   of New York, Buffalo
• Awards—Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and
   Letters; Prix St. Valentine for The Feast of Love
• Currently—lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Charles Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of eight other works of fiction, including most recently Believers, Harmony of the World, and Through the Safety Net. The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award. (From the publisher.)

More
Although his body of work includes poetry and essays, award-winning writer Charles Baxter is best known for his fiction—brilliantly crafted, non-linear stories that twist and turn in unexpected directions before reaching surprising yet nearly always satisfying conclusions. He specializes in portraits of solid Midwesterners, regular Joes and Janes whose ordinary lives are disrupted by accidents, chance encounters, and the arrival of strangers; and his books have garnered a fierce and loyal following among readers and critics alike.

Born in Minneapolis in 1947, Baxter was barely a toddler when his father died. His mother remarried a wealthy attorney who moved the family onto a sprawling estate in suburban Excelsior. From prep school, Baxter was expected to attend Williams, but instead he chose Macalester, a small, liberal arts college in St. Paul. Intending to pursue a career in teaching and writing, he enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the State University of New York at Buffalo, attracted by a faculty that included such literary luminaries of the day as John Barth and Donald Barthelme.

After grad school, Baxter moved to Michigan to teach at Wayne State University in Detroit. He spent more than a decade concentrating on writing poetry, but after a particularly discouraging dry spell, he decided to try his hand at fiction. He labored long and hard over three novels, none of which was accepted for publication. Then, just as he was about to give up altogether, he attempted one last trick. He whittled the three novels down to short stories, replacing epic themes, extraordinary characters, and ambitious story arcs with the small, quiet stuff of ordinary life. It was a good decision, In 1984, his first collection of short fiction, Harmony of the World, was published. Another anthology followed, then a debut novel. Published in 1987, First Light charmed readers with its unusual structure (the story unfolds backwards in time) and a cast of richly, draw, fully human characters.

Baxter continued to publish throughout the 1990s, alternating between short and full-length fiction, and with each book he garnered larger, more appreciative audiences and better reviews. His breakthrough occurred in 2000 with The Feast of Love, a novel composed of many small stories that form a single, cohesive narrative. Described by the New York Times as "rich, juicy, laugh-out-loud funny and completely engrossing," The Feast of Love was nominated for a National Book Award.

"Every time I've finished a book, it feels to me as if the washrag has been rung out," Baxter confessed in a 2003 interview. Yet he keeps on crafting absorbing stories infused with quiet (sometimes absurdist) wit and a compassionate understanding of the human condition. A longtime director of the creative writing program at the University of Michigan, he is known as a generous mentor, and several of his students have gone on to forge successful literary careers of their own.

Extras
From a 2003 interview with Barnes & Noble:

• My novels are sometimes criticized for being episodic, or structurally weird. And they are! I like them that way. It's fairly late in the day — 2003 as I write — in the history of the novel, and I think it's fair for writers to mess around with that form, and to stop thinking that they have to write books that move smoothly from the first act to the second act, and then to the climax and the denouement. I like digressions, asides, intrusions, advice, anything that gets in the way of a smooth narcotic flow. New novels should not look like old novels, except when they want to.

• My father died when I was eighteen months old, and I expect the unexpected to happen in life and in art, and my fiction is full, or loaded down, with unexpected fatalities of one kind or another. For me, that's realism."

• I had an unhappy childhood that I thought was happy, and I dove into books as inspiration and relief and comfort and security and information about what people did and how they thought. I can still get happy and sentimental just over the thought of libraries — the image of a woman sitting quietly and reading is a terrifically sexy image for me.

• Like many writers, I'm private and quiet and observant and bookish. For a physical outlet, I lift weights at the gym two or three times a week, and I don't quit unless and until I've worked up a fairly good sweat. Many writers need an outlet like that to counter the sedentary nature of what they do. I don't have any wild delusions about the greatness of my work: I am happy to work humbly in this field where so many writers have created so many immortal manifestations of the mind and spirit. As Henry James said, you work in the dark; you do what you can; the rest is the madness of art.

• When asked what book most influenced his life as a writer, he answered:

For many writers, the experience of falling in love with a book has to happen in high school, or it won't happen at all. Love at that age is mad love. The book that did it for me at that period in my life was Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, with its voluptuous melancholy; I don't think I had ever imagined that the word "sorrow" could be deployed in so many densely lyrical ways. The book's dramatic idea of the outsider struck a chord in me, since in those days I felt as if I was outside everything of any importance. The other book that did it for me was Melville's Moby-Dick, whose language struck me as wonderfully over-the-top. I found myself pleasurably lost in it and never wanted it to end. (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Gloriously done.... It's like watching fire slowly travel up a curtain, waiting for the moment the whole cloth will be engulfed.
New York Times

Delicious.... Entirely original.... The Soul Thief is so craftily constructed that to appreciate how liberally Baxter plants creepy hints of what's to come a reader really should savor this book twice.
Washington Post Book World

Though a much trickier and more cerebral book than his previous novels, this is a dandy psychological thriller in which proliferating mirrors will make your head spin. Baxter has given us the writer's version of that famous M.C. Escher print in which one hand is drawing the other.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Examines love and lust and the various permutations and cries in between.... Few American writers handle those compelling subjects with a more sure touch or more worthy insight.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

With a prose style lyrical, accessible and warmly humorous, Charles Baxter has been quietly building a reputation as one of America's favorite literary authors.... His newest novel teems with the same good-natured empathy and wry humor that imbues his earlier works.... [I]t surely will delight.
St. Louis Post Dispatch

Opening in gritty, nineteen-seventies Buffalo, Baxter’s suspenseful fifth novel concerns a mildmannered graduate student, Nathaniel, who falls under the spell of a cerebral but affected outsider, the aptly named Coolberg. Drawn to Coolberg’s sneering persona (and to that of his girlfriend, Theresa, who relishes Coolberg’s performances), Nathaniel begins to unravel when he learns that Coolberg is appropriating his identity: a burglar steals clothes from Nathaniel that Coolberg ends up wearing, and Coolberg begins claiming Nathaniel’s history for his own. Baxter’s talent for creating uncanny settings and telling details and his inventive way with language (a similarly dressed couple are "umbilicaled") are both on display here, but the conceptual twist at the novel’s end feels unequal to the dramatic tension that precedes it.
The New Yorker

Critics’ reactions depended on how well they tolerated [Baxter's] inventiveness. Those who enjoyed it found The Soul Thief a compelling investigation into how identities are lost and found over a lifetime. Those who were less patient...left the novel feeling robbed of solid characters.
Bookmarks Magazine

The author of the National Book Award–nominated The Feast of Love, Baxter returns with this ninth book, an assay into the limits of character, fictional and otherwise. The first half of the novel follows the brief arc of Nathaniel Mason's graduate career in 1970s Buffalo, N.Y., which centers on his friendship with the sexy but self-dramatizing Teresa (which she pronounces Teraysa, as if she were French) and her lover Jerome Coolberg, a virtuoso of cast-off ideas. Coolberg, obsessed with Nathaniel, begins taking his shirts and notebooks, and claiming that episodes from Nathaniel's life happened to him. Coolberg drops a hint that something bad will happen to Jamie, Nathaniel's sometime lover; when it actually comes to pass, Nathaniel's world begins to collapse. In the novel's second half, decades after these events have occurred, Coolberg enters Nathaniel's life again for a final, dramatic confrontation. Baxter has a great, registering eye for the real pleasures and attritions of life, but the book gets hung up on metafictional questions of identity (the major one: who is writing this first-person narrative?). The results cheat readers out of identifying with any of the characters, perhaps intentionally.
Publishers Weekly 

Discussion Questions
1. Is The Soul Thief a work of “metafiction”? What aspects of its narrative structure—and of the narrators themselves—might be considered metafictional? How does it differ from more conventional, naturalistic novels?

2. A fellow grad student, Bob Rimjky, says of Jerome Coolberg: “Really, all he wants to do is acquire everyone's inner life” [p. 15]. Why would Coolberg want to possess other people's inner lives? In what ways is this kind of appropriation similar to what novelists do?

3. Coolberg accuses Nathaniel of “willful incomprehension. And convenient amnesia. You're just like this country...a champion of strategic forgetting” [p. 193]. Is this true of Nathaniel? In what ways is America a champion of “strategic forgetting”?

4. After it is revealed that Coolberg himself is “the author” of Nathaniel's story, the narrator says that “the point cannot be that one person can take on another's life.... The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything” [p. 203]. In what ways is The Soul Thief about love and forgiveness?

5. The Soul Thief exhibits a sharp satirical wit. What are Baxter's chief satirical targets in the novel? What does his satire reveal about these subjects?

6. In his role as host of the radio show, American Evenings, Coolberg guides his guests to a revelatory moment that uncovers “the story's secret heart” [p. 156]. What is the secret heart of The Soul Thief? How is it revealed?

7. In what ways does the act of telling stories save both Nathaniel and his sister? What is Baxter suggesting here about the power of stories?

8. When Nathaniel's sister regains her powers of speech, Nathaniel rejects the idea that this was a miracle. Instead, he attributes her recovery to “the force of compassion, which under certain circumstances can bring the dead to life.” He goes on to say that “though a prejudice exists in our culture against compassion, there being little profit in it, the emotion itself is ineradicable” [p. 153]. Why would compassion have the power to bring the dead to life? Is Nathaniel right in suggesting that there's a prejudice against compassion in our culture?

9. Why does Nathaniel fall in love with Theresa and Jamie? In what ways is his love for Jamie more real, even though she is a lesbian, than his love for Theresa? Why isn't Nathaniel ever able to get over Jamie?

10. Coolberg asserts that we're all copycats and that what he's done is really no different than what everyone does. Is he right? Are we all adopting other people's personalities or identities? How should Coolberg finally be judged?

11. Nathaniel asserts that identities are nothing more than “a pile of moldering personal clichés given sentimental value by the fact that someone owns them” [p. 87]. Does the sense of personal identity have any inherent value beyond the sentimental, either in the novel or in “real” life? Does the novel make a distinction between a soul and an identity?

12. Nathaniel wonders why Gertrude Stein keeps intruding on his consciousness. Why won't Stein leave him alone? In what ways is Stein relevant to The Soul Thief?

13. Why does Baxter end the novel with Nathaniel offering “blessings on everybody. Blessings without limit” [p. 210]? What has brought him to this sense of gratitude, forgiveness, and all-inclusive love?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner, 1929
Knopf Doubleday
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679732242

Summary
First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers—the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason

The Sound and the Fury is made up of undifferentiated streams of consciousness that ultimately turn out to be the inner voices of a family's siblings. Its construction is so masterful that the last sentence refers the reader back to the first one, as any perfect work of art might do.

Sound has the earmarks of a modern psychological study, although the book was published in 1929. It is a dramatic and harrowing tale of the Compson family's pathology—primarily in the form of incest and incestuous thoughts. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 25, 1897
• Where—New Albany, Mississippi, USA
• Death—July 6, 1962
• Where—Byhalia, Mississippi
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1950; 2 Pulitizer prizes; others


William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. His family was rooted in local history: his great-grandfather, a Confederate colonel and state politician, was assassinated by a former partner in 1889, and his grandfather was a wealth lawyer who owned a railroad. When Faulkner was five his parents moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he received a desultory education in local schools, dropping out of high school in 1915. Rejected for pilot training in the U.S. Army, he passed himself off as British and joined the Canadian Royal Air Force in 1918, but the war ended before he saw any service. After the war, he took some classes at the University of Mississippi and worked for a time at the university post office. Mostly, however, he educated himself by reading promiscuously.

Faulkner had begun writing poems when he was a schoolboy, and in 1924 he published a poetry collection, The Marble Faun, at his own expense. His literary aspirations were fueled by his close friendship with Sherwood Anderson, whom he met during a stay in New Orleans. Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay, was published in 1926, followed a year later by Mosquitoes, a literary satire. His next book, Flags in the Dust, was heavily cut and rearranged at the publisher's insistence and appeared finally as Sartoris in 1929. In the meantime he had completed The Sound and the Fury, and when it appeared at the end of 1929 he had finished Sanctuary and was ready to begin writing As I Lay Dying. That same year he married Estelle Oldham, whom he had courted a decade earlier.

Although Faulkner gained literary acclaim from these and subsequent novels—Light in August (1932), Pylon (1935), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942)—and continued to publish stories regularly in magazines, he was unable to support himself solely by writing fiction. he worked as a screenwriter for MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Warner Brothers, forming a close relationship with director Howard Hawks, with whom he worked on To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Land of the Pharaohs, among other films. In 1944 all but one of Faulkner's novels were out of print, and his personal life was at low ebb due in part to his chronic heavy drinking. During the war he had been discovered by Sartre and Camus and others in the French literary world. In the postwar period his reputation rebounded, as Malcolm Cowley's anthology The Portable Faulkner brought him fresh attention in America, and the immense esteem in which he was held in Europe consolidated his worldwide stature.

Faulkner wrote seventeen books set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County, home of the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury. "No land in all fiction lives more vividly in its physical presence than this county of Faulkner's imagination," Robert Penn Warren wrote in an essay on Cowley's anthology. "The descendants of the old families, the descendants of bushwhackers and carpetbaggers, the swamp rats, the Negro cooks and farm hands, the bootleggers and gangsters, tenant farmers, college boys, county-seat lawyers, country storekeepers, peddlers--all are here in their fullness of life and their complicated interrelations." In 1950, Faulkner traveled to Sweden to accept the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. In later books—Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962) -- he continued to explore what he had called "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself," but did so in the context of Yoknapatawpha's increasing connection with the modern world. He died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
The critics...now tell us that his style is florid, that his plots are hard to follow, that he sometimes shows bad taste in his choice of material.... On the other hand, I can think of no other living American author who writes with the same intensity or who carries us so completely into a world of his own. There is no American author or our time who has undertaken and partly completed a more ambitious series of novels and stories..... Faulkner has been writing a sort of human comedy that was partly inspired by his reading of Balzac.
Malcolm Cowley - New York Times (10/29/1944)

For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must return to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics.
Ralph Ellison

Faulkner...belongs to the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust.
Edmund Wilson

For all the range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country.
Robert Penn Warren

Discussion Questions
1. The novel's title is taken from a monologue spoken by Shakespeare's Macbeth, who has attained the throne of Scotland through murder and has held it through the most brutal violence and tyranny; at this point in the play he has just heard that his wife has killed herself. Sated with his own corruption and looking forward to his imminent defeat and death, he says:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

Why do you think Faulkner chose a phrase from this passage for his title? How is this passage applicable to the novel? Do you find the novel as pessimistic and despairing as Macbeth's speech?

2. In The Sound and the Fury Faulkner makes use of the stream of consciousness technique, which was also used earlier in the 1920s in such experimental works as James Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. He further complicates matters for the reader by scrambling, as it were, the time frames referred to by the narrating consciousness of the opening section of the novel. How do you learn to find your way in Benjy's chapter? How many time periods are interspersed? What are some of the events Benjy is remembering? If Benjy is the "idiot" of Macbeth's speech, in what ways can he be seen, nonetheless, as both a sensitive and sentient observer of his family?

3. All of the novel's crucialevents are registered in Benjy's section and are later recapitulated or expanded upon by other narrators, for Benjy is in many ways the central and most important narrating consciousness. Faulkner said of Benjy, "To that idiot, time was not a continuation, it was an instant, there was no yesterday and no tomorrow, it all is this moment, it all is [now] to him. He cannot distinguish between what was last year and what will be tomorrow, he doesn't know whether he dreamed it, or saw it." What are some of the effects of the opening section upon your experience of the Compson family story? Why would Faulkner choose Benjy to introduce the reader to his story? What is Benjy's importance in a novel that is dominated by memory rather than action?

4. Which characters, if any, serve as registers of emotional and moral value? In whom do we find love, honor, loyalty, strength? Is Jason the embodiment of the opposite traits? How does Caddy's daughter, Quentin, fit into the scheme of value here? What about Mrs. Compson? Do Benjy's perceptions function as a sort of touchstone for the reader?

5. Each of the four sections has a date rather than a chapter number. Note that three of the narratives take place on three sequential days in April of 1928 though they are not presented in chronological sequence. The second of the four, Quentin's narrative, is dated June 2, 1910—the day he drowned himself at the end of his first year at Harvard. With each section the narrative voice becomes more coherent, and we finish with a fairly straightforward and traditional third-person voice. Why do you think Faulkner has chosen to present things in this way and in this order?

6. What are the reasons for Quentin's decision to drown himself? Why does Faulkner choose to have Quentin narrate his own section, even though he has been dead for nearly eighteen years? What do you see as the meaning of his dual obsession with his sister's virginity and the loss of the family honor? Why does he attempt to make, in a crucial conversation with his father, a false confession of incest? Given Quentin's state of mind at the time, what do you think of Mr. Compson's response to him?

7. For her brothers, Caddy is the traumatic absence at the center of their experience. For Faulkner, Caddy was the image around which the novel took shape; she was "the sister which I did not have and the daughter which I was to lose, " and it all began with the image of "the muddy bottom of a little doomed girl climbing a blooming pear tree in April to look in the window" at the funeral of her grandmother. While Caddy is presented as maternal, erotic, promiscuous, and imperious, she is also unknowable, given that she can only be glimpsed in the rather unreliable narrations of her brothers. Does she appeal to you as a sympathetic character? Is Caddy's fall the cause of the family tragedy or is she just another child-victim of the abdication of parental responsibility? Why do Caddy's brothers each have a narrative voice, while Caddy has none?

8. Jason is an embittered young man with a nasty sense of humor. Nonetheless, he is the querulous Mrs. Compson's favorite, the son upon whom she depends. He imagines people saying of his siblings, "one of them is crazy and another one drowned himself and the other one was turned out into the street by her husband..." [p. 233]. Do you think he succeeds in preserving the appearance of normality that is so important to him? How would you describe Jason's mode ofthinking and reasoning? What are some of his activities and preoccupations? What is the effect of his narrative's mood and voice, following as it does upon Benjy's and Quentin's?

9. What role does Dilsey play in the novel? Why does the narrative of the fourth and final section focus upon her, and why do you think Faulkner chose not to give her a narrative in her own voice? What is the significance of the black community and its church in the final section? The novel ends on Easter Sunday; how does this turn to an overtly Christian context work for you as a reader?

10. The novel takes into its scope a number of serious philosophical and psychological issues—the meaning of time, for instance, and the psychopathology of the family—but it does not devote itself to a cohesive exploration of any of them. What, then, would you say this novel is "about"? Think again about the Macbeth quotation—life is "a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing." What does Faulkner's tale, told four times, signify? What does it achieve? In what ways does the novel focus our attention upon the problem of representing consciousness realistically within the novel form? How does The Sound and the Fury change or affect your experience as a reader of novels?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Sound of Broken Glass (Kincaid and James Series, 15)
Deborah Crombie, 2013
HarperCollins
359 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061990632


Summary
In the past...
On a blisteringly hot August afternoon in Crystal Palace, once home to the tragically destroyed Great Exhibition, a solitary thirteen-year-old boy meets his next-door neighbor, a recently widowed young teacher hoping to make a new start in the tight-knit South London community. Drawn together by loneliness, the unlikely pair forms a deep connection that ends in a shattering act of betrayal.

In the present...
On a cold January morning in London, Detective Inspector Gemma James is back on the job now that her husband, Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid, is at home to care for their three-year-old foster daughter. Assigned to lead a Murder Investigation Team in South London, she's assisted by her trusted colleague, newly promoted Detective Sergeant Melody Talbot. Their first case: a crime scene at a seedy hotel in Crystal Palace. The victim: a well-respected barrister, found naked, trussed, and apparently strangled.

Is it an unsavory accident or murder? In either case, he was not alone, and Gemma's team must find his companion—a search that takes them into unexpected corners and forces them to contemplate unsettling truths about the weaknesses and passions that lead to murder. Ultimately, they will begin to question everything they think they know about their world and those they trust most. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 6, 1952
• Raised—McKinney, Texas, USA
• Education—Austin College; Tarrant County
   College
• Awards—3 Macavity Awards (more below)
• Currently—lives in McKinney, Texas


Deborah Crombie (nee Darden) is an American author of the Duncan Kinkaid / Gemma James mystery series set in the United Kingdom. Crombie was raised in McKinney, Texas, studied Biology at Austin College, and was a writing student of Warren Norwood at Tarrant County College. She has lived in both England and Scotland in the UK.

Crombie began writing her first mystery after dissecting the structure of books by mystery novelists—and has never had a rejection slip. The author of more a dozen novels, she is a top regarded mystery writer. The Independent Mystery Booksellers selected her 1997 Dreaming of the Bones as one of the 100 Best Crime Novels of the Century. She is a three-time Macavity Award winner, an Edgar Award nominee, and New York Times Notable author.

Crombie still lives in McKinney, Texas, sharing a house that is more than one hundred years old with her husband, three cats, and two German shepherds. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
The Sound of Broken Glass, Deborah Crombie’s 15th mystery featuring the Scotland Yard detectives Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid, is new on the hardcover fiction list at No. 9. These books are as British as Downton Abbey, so it’s a bit surprising to learn that Crombie still lives outside her hometown, Dallas.
Gregory Cowles - New York Times Book Review


Bestseller Crombie puts together past and present in her solid, finely controlled 15th novel featuring married police detectives Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid (after 2012’s No Mark upon Her). While Duncan looks after their three-year-old foster daughter at home, Gemma and Det. Sgt. Melody Talbot investigate the murder of barrister Vincent Arnott, found in a seedy hotel in London’s Crystal Palace area, naked, tied with a belt, and strangled. When the body of a second barrister, killed in exactly the same way, turns up, physical evidence proves the same person murdered both men. Gemma and Melody painstakingly and methodically unravel the clues, finding connections that began 15 years earlier in the Crystal Palace area. Flashbacks show how the meeting of a lonely 13-year-old boy and a recently widowed teacher had grave consequences. The unfolding domestic relationship between Gemma and Duncan softens and humanizes them. The city of London, foggy, blustery, and historic, provides a seductive background.
Publishers Weekly


Friendships go seriously awry.... DS Melody Talbot spends the night with guitarist Andy Monahan, a witness and possibly even a suspect in a murder case.... Andy had argued with barrister Vincent Arnott, the victim, between sets at a pub in the Crystal Palace area. Could the musician have followed Arnott to the sleazy Belvedere Hotel, plied him with drugs, stripped him naked, trussed him up, then strangled him with a scarf?.... When another barrister, Shaun Francis, is murdered in identical fashion, the only link between the two dead men seems to be Andy.... Another solid outing for the reliable Crombie, who turns a judicious eye on secrets that can overwhelm what they're meant to protect despite the best intentions.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Talk about the four detectives featured in the novel: Melody, Gemma, Duncan, and Doug. What techniques do they use during their investigation? Does their gender have any influence on how they approach their jobs?

2. Discuss the structure of the novel. Each chapter begins with a small entry on the history of the Crystal Palace. It also includes information from one of the main character's lives: Andy. Why did the author frame the story this way? How does this add to the tension and the plotting? What do you learn about this section of London—how has it changed from when Crystal Palace was built to Andy's childhood to today?

3. How do some of the detectives' choices complicate the case? By the book or think outside of the box?

4. If you are fans of the series, compare the characters from the first novel you read to this one. Describe the arc of each of the characters' developments and identify the factors that helped shape their personalities. Do you have a favorite character? Identify and explain what attracts you to him or her.

5. Being a detective is a highly immersive profession. How do Gemma and Duncan balance work and family life? How does having small children complicate their work? What does it add to it? How does Duncan cope with being a stay-at-home dad?

6. If you are a fan of mystery novels, how does this novel—and the series compare to others in the genre? What is it about this series that appeals to you? Compare and contrast British and American detectives. If this were set in America, how would it be different?

7. Were you surprised when the killer's identity became clear? If yes, what plot devices did Deborah Crombie employ to keep you guessing? If you suspected the killer early, what led you to suspect the truth?

8. What role does class play in the story? Do the detectives have their own prejudices that shape their attitudes and color their investigations?

9. What do you think will happen in the next novel? Will Melody still be seeing Andy? What would you like to see happen in her and Doug's relationship? What may happen to Duncan and his career?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Sound of Glass 
Karen White, 2015
Penguin Publishing
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451470898


Summary
Nominee, 2015 Goodreads Best Book of the Year

It has been two years since the death of Merritt Heyward’s husband, Cal, when she receives unexpected news—Cal’s family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by Cal’s reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt.

Charting the course of an uncertain life—and feeling guilt from her husband’s tragic death—Merritt travels from her home in Maine to Beaufort, where the secrets of Cal’s unspoken-of past reside among the pluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff.

This unknown legacy, now Merritt’s, will change and define her as she navigates her new life—a new life complicated by the arrival of her too young stepmother and ten-year-old half-brother.

Soon, in this house of strangers, Merritt is forced into unraveling the Heyward family past as she faces her own fears and finds the healing she needs in the salt air of the Low Country. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA
• Education—B.S., Tulane University
• Currently—lives near Atlanta, Georgia


Karen White is an American author of some 20 fiction novels.

She was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but because of her father's work with Exxon, her family moved around. She spend most of her childhood in various U.S. states, as well as in Venezuela and England, where she graduated from The American School in London.

Inspired by Gone With the Wind, Karen knew early on that she wanted to be a writer. Instead, however, when it was time for college, she returned to the U.S. to earn a B.S. degree in management from Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

After 10 years in the business world, Karen finally turned to her dream of becoming an author. She published her first book in 2000—In the Shadow of the Moon—which went on to became a double finalist for the Romance Writers of America RITA Award.

Her books have since achieved best seller status on both the New York Times and USA Today lists. They have also been nominated for numerous national contests including the SIBA (Southeastern Booksellers Alliance) Fiction Book of the Year, and has twice won the National Readers’ Choice Award.

She writes what she refers to as "grit lit"—Southern women’s fiction. She has also expanded her horizons into writing a mystery series set in Charleston, South Carolina.

When not writing, she spends her time reading, scrapbooking, playing piano, and avoiding cooking.  She currently lives near Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and two children...and two spoiled Havanese dogs. (Adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website. Retrieved 12/06/2015.)

Book Reviews
Some books you read for the pure pleasure of the writing. Others you read for the emotions that are invoked. The Sound of Glass is a book that pays off in both areas. Karen White dug deep to create this tale of the south and it is well worth all of her efforts. Don't miss this one!
Jackie K. Cooper - Huffington Post


In this fish-out-of-water tale, Merritt moves from her native Maine to a small town in South Carolina.... Verdict: White deftly handles the multifaceted plot while creating a vivid atmosphere. —Karen Core, Detroit P.L.
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the effect of the plane crash in 1955 and the effect on Beaufort. How does it affect the lives of the characters in this story for generations? How did it recast Edith’s life?

2. Of all Loralee’s maxims found in her Journal of Truths, which rings the truest to you? Do you carry around any of your own "truths" to guide your thinking?

3. Even after her husband’s death, why does Edith keep her "secret project" under wraps, even though it helps and inspires the police community?

4. Why do you think Edith makes the sea-glass wind chimes so devotedly? And why do you think Merritt chooses to leave them all in place? What do they come to represent, and why might they be called "mermaid’s tears"?

5. Why does Merritt blame herself for Cal’s death? How does she transform herself over the course of the book? Is she finally at peace with her journey at the end of the story?

6. Discuss the tragic connection between the women in the book. How did each survive her circumstances? Do you think a predisposition for  domestic violence is a trait you can inherit?

7. Were you shocked by the "beloved" letter’s contents? Or by Merritt’s ties to the letter?

8. Do you think Edith was right to keep the letter writer’s secret? Was she justified in any way?

9. Did Cal’s personal struggles and rationale for seeking out Merritt surprise you? Was he sensible in feeling wronged by Edith’s secrecy?

10. Do you believe in fate or coincidences? Are there such things in your opinion? Do you think Merritt and Gibbes were ultimately meant for each other?

11. What is Loralee’s legacy for her loved ones? Do you think she successfully "built" a family or guidebook for Owen?
(Questions found on author's website.)

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The Sound of Things Falling
Juan Gabriel Vasquez, 2011; Anne McClean, trans., 2013
Penguin Group USA
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487484


Summary
From a global literary star comes a prize-winning tour de force – an intimate portrayal of the drug wars in Colombia.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez has been hailed not only as one of South America’s greatest literary stars, but also as one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. In this gorgeously wrought, award-winning novel, Vasquez confronts the history of his home country, Colombia.

In the city of Bogota, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobar’s Medellín cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombia’s streets and in the skies above.

Back then, Antonio witnessed a friend’s murder, an event that haunts him still. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friend’s family have been shaped by his country’s recent violent past. His journey leads him all the way back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change: a time before narco-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare.
 
Vasquez is “one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature,” according to Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, and The Sound of Things Falling is his most personal, most contemporary novel to date, a masterpiece that takes his writing—and will take his literary star—even higher. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—Bogota, Columbia
• Education—J.D., University of Rosario; Ph.D.,
   Sorbonne University
• Awards—Premio Alfaguara de Novela; Roger
   Caillois Award (France)
• Currently—lives in Bogota


Juan Gabriel Vasquez is a Colombian writer and the author, most recently, of The Sound of Things Falling.

Vasquez studied Law in his native city, at the University of Rosario in Bogota, and after graduating left to France, where he lived in París from 1996 to 1999. There, at the Sorbonne, he received a doctorate in Latin American Literature. Later he moved to a small town in the Ardennes in Belgium. After living there for a year, he moved to Barcelona, where he resided until 2012. Today he lives in Bogota.

Vasquez is the author of three "official" novels — The Informers (2004), The Secret History of Costaguana, (2007) and The Sound of Things Falling (2011; U.S. transl, 2013). He wrote two others, which he prefers to ignore, when he was 23 and 25 years old: "I would like to leave this part of my past forgotten. I have this right," he has said.

Even though he recognizes a debt to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his work is a reaction to magical realism, saying this with regard to The Secret History of Costaguana:

I want to forget this absurd rhetoric of Latin America as a magical or marvellous continent. In my novel there is a disproportionate reality, but that which is disproportionate in it is the violence and cruelty of our history and of our politics.... I can say that reading One Hundred Years...in my adolesence contributed much to my vocation, but I believe that all of the side of magical realism is the least interesting part of this novel.... Like all grand novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude requires us to reinvent the truth. I believe that this reinvention is to make us lose ourselves in the magical realism. And what I have tried to make in my novel is to recount the 19th Century Colombian story in a radically distinct key and I fear to oppose what Colombians have read until now.

Vasquez also writes essays and is a weekly columnist in the Colombian newspaper, El Espectador.  His stories have appeared in anthologies in different countries and his novels have been translated to various languages. Furthermore, he himself has translated works of John Hersey, Victor Hugo, and E. M. Forster, among others. He was part of the jury of 81 Latin American and Spanish writers and critics who in 2007 elected for the Colombian review, Semana, the best 100 books in the Castilian language in the last 25 years. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/18/1213.)

Book Reviews
Juan Gabriel Vasquez's brilliant new novel rejects the vivid colors and mythical transformations of [Garcia Marquez's] Caribbean masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in favor of the cold, bitter poetry of Bogota and the hushed intensity of young married love…A gripping novel, absorbing right to the end…The Sound of Things Falling...[is] also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded. Bogota and the Colombian countryside are beautifully if grimly described.
Edmund White - New York Times Book Reivew


Like Bolano, [Vasquez] is a master stylist and a virtuoso of patient pacing and intricate structure, and he uses the novel for much the same purpose that Bolaño did: to map the deep, cascading damage done to our world by greed and violence and to concede that even love can’t repair it.
Lev Grossman - Time


Vasquez creates characters whose memories resonate powerfully across an ingeniously interlocking structure.... Vasquez creates a compelling literary work—one where an engaging narrative envelops poignant memories of a fraught historical period
New Republic
 

Quietly elegant… Vasquez is a resourceful storyteller. Scenes and dialogue shine with well-chosen details. His theme echoes compellingly through family parallels, ill-fated flights and even a recurring hippo motif. He shrugs off the long shadow of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a gritty realism that has its own persuasive magic.
Bloomberg News


If you only read one book this month...
Esquire


(Starred review.) [T]his book is an exploration of the ways in which stories profoundly impact lives.... Yammara befriends enigmatic stranger Ricardo Laverde. One night, assassins on motorbikes open fire on the two, killing Laverde and seriously wounding Yammara.... Yammara eventually finds Laverde’s daughter....Together they lose themselves in stories of Laverde’s childhood....and as the puzzle of Laverde is pieced together, Yammara comes to realize just how thoroughly the stories of these other people are part of his own.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) In this latest from Vasquez, law professor Antonio Yammara recalls befriending retired pilot and former convict Ricardo Laverde, who is later killed in a shooting in which Yammara is seriously wounded. The murder propels an extensive inquiry into Laverde's background.... Only near the very end do we discover Laverde's involvement in one of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's drug cartels. Yet Vasquez does not emphasize the drug trafficking, instead focusing on poor choices and the role of memory in the retelling of events: "reality [is] adjusted to the memory we have of it." Verdict:... [a] genuine and magnificently written examination of memory's persistence.... —Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH
Library Journal


An odd coincidence leads Antonio Yammara, a law professor and narrator of this novel...deep into the mystery of personality, both his own and especially that of Ricardo Laverde, a casual acquaintance of Yammara before he was gunned down on the streets of Bogota.... Yammara is... intrigued by Laverde's murder and wants to find out the mystery behind his life. His curiosity leads him circuitously to Laverde's relationship with Elena, his American wife [and] Maya Fritts, Laverde's daughter by Elena, who fills in some of the gaps in Yammara's knowledge.... [This] ambiguous borderland where things don't quite come into coherent focus is where most of the characters remain.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

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

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Sourdough 
Robin Sloan, 2017
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374203108


Summary
In his much-anticipated new novel, Robin Sloan does for the world of food what he did for the world of books in Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions.

She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues.

The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her—feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it.

Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up.

When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology. But who are these people, exactly?

Leavened by the same infectious intelligence that made Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore such a sensation, while taking on even more satisfying challenges, Sourdough marks the triumphant return of a unique and beloved young writer. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980
• Raised—Troy, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.A., Michigan State University
• Currently—lives in Berkeley, California


Robin Sloan is an American novelist and short story writer — the author of the New York Times bestselling novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (2012), and Sourdough (2017), as well as the novella Annabel Scheme (2009) and an assortment of short stories.

Sloan was raised in Troy, Michigan, and earned a degree in economics from Michigan State University. While still a student, he co-founded a literary magazine called Oats. For 10 years, (2002-2012), he worked at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, Current TV, and Twitter — in various positions, all of which explore the future of media. Currently, Sloan works as a "media inventor" out of the Murray Street Lab in South Berkeley.

In addition to his writing and media work, Sloan and his partner, Kathryn Tomajan, lease three acres in Sunol, California, where they produce extra virgin olive oil. Sloan makes his home in Berkeley, California. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
The magical world Robin Sloan used to such affect in Mr. Penumbra’ 24-Hour Bookstore shows up in his newest, Sourdough. The “magick” here, though, is less Harry Potter and more of the Garden Spells variety: whimsical rather than mystical.… The writing is, in parts, smart and insightful, particularly when describing the tech world. The how-tos of baking, the invisible “empire” of microbes, and the politics of agribusiness are also quite good. Overall, though, while pleasant and occasionally clever, Sourdough feels somewhat lackluster. 
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers


In his novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Sloan unraveled a mystery about a web designer who takes a job in a peculiar all-night Bay area book shop. New technology clashed, then melded, with classic history. Sourdough promises a similar sort of tech and analog mashup, in this case involving the food industry: a software engineer learns to bake bread and uncovers a secret underground market. We’re already hungry for it.
Miami Herald


Delightful…equal measures techie and foodie fodder, a perfect parable for our times.
San Francisco Magazine


As he did in Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan will have readers looking for magic in the mundane.
Nora Horvath - Real Simple


Sloan captures contemporary work environments, current reality, and future trends. It’s a busy novel, crammed with some excellent bits…and some bits that are just creative hyperactivity…. [M]uch to savor, but like the starter it proves rich and buoyant at first, then overreaches.
Publishers Weekly


[B]uoyant, touch-of-magic prose.… How many novels can boast an obstreperous sourdough starter as a key character? A delightful and heartfelt read.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Filled with crisp humor and weird but endearing characters.… At once a parody of startup culture and a foodie romp.… [A] delight, perfect for those who like a little magic with their meals.
Booklist


A listless coder discovers inspiration—and some unusual corners of the Bay Area—via a batch of sourdough starter.… But the absurdities of the plot twists…ultimately feel less cleverly offbeat than hokey.… Fluffy but overbaked.
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. Talk about Lois, especially as the book opens. How does she feel about her job, and how has the job affected her outlook on life? What might her experience, as presented in the novel, suggest about contemporary jobs in Silicon Valley?

2. What does Lois mean when she says, "Here's a thing I believe about people my age: We are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted." Why does that belief or idea inspire her to leave Michigan for San Francisco?

3. Do you find the robotic blue arm just a little creepy ... or funny? Is it the wave of the future? While you're at it, can you understand, even define, proprioception? It is truly a marvel of human ability, isn't it?

4. In what ways does the sour dough starter function as a symbol in the novel? Compare, for instance, the sourdough to both the blue arm and Tetra Pak nutritional gel. Think of the meaning of the word "starter" itself.

5. Follow-up to Question 1: Once Lois has taken up kneading dough and building a brick oven, consider her statement about exhaustion : "When I fell into my bed, I was truly tired; not merely the brain-spent Well, I guess I’ll give up now tiredness of a day at the robot factory, but something deeper, actually muscular." How else does her life change? Better yet, how does she change?

6. What do you think of the innovative Marrow Fair Lois is invited to join — funny, frightening, off-putting, even slightly repulsive? All or none of the above?

7. What is Agrippa's empire of microbes — "This is their world, not ours, and their stories are greater."

8. Robin Sloan seems to be taking on both the farm-to-table movement and giant agribusiness. What is his criticism, and does he offer up a solution for feeding the world's growing population?

9. Why does Alice turn down the job offered to her by the doyenne of the California food world?

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

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South 
Lance Charnes, 2014
Wombat Group Media
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780988690332


Summary
Luis Ojeda owes his life to the Pacifico Norte cartel. Literally. Now it’s time to pay.

Luis led escaping Muslims out of the U.S. during the ten years following a 2019 terrorist attack on Chicago. He retired after nearly being killed by a border guard. But now in 2032, the Nortes give Luis a choice: pay back the fortune they spent saving his life, or take on a special job.

The job: Nora Khaled—FBI agent, wife, mother of two, and Muslim. She claims her husband will be exiled to one of the nation’s remote prison camps to rot with over 400,000 other Muslim Americans. Faced with her family’s destruction, she’s forced to turn to Luis—the kind of man she’s spent her career bringing to justice.

But when the FBI publicly accuses Nora of terrorism, Luis learns Nora’s real motive for heading south: she has proof that the nation’s recent history is based on a lie—a lie that reaches to the government’s highest levels.

Torn between self-preservation and the last shreds of his idealism, Luis guides Nora and her family toward refuge in civil war-wracked Mexico. The FBI, a dogged ICE agent, killer drones, bandits, and the fearsome Zeta cartel all plan to stop him. Success might just free Luis from the Nortes...but failure means disappearing into a black-site prison, or a gruesome death for them all.

In a day-after-tomorrow America where government has been downsized and outsourced into irrelevance, and none but the very wealthy few can afford hopes or dreams, Luis and Nora must learn to trust each other to ensure the survival of the truth—and of the people they love. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—Oakland, California, USA
• Education—B.A. University of California, Berkeley; M.S.,California State University, Long Beach
• Currently—lives in Orange County, California


Lance Charnes has been an Air Force intelligence officer, information technology manager, computer-game artist, set designer and Jeopardy! contestant, and is now an emergency management specialist. He’s had training in architectural rendering, terrorist incident response and maritime archaeology, but not all at the same time. His Facebook author page features spies, archaeology and art crime.

Lance is the author of the international thriller DOHA 12, the near-future thriller SOUTH, and the DEWITT AGENCY FILES series of international art-crime novels. All are available in trade paperback and digital editions. He's also a frequent contributor to Macmillan's Criminal Element website. (From the author.)

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

Book Reviews
South is a riveting work of action/adventure suspense that is a real page-turner.... Lance Charnes demonstrates a truly impressive knack for deftly creating a complex and thoroughly engaging story.
Midwest Book Review


South is a compelling futuristic thriller, as convincing a cautionary novel as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was in its day...these were real people forced to live in terrible times, and I was only too happy to cheer them on—or cry over their tragedies.
Criminal Element


Charnes creates characters you can understand and care for. The action scenes in South make you feel as though you are a participant.... South is a brilliantly conceived and executed thriller.
William Brooks, author of Black Karma

Discussion Questions
1. Is Luis a criminal? Why or why not? Do you think it’s possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or the wrong thing for the right reasons?

2. Bel says to Ros, “I just can’t fight anymore” (p. 22, paperback edition). Discuss the various ways that Bel finds to continue fighting, despite her words. Why do you think she refuses to help Ros?

3. Discuss Nora’s relationship with Paul. Who do you think is the dominant member of their household, and why? Take into account that in every instance where they disagree during the story, Nora defers to Paul.

4. Place yourself in Nora’s position. If you learned what she had, what would you have done? How much—if anything—would you risk to bring the truth to light? Would you ask a criminal for help if you needed it?

5. Is McGinley a hero, villain, or some of each? Is he a good law-enforcement officer? Do you approve of his methods? Why or why not?

6. Who was your favorite character, and why? Who was your least-favorite character, and why? Who was the strongest character, and what made them seem that way to you?

7. Do you think anything like the Terrorist Detention Program (South’s network of prison camps in the western U.S.) could actually come about? Why or why not? Given the provocation—the terrorist attack on Wrigley Field that killed thousands—would you support or oppose a real-world TDP? Would you do so publicly?

8. South’s America has become a poorer, less healthy, more brutal and less secure place than it is today. However, it has also achieved full employment, has a booming industrial sector and is an energy exporter. Is this a good tradeoff? Would you want to live there?

9. Newport Beach—a wealthy real-world beach community in Orange County, California—has become a walled, gated enclave in South’s world. Do you think similar cities would opt to isolate themselves from their less-well-off neighbors if allowed? What effect do you think that would have on (a) their residents, and (b) their neighbors? Can you think of instances where this has already been done?

10. Small drones are sold today in electronics stores and on the Internet. Do you have any interest in owning a drone? If you had one, what would you do with it? Would you object to your neighbors owning a drone?

11. Do you think the amount of cultural change required to generate the social and economic conditions seen in South could occur in the next twenty years? Why or why not?

12. How strong a role does religion play in this story? Other than the obvious (Nora’s predicament), how does it manifest itself?

13. What other aspects of South’s reality would you have liked to hear about, but weren’t included in the story? Given the conditions of the book’s world, how do you think these bypassed issues would work?

14. Real-world gunfights tend to be messy, confused actions, frightening to both participants and onlookers, in which far more shots miss than hit their targets. Did the author portray this reality effectively in the action sequences? Do you find this preferable to the usual Hollywood depiction of gunfights, and why/why not?

15. Consider the various fates of the principal characters. Which ones ended up the way you expected? Which ones had outcomes different from what you expected? If you could change one main character’s fate, whose would it be, what would you change, and why?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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South of Broad 
Pat Conroy, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385344074


Summary 
Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a respected Joyce scholar.

After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of ten, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death, and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to sustain him. Eventually, he finds his answer when he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that includes friends Sheba and Trevor Poe, glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison-escapee father; hardscrabble mountain runaways Niles and Starla Whitehead; socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge X-and an ever-widening circle whose liaisons will ripple across two decades, from 1960s counterculture through the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

The ties among them endure for years, surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, as well as Charleston's dark legacy of racism and class divisions. But the final test of friendship that brings them to San Francisco is something no one is prepared for.

South of Broad is Pat Conroy at his finest: a long-awaited work from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—October 26, 1945
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.A., The Citadel
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California, and Fripp
   Island, South, Carolina


Pat Conroy was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to a young career military officer from Chicago and a Southern beauty from Alabama, whom Pat often credits for his love of language. He was the first of seven children.

His father was a violent and abusive man, a man whose biggest mistake, Conroy once said, was allowing a novelist to grow up in his home, a novelist "who remembered every single violent act.... My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life." Since the family had to move many times to different military bases around the South, Pat changed schools frequently, finally attending the Citadel Military Academy in Charleston, South Carolina, upon his father's insistence. While still a student, he wrote and then published his first book, The Boo, a tribute to a beloved teacher.

After graduation, Conroy taught English in Beaufort, where he met and married a young woman with two children, a widow of the Vietnam War. He then accepted a job teaching underprivileged children in a one-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island, a remote island off the South Carolina shore. After a year, Pat was fired for his unconventional teaching practices—such as his unwillingness to allow corporal punishment of his students—and for his general lack of respect for the school's administration. Conroy evened the score when he exposed the racism and appalling conditions his students endured with the publication of The Water is Wide in 1972. The book won Conroy a humanitarian award from the National Education Association and was made into the feature film Conrack, starring Jon Voight.

Writings
Following the birth of a daughter, the Conroys moved to Atlanta, where Pat wrote his novel, The Great Santini, published in 1976. This autobiographical work, later made into a powerful film starring Robert Duvall, explored the conflicts of his childhood, particularly his confusion over his love and loyalty to an abusive and often dangerous father.

The publication of a book that so painfully exposed his family's secret brought Conroy to a period of tremendous personal desolation. This crisis resulted not only in his divorce but the divorce of his parents; his mother presented a copy of The Great Santini to the judge as "evidence" in divorce proceedings against his father.

The Citadel became the subject of his next novel, The Lords of Discipline, published in 1980. The novel exposed the school's harsh military discipline, racism and sexism. This book, too, was made into a feature film.

Pat remarried and moved from Atlanta to Rome where he began The Prince of Tides which, when published in 1986, became his most successful book. Reviewers immediately acknowledged Conroy as a master storyteller and a poetic and gifted prose stylist. This novel has become one of the most beloved novels of modern time—with over five million copies in print, it has earned Conroy an international reputation. The Prince of Tides was made into a highly successful feature film directed by Barbra Streisand, who also starred in the film opposite Nick Nolte, whose brilliant performance won him an Oscar nomination.

Beach Music (1995), Conroy's sixth book, was the story of Jack McCall, an American who moves to Rome to escape the trauma and painful memory of his young wife's suicidal leap off a bridge in South Carolina. The story took place in South Carolina and Rome, and also reached back in time to the Holocaust and the Vietnam War. This book, too, was a tremendous international bestseller.

While on tour for Beach Music, members of Conroy's Citadel basketball team began appearing, one by one, at his book signings around the country. When his then-wife served him divorce papers while he was still on the road, Conroy realized that his team members had come back into his life just when he needed them most. And so he began reconstructing his senior year, his last year as an athlete, and the 21 basketball games that changed his life. The result of these recollections, along with flashbacks of his childhood and insights into his early aspirations as a writer, is My Losing Season, Conroy's seventh book and his first work of nonfiction since The Water is Wide.

South of Broad, published in 2009, 14 years after Beach Music, tells the story of friendships, first formed in high school, that span two decades.

He currently lives in Fripp Island, South Carolina with his wife, the novelist Cassandra King. (Adapted from the author's website and Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews 
South of Broad is a big sweeping novel of friendship and marriage—and, perhaps, vintage Pat Conroy…Conroy is an immensely gifted stylist, and there are passages in the novel that are lush and beautiful and precise. No one can describe a tide or a sunset with his lyricism and exactitude. My sense is that the millions of readers who cherish Conroy's work won't be at all disappointed—and nor will anyone who owns stock in Kleenex.
Chris Bohjalian - Washington Post

Echoing some themes from his earlier novels, Conroy fleshes out the almost impossibly dramatic details of each of the friends’ lives in this vast, intricate story, and he reveals truths about love, lust, classism, racism, religion, and what it means to be shaped by a particular place, be it Charleston, South Carolina, or anywhere else in the U.S. —Mark Knoblauch
Booklist

Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy's first novel in 14 years. In the late '60s and after his brother commits suicide, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city's inhabitants: scions of Charleston aristocracy; Appalachian orphans; a black football coach's son; and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo's coterie stormed Charleston's social, sexual and racial barricades, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. Too often the not-so-witty repartee and the narrator's awed voice (he is very fond of superlatives) overwhelm the stories surrounding the group's love affairs and their struggles to protect one another from dangerous pasts. Some characters are tragically lost to the riptides of love and obsession, while others emerge from the frothy waters of sentimentality and nostalgia as exhausted as most readers are likely to be. Fans of Conroy's florid prose and earnest melodramas are in for a treat.
Publishers Weekly

"Kids, I'm teaching you to tell a story. It's the most important lesson you'll ever learn," says the protagonist of Conroy's first novel in 14 years (since 1995's Beach Music). Switching between the 1960s and the 1980s, the narrative follows a group of friends whose relationship began in Charleston, SC. The narrator is Leopold Bloom King (his mother was a Joyce scholar), a likable but troubled kid who goes from having one best friend, his brother, to having no friends after a tragedy, to having, suddenly, a gang, of which he is perhaps not the leader but certainly the glue. Conroy continues to demonstrate his skill at presenting the beauty and the ugliness of the South, holding both up for inspection and, at times, admiration. He has not lost his touch for writing stories that are impossible to put down; the fast pace and shifting settings grip the reader even as the story occasionally veers toward the unbelievable. Verdict: Filled with the lyrical, funny, poignant language that is Conroy's birthright, this is a work Conroy fans will love. Libraries should buy multiple copies. —Amy Watts, Univ. of Georgia Lib., Athens
Library Journal

First novel in 14 years from the gifted spinner of Southern tales (Beach Music, 1995, etc.)—a tail-wagging shaggy dog at turns mock-epic and gothic, beautifully written throughout. The title refers, meaningfully, to a section of Charleston, S.C., and, as with so many Southern tales, one great story begets another and another. This one starts most promisingly: "Nothing happens by accident." Indeed. The Greeks knew that, and so does young Leopold Bloom King. It is on Bloomsday (June 16) 1969 that 18-year-old Leo learns his mother had once been a nun. Along the way, new neighbors appear, drugs make their way into the idyllic landscape and two new orphans turn up "behind the cathedral on Broad Street." The combination of all these disparate elements bears the unmistakable makings of a spirit-shaping saga. The year 1969 is a heady one, of course, with the Summer of Love still fresh in memory, but Altamont on the way and Vietnam all around. Working a paper route along the banks of the Ashley River and discovering the poetry of place ("a freshwater river let mankind drink and be refreshed, but a saltwater river let it return to first things"), Leo gets himself in a heap of trouble, commemorated years later by the tsk-tsking of the locals. But he also finds out something about how things work ("Went out with a lot of women when I was young," says one Nestor; "I could take the assholes, but the heartbreakers could afflict some real damage.") and who makes them work right—or not. Leo's classic coming-of-age tale sports, in the bargain, a king-hell hurricane. Conroy is a natural at weaving great skeins of narrative, and this one will prove a great pleasure to his many fans.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. At the beginning of the novel, Leo is called on to mitigate the racial prejudice of the football team. What other types of prejudice appear in the novel? Which characters are guilty of relying on preconceived notions? Why do you think Leo is so accepting of most people? Why is his mother so condemnatory?

2. What do you think of the title "South of Broad"? How does the setting inform the novel? Would the novel be very different if it were set in another city or region?

3. As a teenager, Leo is heavily penalized for refusing to name the boy who placed drugs in his pocket. Why did he feel compelled to protect the boy's identity? Do you think he did the right thing?

4. When Leo's mother asks him to meet his new peers, she warns, “Help them, but do not make friends with them.” Do you think such a thing possible? Through the novel, how does Leo help his friends, and how do they help him?

5. Leo's mother tells him, “We're afraid the orphans and the Poe kids will use you,” to which he responds, “I don't mind being needed. I don't even mind being used.” Do you think this is a healthy attitude toward friendship? Do any of the characters end up “using” Leo? Does his outlook on friendship changed by the end of the novel?

6. Leo admits that the years after Steven's suicide nearly killed him. How was he able to cope? How do Leo's parents deal with their grief? What does the novel say about human resilience and our propensity to overcome tragedy?

7. When Sheba suggests to Leo that he divorce his wife, he says, “I knew there were problems when I married Starla so I didn't walk into that marriage blind.” Do you think that knowledge obligates Leo to stay with his wife? In your opinion, does Leo do the right thing by staying married? Would you do the same?

8. Both Chad and Leo are unfaithful to their wives, but only Leo is truthful about it. Do you think this makes Chad's infidelity a worse offense? Why or why not?

9. At two points in the novel, the group tries to rescue a friend: first Niles, then Trevor. But when Starla is in trouble, they don't attempt to save her. Why do you think this is? Has Starla become a “lost cause”?

10. At one point Leo remarks, “I had trouble with the whole concept [of love] because I never fully learned the art of loving myself.” How does the concept of self-love play into the novel?

11. In the moment before Leo attacks Trevor's captor, he recites a portion of “Horatio at the Bridge,” a poem about taking a lone stand against fearful odds. What is the significance of the verse? Do you think it's appropriate to that moment?

12. The twins are the novel's most abused characters and also the most creative. Do you think there is a connection between suffering and art?

13. What do you make of the smiley face symbol that Sheba and Trevor's father paints? How does the novel address the idea of happiness coexisting with pain?

14. At several points in the novel, characters divulge family secrets. Do you believe that this information should stay secret, or is there value in bringing it to light?

15. Leo examines his Catholicism at several points in the novel. What do you think he might say are the advantages and drawbacks of his religion? Do you think all religions are fraught with those problems?

16. One might interpret Leo's mother's attitude toward religion as one of blind faith. If Steven had admitted his abuse to her, do you think she would she have believed him? How do you think the information might have affected her?

17. Sheba and Trevor are literally tormented by their childhoods, in the form of their deranged father. How are some of the other characters hindered by the past? Are they ever able to escape its clutches and, if so, by what means?

18. Discuss the scene in which Leo and Molly rescue the porpoise. What does the event symbolize?

19. Why do you think the discoveries about Leo's mother and Monsignor Max begin and end the novel? What theme do these incidents convey?

20. Chapter one begins with the statement, “Nothing happens by accident,” and Leo often reflects on the way that destiny has shaped his life. How does destiny affect the other characters? Do you agree that real life is the result of predetermined forces? Or can we affect our fate.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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South Pole Station 
Ashley Shelby, 2017
Picador : Macmillan
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250112828


Summary
DO YOU HAVE DIGESTION PROBLEMS DUE TO STRESS?
DO YOU HAVE PROBLEMS WITH AUTHORITY?
HOW MANY ALCOHOLIC DRINKS DO YOU CONSUME A WEEK?
WOULD YOU RATHER BE A FLORIST OR A TRUCK DRIVER?

These are some of the questions that determine if you have what it takes to survive at South Pole Station, a place with an average temperature of -54°F and no sunlight for six months a year.

Cooper Gosling has just answered five hundred of them. Her results indicate she is abnormal enough for Polar life. Cooper’s not sure if this is an achievement, but she knows she has nothing to lose.

Unmoored by a recent family tragedy, she’s adrift at thirty and—despite her early promise as a painter—on the verge of sinking her career. So she accepts her place in the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers Program and flees to Antarctica, where she encounters a group of misfits motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own.

The only thing the Polies have in common is the conviction that they don’t belong anywhere else.

Then a fringe scientist arrives, claiming climate change is a hoax. His presence will rattle this already-imbalanced community, bringing Cooper and the Polies to the center of a global controversy and threatening the ancient ice chip they call home.

A warmhearted comedy of errors set in the world’s harshest place, Ashley Shelby's South Pole Station is a wry and witty debut novel about the courage it takes to band together when everything around you falls apart. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1977
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Third Coast Fiction Prize; William Faulkner Award-Short Fiction
• Currently—lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota


Ashley Shelby is a former editor at Penguin Books, prize-winning writer/journalist, and author of both fiction and nonfiction.

Born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Shelby received her MFA from Columbia University. She is the author of Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City (2003), a narrative nonfiction account of the record-breaking flood that, in 1997, devastated Grand Forks, North Dakota.

The short story that became the basis for her debut novel, South Pole Station (2017) is a winner of the Third Coast Fiction Prize.

Her work has been published widely, including in the Seattle Review, Post Road, Sonora Review, Portland Review, J Journal: New Writings on Social Justice, Sierra, Full Circle Journal, Babble, Gastronomica, Carve, and Southeast Review.

She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her family. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
For those who like stories that “turn up the heat” on off-beat personalities trapped in tight quarters, South Pole Station is super cool. It’s a worthy debut and a sign of a smart new novelist arriving on the scene. (By the way, be sure to take note of Cooper’s last name.) 
P.J. Adler - LitLovers


Entertaining.… The mechanics of the central plot — …astrophysicists squabbling over the Big Bang Theory… — are best not inspected too closely, although they do yield some nicely rebellious behavior …and a satisfying …nerd romance.… More appealing …are the back stories and posturings of the ensemble cast, whose day-to-day dramas provide a vivid notion of what it's like to live in a frigid landscape that's dark for six months of the year.
Alida Becker - New York Times Book Review


[An] enjoyable first novel.… Shelby is very good on social interactions at the end of the earth, and South Pole Station crackles with energy whenever science takes center stage
Dennis Drabelle - Washington Post


If you like literature that transports you to exotic locales beyond the reach of commercial airlines and enables you to view hot topics from cool new angles, South Pole Station is just the ticket.… Shelby's writing is pithy and funny …[and] in this unusual, entertaining first novel, [she] combines science with literature to make a clever case for scientists' and artists' shared conviction that "the world could become known if only you looked hard enough."
Heller McAlpin - NPR


Most associate [climate fiction] with 'sci-fi' and therefore sci-fi's most recognizable tropes.… But what if we expand the genre's definition to works that address issues of climate change in the here-and-now, in worlds that aren’t speculative or futuristic at all, but rather, unnervingly familiar? What we would find are some of the most urgent, funny, and beautifully written works in contemporary fiction. Case in point: Ashley Shelby’s South Pole Station.
Chicago Review of Books


Set in the vast yet claustrophobic reality of Antarctica, the novel's first delight is in its vivid depiction of sub-zero life.…The second delight is the clear message that science is not belief. It's science.… Shelby keeps more than a few story lines thrumming here, yet a keen eye for character and a sharp ear for smartass dialogue keeps the strands straight.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


This is a fascinating novel, loaded with interesting history of Antarctic exploration, current scientific operations, and the living and working conditions of those folks brave enough to endure six months of darkness and six months of daylight.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Shelby's first novel, based on a short story that won the Third Coast Fiction Prize, skillfully weaves science, climate change, politics, sociology, and art.… All readers of fiction, particularly those interested in life in extreme climates, will find [South Pole Station] appealing. —Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence
Library Journal


[Shelby] eschews easy choices and treats interpersonal relations, grief, science, art, and political controversy with the same deft, humorous hand. Readers will find characters to love, suspect, and identify with…. [F]or readers …who enjoy stories about quirky individuals and …armchair travelers.
Booklist


Throughout witty, often hilarious scenarios, Shelby expertly weaves in the legitimate political and environmental concerns…. Shelby's exploration of the human spirit continuously digs deeper, ever in search of answers to all of life's important questions—scientific and otherwise.
BookPage


In the messy human petri dish at the South Pole, a comic novel brews.… [S]mart and inventive…. Jokes lubricate a moving and occasionally preposterous story of love and death in the Antarctic cold.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In her interview, Tucker prods Cooper for her motivation for going to the South Pole. She’s hesitant to say she desires "to be somewhere else" because that sounds like she’s "running from something." But Tucker responds that it’s not "running from something.… It’s turning aside.… Looking askance." Do you agree with Tucker’s assessment? Does this hold true for Cooper? For the other Polies?

2. Many of the Polies take issue with calling Pavano a "climate skeptic" because, as Sal says, "All scientists are born skeptics. Pavano is not a practicing scientist." Do you agree with Sal? Why or why not?

3. Though it’s eventually disproved, Sal poses a compelling theory about the origins of the universe, a "cyclic model" in which "every trillion or so years, the universe remakes itself as an echo of its previous form.… Every corner of space makes galaxies, stars, planets, and presumably life, over and over again." This model, he says, "has an explanation for 'what happened before the Big Bang.'" He proposes, "Instead of a single 'bang,' it was engaged in an endless cycle with endless variations." Cooper, however, poses the question of how this cycle begins, of what happens "before." What do you think of Sal’s theory? In what ways do you find it believable? How might you contest it?

4. Cooper spends much time trying to come to grips with David’s suicide. How do you see her working through his death throughout the novel? In what ways do you think she makes peace with his choice?

5. What do you think of Pearl’s ambitions in the kitchen? Did you root for her? Think she was manipulative? Both?

6. South Pole Station unfolds through various narrative perspectives — Cooper, Pearl, Tucker, Bozer, Pavano, even emails, and official government documents. How does having these multiple vantage points shape your sense of the community? In what ways would the story be different if we were only privy to Cooper’s perspective?

7. Congressman Bayless gives a speech in which he purports, "Dissent is the healthiest state of affairs in any democracy … democracy is under attack. That in a bastion of free thought, the covenant of free thought has been broken.… Dr. Pavano has been the victim of a systematic and sustained pattern of harassment based solely on his research." Sal’s rebuttal is that "in the scientific community, there’s virtually unanimous consensus that the earth is warming … instead of fearing this new knowledge … accept it, and leave science to science." How would you respond to both of these statements?

8. As an artist, Cooper’s role at the station is more nebulous than that of some of the other characters. Right before the standoff, Denise tells Cooper that her "paintings will remind the people here that they are not just cogs of the machine." How do you interpret Denise’s statement?

9. What did you think of Cooper’s reaction to her injury? How might you have reacted in her position?

10. Climate change is the subject of much debate in our society; it’s a complicated issue. What did you take away from South Pole Station about the interplay of science, politics, religion, and economics in the climate change debate? Did the novel shift your perspective at all? How so?

11. We aren’t privy to Pavano’s perspective until the end of the novel when we learn of his ascendance as a "climate change skeptic." In what ways did his backstory align with your expectations? What elements surprised you?
(Guide written by Laura Chasen and issued by the publisher.)

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Soy Sauce for Beginners 
Kristin Chen, 2014
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544114395


Summary
Gretchen Lin, adrift at the age of thirty, leaves her floundering marriage in San Francisco to move back to her childhood home in Singapore and immediately finds herself face-to-face with the twin headaches she’s avoided her entire adult life: her mother’s drinking problem and the machinations of her father’s artisanal soy sauce business.
 
Surrounded by family, Gretchen struggles with the tension between personal ambition and filial duty, but still finds time to explore a new romance with the son of a client, an attractive man of few words. When an old American friend comes to town, the two of them are pulled into the controversy surrounding Gretchen’s cousin, the only male grandchild and the heir apparent to Lin’s Soy Sauce.

In the midst of increasing pressure from her father to remain permanently in Singapore—and pressure from her mother to do just the opposite—Gretchen must decide whether she will return to her marriage and her graduate studies at the San Francisco Conservatory, or sacrifice everything and join her family’s crusade to spread artisanal soy sauce to the world.
 
Soy Sauce for Beginners reveals the triumphs and sacrifices that shape one woman’s search for a place to call home, and the unexpected art and tradition behind the brewing of a much-used but unsung condiment. The result is a foodie love story that will give readers a hearty appreciation for family loyalty and fresh starts. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Singapore, Singapore
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., Emerson College
• Currently—San Francisco, CA


Kristin Chen is the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners, featured in USA Today’s "New Voices”, an Oprah Magazine book pick, and a Glamour book club pick.

A former Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing, she holds an MFA from Emerson College and a BA from Stanford University. She has received awards from the Sewanee and Napa Valley writers’ conferences. Her short stories have appeared in Zyzzyva, Hobart, Pank, and others, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best New American Voices.

Born and raised in Singapore, she currently lives in San Francisco, where she’s at work on her second novel, set on a tiny island off the coast of southern China in 1958. (From .)

Book Reviews
Chen’s debut illustrates a young woman caught between east and west, and between family tradition and her own ambition.... [A] lighthearted glimpse into the rapidly changing culture and economy of Singapore, and into the lives of the young people hoping to find their future there.
Publishers Weekly


When Gretchen Lin returns to her family home in Singapore...to decide what to do about the unfaithful husband she left behind in California.... Gretchen’s journey of self-discovery forms the backbone of this story about family, tradition, and honor. [A] behind-the-scenes look at the world of artisanal soy sauce. —Cortney Ophoff
Library Journal


East or West, music studies or the family business, authentic soy sauce or a cheaper modern alternative? These are the choices facing droopy Gretchen Lin in a pleasant if generic tale of roots and romance.... [S]hort on depth and complexity...given the conventional flavor of Chen's readable but lightweight debut.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

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

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The Space Between Us 
Thrity Umrigar, 2006
HarperCollins
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060791568


Summary
Each morning, Bhima, a domestic servant in contemporary Bombay, leaves her own small shanty in the slums to tend to another woman's house. In Sera Dubash's home, Bhima scrubs the floors of a house in which she remains an outsider. She cleans furniture she is not permitted to sit on. She washes glasses from which she is not allowed to drink.

Yet despite being separated from each other by blood and class, she and Sera find themselves bound by gender and shared life experiences.

Sera is an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife whose opulent surroundings hide the shame and disappointment of her abusive marriage. A widow, she devotes herself to her family, spending much of her time caring for her pregnant daughter, Dinaz, a kindhearted, educated professional, and her charming and successful son-in-law, Viraf.

Bhima, a stoic illiterate hardened by a life of despair and loss, has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years. Cursed by fate, she sacrifices all for her beautiful, headstrong granddaughter, Maya, a university student whose education—paid for by Sera—will enable them to escape the slums.

But when an unwed Maya becomes pregnant by a man whose identity she refuses to reveal, Bhima's dreams of a better life for her granddaughter, as well as for herself, may be shattered forever.

Poignant and compelling, evocative and unforgettable, The Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet familiar world.

Set in modern-day India and witnessed through two compelling and achingly real women, the novel shows how the lives of the rich and the poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and vividly captureshow the bonds of womanhood are pitted against the divisions of class and culture. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Where—Mumbai, India
• Education—B.A., Bombay, University; M.A., Ohio State
   University; Ph.D., Kent State University
• Awards—Neiman Fellowship to Harvard
• Currently—lives in Cleveland, Ohio, USA

A journalist for seventeen years, Thrity Umrigar has written for the Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and other national newspapers, and contributes regularly to the Boston Globe's book pages. She teaches creative writing and literature at Case Western Reserve University.

The author of The Space Between Us; Bombay Time, the memoir First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood, and The Weight of Heaven, she was a winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University. She has a Ph.D. in English and lives in Cleveland, Ohio. (From the publisher.)

Learn more about Umrigar from an interview on author's website.

Book Reviews 
Umrigar is a perceptive and often piercing writer, although her prose occasionally tips into flamboyant overstatement....[H]er portrait of Sera as a woman unable to "transcend her middle-class skin" feels bracingly honest. But Umrigar never makes a similar imaginative leap with Bhima. The housekeeper seems exaggeratedly ignorant and too good-hearted to be true.Yet this novel does allow for one moment when Sera and Bhima close up the space between them. In a flashback, Bhima sees the results of a savage beating the young Sera has received from her husband and...gently rubs medicinal oil over her mistress's bruises. At first, Sera recoils from Bhima's touch, then tearfully submits. It's a powerful scene, with an uncomfortable echo of the age-old way the social classes have come together: furtively, in silence, in the dark.
Ligaya Mishan - New York Times Book Review

Against terrible odds, Bhima must find the strength and the will to keep going. The tragedy is that there is so little to hope for. Which brings us to the implicit, pivotal question raised at the beginning and end of the book: Why survive at all in the face of continuous despair? The life of the privileged is harshly measured against the life of the powerless, but empathy and compassion are evoked by both strong women, each of whom is forced to make a separate choice. Umrigar is a skilled storyteller, and her memorable characters will live on for a long time.
Frances Itani - Washington Post

Umrigar's schematic novel (after Bombay Time) illustrates the intimacy, and the irreconcilable class divide, between two women in contemporary Bombay. Bhima, a 65-year-old slum dweller, has worked for Sera Dubash, a younger upper-middle-class Parsi woman, for years: cooking, cleaning and tending Sera after the beatings she endures from her abusive husband, Feroz. Sera, in turn, nurses Bhima back to health from typhoid fever and sends her granddaughter Maya to college. Sera recognizes their affinity: "They were alike in many ways, Bhima and she. Despite the different trajectories of their lives—circumstances...dictated by the accidents of their births—they had both known the pain of watching the bloom fade from their marriages." But Sera's affection for her servant wars with ingrained prejudice against lower castes. The younger generation—Maya; Sera's daughter, Dinaz, and son-in-law, Viraf—are also caged by the same strictures despite efforts to throw them off. In a final plot twist, class allegiance combined with gender inequality challenges personal connection, and Bhima may pay a bitter price for her loyalty to her employers. At times, Umrigar's writing achieves clarity, but a narrative that unfolds in retrospect saps the book's momentum.
Publishers Weekly

Journalist Umrigar (Bombay Time) evocatively describes daily life in two very different households in modern-day Bombay, where the traditions that separate the classes and the sexes still persist. The relationship between Sera Dubash, an upper-class Parsi housewife, and Bhima, her servant, is full of contradictions. They talk over cups of tea like girlfriends, but Bhima must squat on the floor using her own cup, while Sera sits on a chair. Bhima is loyal to Sera, but sometimes has to talk herself through minor humiliations and slights from her employer by reminding herself how generous this woman has always been to her. While money and class keep these two from fully bridging the gap between them, they remain closer than either of them can fully see, for as women, they suffer equally the abuse of men, the loss of love, and the joys and sorrows of motherhood. Umrigar beautifully and movingly wends her way through the complexities and subtleties of these unequal but caring relationships. Recommended for all fiction collections. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal

Set in contemporary Bombay, Umrigar's second novel (Bombay Time, 2001) is an affecting portrait of a woman and her maid, whose lives, despite class disparity, are equally heartbreaking. Though Bhima has worked for the Dubash family for decades and is coyly referred to as "one of the family," she nonetheless is forbidden from sitting on the furniture and must use her own utensils while eating. For years, Sera blamed these humiliating boundaries on her husband Feroz, but now that he's dead and she's lady of the house, the two women still share afternoon tea and sympathy with Sera perched on a chair and Bhima squatting before her. Bhima is grateful for Sera, for the steady employment, for what she deems friendship and, mostly, for the patronage Sera shows Bhima's granddaughter Maya. Orphaned as a child when her parents died of AIDS, Bhima raised Maya and Sera saw to her education. Now in college, Maya's future is like a miracle to the illiterate Bhima—her degree will take them out of the oppressive Bombay slums, guaranteeing Maya a life away from servitude. But in a cruel mirror of Sera's happiness—her only child Dinaz is expecting her first baby—Bhima finds that Maya is pregnant, has quit school and won't name the child's father. As the situation builds to a crisis point, both women reflect on the sorrows of their lives. While Bhima was born into a life of poverty and insurmountable obstacles, Sera's privileged upbringing didn't save her from a husband who beat her and a mother-in-law who tormented her. And while Bhima's marriage begins blissfully, an industrial accident leaves her husband maimed and an alcoholic. He finally deserts her, but not before he bankrupts the family and kidnaps their son. Though Bhima and Sera believe they are mutually devoted, soon decades of confidences are thrown up against the far older rules of the class game. A subtle, elegant analysis of class and power. Umrigar transcends the specifics of two Bombay women and creates a novel that quietly roars against tyranny.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. At the end of The Space Between Us, Sera has a tough choice to make. Can you envision a scenario where she could've made a different choice? What would it have taken for her to have made a different choice? And what would be the consequences of that choice?

2. The novel deals with a relationship that, despite all the good will in the world, is ultimately based on the exploitation of one human being by another. Has this novel caused you to look at any situations in your own life where you may be benefiting from the labor or poverty of another?

3. Remarking on the fact that Bhima is not allowed to sit on the furniture in Sera Dubash's home, or drink from the same glass, it could be said that the novel is about a kind of "Indian Apartheid." Do you think that's putting it too strongly? If not, can you identify any parallels in contemporary America?

4. The novel tracks the lives of two women. Trace some of the ways in which their lives resemble each other's. What are the points of departure?

5. Neither Sera nor Bhima end up with happy, successful marriages. Why? Trace the factors that cause each marriage to fail. And for all its failings, which woman has the better marriage?

6. Sera's mother-in-law, Banu, makes life miserable for the young Sera. Is Banu the kind of mother-in-law that many American women can identify with? Examine the ways in which she is or isn't the typical in-law.

7. The Afghani balloonwalla is a minor but pivotal character in the novel. What is his role? What does he symbolize or represent?

The novel is told from the points of view of the two women, Bhima and Sera. Should it have included more points of view? For instance, should Viraf have had his own "voice"?

8. How do you read the ending of the book? Is it a hopeful ending? Do you think the ending is justified, given what awaits Bhima the next day?

9. What is your opinion about Sera, especially given the choice she makes in the end. Is she a sympathetic character? Or is she part of the problem?

10. This is a novel about the intersection of class and gender. Can you think of ways in which gender bonds the two women and ways in which class divides them?

11. Is Gopal justified in being furious at Bhima for having signed the contract that the accountant puts before her during the cab ride to the hospital? Would the family's fate have been different if she hadn't signed that paper?

12. Two characters who help Bhima—Hyder, the boy in the hospital and the Afghani balloon seller, both happen to be Muslims. Why? What does the novel say about the issues of religious and communal divisions in India?

13. What does this novel say about the importance of education? Think of some examples where the lack of education hurts a character and conversely, instances of where having an education benefits someone.

14. In some ways, the city of Bombay is a character in the novel. What are your impressions of Bombay after having read this novel? Does the author portray the city with affection or disdain?

15. What societal changes and/or personal choices would need to be different in order for us to envision the possibility of someone like Bhima having a better life?

16. The author has said that although the plot of The Space Between Us is a work of fiction, the character of Bhima is based on a woman who used to work in her home when the writer was a teenager. Is there any person in your own life who has inspired you enough to want to write a book about them? What is it about that person that had a deep impact on you?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Space Pilot Conor Grant 
Todd Templeman, 2012
Logic Factory
446 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780988297500


Summary
Space is lovely, dark, and deep, but he has promises to keep ....

In a future that embraces humanity's desire to explore and exploit the Solar System, raiding pirates have managed to hide their enormous strange base somewhere inside it. Space Pilot, Connor Grant, is about to learn just how immense it can be out there. Even in the age of metadrives, rescuing a friend lost in the Outer System is no easier than finding a coin tossed in the ocean.

And while pilots enjoy visiting the great cities of the Inner System, as engineers continue upgrading their ships with fantastic inventions, everybody will find out soon enough that someone tougher than pirates has been hunting in the Asteroid Belt. (From the book cover.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—Seattle, Washington, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California, Berkeley
• Awards—CODIE Award (computer games industry award)
• Currently—currently lives in California


Born in Seattle, WA in 1970, Templeman spent his childhood moving around the world as his parents chased one adventure after another. From his family's American-style pizza franchise—the first of its kind in Australia—to the oil business in Dallas, Texas, to owning Kentucky Derby co-favorite, Total Departure (1982), Templeman learned that the key ingredient to making any dream happen is belief.

Templeman has worked in the computer games industry, specializing in sci-fi games for seventeen years. He produced the game, "Ascendancy," first released in 1996, which won the CODIE Award for Best Strategy Software, and is now on the iTunes App Store, where it has been featured globally as a Staff Favorite. Before that he attended UC Berkeley, majoring in English. He lives with his family in California.

Templeman began work on SPCG with his seven year old son, as they told stories together about space. He finished the first book in the series when his son was fifteen, and readers will see the characters in the book mature throughout. No—the author having fully succumbed to the writing bug—Book Two in the "Space Pilot" series is in progress, and will be on the shelves soon. The first four chapters of Book Two, Sheyn's Retreat are included in the current edition of Space Pilot Connor Grant as an excerpt at the end. (From the author.)

Book Reviews
(See Amazon for additional customer reviews.)

The characters are well developed and the plot does keep you interested to the very end.
Robert

Waiting impatiently for the next book.
Steve Kile

Here is another excellent addition to the science fiction genre.
E. Duffield

Discussion Questions
1. If you could have the chance to live in a metropolis on Mars, what would most attract you to making the move?

2. If you found yourself living further out in the Solar System, where the law cannot yet reach, what things would you try to do to keep yourself reasonably secure?

3. In spite of the viciousness of Dav Sheyn, do you share any of his frustrations with what he claims is a ubiquitous injustice in modern civilization?

4. SPOILER ALERT: What would be your reaction if you suddenly discovered that humanity had created an entirely new species of terrifying creature, based on manipulating the human genome. Would these creatures, created by man, be born with natural rights?

5. If you could equip your own spaceship, can you think of any gadgets, gizmos, or features you wish you could have that you've never heard of before?

6. What do you think would happen to you if you went to the authorities with absolute proof in-hand that you had discovered a hostile alien species?

7. In an age where practically anything can be faked, whether audio, video, or written on the page, do you think something like the Notary Corps will be necessary in the near future?

8. If technology advanced to the point where individuals could reasonably protect themselves and their children against aggressors, do you think it would be possible—somewhere—for a human society to prosper in the total absence of rules?
(Questions provided by author.)

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A Spark of Light  
Jodi Picoult, 2018
Random House
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345544988


Summary
A powerful and provocative new novel about ordinary lives that intersect during a heart-stopping crisis.

The warm fall day starts like any other at the Center—a women’s reproductive health services clinic—its staff offering care to anyone who passes through its doors.

Then, in late morning, a desperate and distraught gunman bursts in and opens fire, taking all inside hostage.

After rushing to the scene, Hugh McElroy, a police hostage negotiator, sets up a perimeter and begins making a plan to communicate with the gunman. As his phone vibrates with incoming text messages he glances at it and, to his horror, finds out that his fifteen-year-old daughter, Wren, is inside the clinic.

But Wren is not alone. She will share the next and tensest few hours of her young life with a cast of unforgettable characters:

• A nurse who calms her own panic in order to save the life of a wounded woman.
• A doctor who does his work not in spite of his faith but because of it, and who will find that faith tested as never before.
• A pro-life protester, disguised as a patient, who now stands in the crosshairs of the same rage she herself has felt.
• A young woman who has come to terminate her pregnancy. And the disturbed individual himself, vowing to be heard.

Told in a daring and enthralling narrative structure that counts backward through the hours of the standoff, this is a story that traces its way back to what brought each of these very different individuals to the same place on this fateful day.

One of the most fearless writers of our time, Jodi Picoult tackles a complicated issue in this gripping and nuanced novel. How do we balance the rights of pregnant women with the rights of the unborn they carry? What does it mean to be a good parent?

A Spark of Light will inspire debate, conversation … and, hopefully, understanding. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 19, 1966
• Where—Nesconset (Long Island), New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; M.Ed., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Hanover, New Hampshire


Jodi Lynn Picoult is an American author. She was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for fiction in 2003. Picoult currently has approximately 14 million copies of her books in print worldwide.

Early life and education
Picoult was born and raised in Nesconset on Long Island in New York State; when she was 13, her family moved to New Hampshire. Even as a child, Picoult had a penchant for writing stories: she wrote her first story— "The Lobster Which Misunderstood"—when she was five.

While still in college—she studied writing at Princeton University—Picoult published two short stories in Seventeen magazine. To pay the bills, after graduation she worked at a variety of jobs, including copy writing and editing textbooks; she even taught eighth-grade English and attained a Masters in Education from Harvard University.

In 1989, Picoult married Timothy Warren Van Leer, whom she met in college, and while pregnant with their first child, wrote her first book. Song of the Humpbacked Whale, her literary debut, came out in 1992. Two more children followed, as did a string of bestseller novels. All told, Picoult has more than 20 books to her name.

Writing
At an earlier time in her life, Picoult believed the tranquility of family life in small-town New England offered little fodder for writing; the truly interesting stuff of fiction happened elsewhere. Ironically, it is small-town life that has ended up providing the settings for Picoult's novels. Within the cozy surroundings of family and friends, Picoult weaves complex webs of relationships that strain, even tear apart, under stress. She excels at portraying ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Disoriented by some accident of chance, they stumble, whirl, and attempt to regain a footing in what was once their calm, ordered world.

Nor has Picoult ever shied from tackling difficult, controversial issues: school shooting, domestic violence, sexual abuse, teen suicide, and racism. She approaches painful topics with sympathy—and her characters with respect—while shining a light on individual struggles. Her legions of readers have loved and rewarded her for that compassion—and her novels have been consistent bestsellers.

Personal life
Picoult and her husband Timothy live in Hanover, New Hampshire. They have three children and a handful of pets. (Adapted from a 2003 Barnes and Noble interview and from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/28/2016.)

Book Reviews
Picoult at her fearless best.… Timely, balanced and certain to inspire debate.
Washington Post


The author presents the white-knuckled narrative in a reverse-chronological order. The effect is mesmerizing, as Picoult establishes moments in the overarching event, before revealing how they came to be.
Houston Chronicle


Drama abounds in Picoult’s latest issue-driven novel…. Picoult’s extensive research shines throughout, but the book’s reverse chronological structure interferes with the complicated back stories…. Nevertheless, this is a powerful story that brings clarity to the history of abortion.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) Picoult has achieved what politicians across the spectrum have not been able to: humanized a hot-button issue. Excellent for book clubs, this should also be considered for discussions in critical thinking and political debate. —Julie Kane, Washington & Lee Lib., Lexington, VA
Library Journal


(Starred review) Picoult delivers another riveting yarn …in this carefully crafted, utterly gripping tale.
Booklist


At times, Picoult defaults to her habitual sentimentality…. Novels such as this extensively researched and passionate polemic are not necessarily art, but, like Sinclair Lewis’ The Jungle, they are necessary.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The story is narrated from the points of view of ten different characters. Why do you think the author chose to include so many different perspectives? Was there a voice that you connected to most strongly? Did you have difficulty connecting with any characters?

2. Regardless of their feelings on the issue of abortion, many characters are preoccupied with being a good parent. Why do you think it means to be a good parent?

3. Initially, Joy and Janine seem to stand on opposite sides of the pro-life/pro-choice debate. By the end, do you think they have found common ground? Do you understand where each one is coming from? Is it possible to form a connection with someone with opposing viewpoints and still maintain a commitment to one’s own beliefs?

4. At one point, Rachel, the employee who escaped from the Center, accuses Allen and his fellow protestors of being responsible for the hostage crisis situation: "If people like you didn’t spout the bullshit you do, people like him wouldn’t exist." Is this a fair accusation? Is there a point at which one does not have the right to voice one’s beliefs? If so, where should that line be drawn?

5. Did your feelings about the issue of abortion evolve during the reading of this novel, and, if so, how?

6. By the end of the book, we discover that these characters’ lives are interwoven in more ways than one and that each individual has a deeper story than we expected. Were you surprised by any of the interconnections? Which twist struck you the most strongly?

7. Did anything about Jodi’s research surprise you? What did you learn?

8. Did Jodi’s Author Note change your reading experience at all?

9. A Spark of Light is different than the traditional novel structure. How did you feel about the events of the story unfolding backwards? Did this structure affect your reading experience?
(Questions issued by the publishers.)

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The Sparrow 
Mary Doria Russell, 1996
Random House
405 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449912553


Summary
It is the year 2019. From an outer space listening post on Puerto Rico come the sounds of exquisite singing—emanating from a planet that will be known by earth as Rakhat.

While the international community debates endlessly about sending a mission, a scientific team of eight Jesuits quietly launches its own.

What they discover on Rakhat makes them question the very basis of what it means to be human. Four decades later, Emilio Sandoz, the sole survivor, attempts to tell what happened. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—August 19, 1950
• Where—Elmhurst, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A. University of Illinois; M.A. Northeastern
   University; Ph.D. University of Michigan
• Awards—The John W. Campbell Award, 1998
• Currently—lives in Cleveland, Ohio


Mary Doria Russell was born in suburban Chicago in 1950. Her mother was a U.S. Navy nurse and her father was a Marine Corps drill sergeant. She and her younger brother, Richard, consequently developed a dismaying vocabulary at an early age. Mary learned discretion at Sacred Heart Catholic elementary school and learned how to parse sentences at Glenbard East High; she moved on to study cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois, social anthropology at Northeastern University in Boston, and biological anthropology at the University of Michigan.

After earning a doctorate, Russell taught human gross anatomy at Case Western Reserve University in the 1980s but left the academic world to write fiction, which turned out to be a good career move.

Her novels have struck a deep chord with readers for their respectful but unblinking consideration of fundamental religious questions. The Sparrow and Children of God remain steady sellers, translated into more than a dozen languages. Russell has received nine national and international literary awards and has been a finalist for a number of others. She and her family live in Cleveland, Ohio. (From the publisher.)

Extra
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:

• I honestly think getting up early gives you cancer. You should definitely sleep in as often as possible.

• Coffee is good for you. Don't believe anyone who says different. All research concluding that coffee is bad is seriously flawed in scientific design.

• Here's how you know when you're grown up: you decide if you get to have a pet. You don't have to ask anyone else's permission. I just got myself a 4-year-old miniature dachshund named Annie from Petfinder.com. She makes me laugh out loud first thing in the morning, and at least half a dozen times a day after that.

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

Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence (1935). I saw the David Lean movie Lawrence of Arabia when it first came out in 1962. I was twelve then, and ripe for hero worship, living in Lombard, Illinois, but ready to imagine a larger world than the Chicago suburbs. I found a musty old copy of Seven Pillars, and to this day I remain fascinated by the book and the man who wrote it. I can name a number of direct effects of reading the book.

Initially, I became interested in archeology because of Lawrence's early work, and that led me to anthropology, which sustained my interest through three degrees and years of professional work. I keep my hand in by editing the professional papers of friends in the field.

Lawrence taught me that speaking more than one language opens doors to experiences you'd miss if you only speak English. Over the years, I've studied Spanish, Russian, French and Croatian fairly formally, with less studious stabs at Latin, Hebrew, Italian and German. Each one has led me places I'd never have gone other wise. My study of Croatian led directly to the adoption of our son Daniel in Zagreb—so Lawrence is Dan's sort-of godfather!

I learned that intentions are irrelevant and regrets are useless: it doesn't matter what you thought would happen, or that you meant no harm. Unintended consequences of good intentions are a theme I return.

Lawrence taught me that how you write is as important as what you have to tell about. Choice of word, rhythm, detail, editing and overall structure make Seven Pillars literature, not just a military history or personal memoir.

There are echoes of Lawrence's experience in Deraa in my first novel, echoes of his war guilt in my third. I'm beginning research for a novel about the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, and will come full circle: T. E. Lawrence will actually be a character in that one.

I also caught the colon habit from reading Lawrence's work: quod erat demonstradum. (Interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews 
Powerful... Father Emilio Sandoz [is] the only survivor of a Jesuit mission to the planet Rakhat, "a soul...looking for God." We first meet him in Italy...sullen and bitter.... But he was not always this way, as we learn through flashbacks that tell the story of the ill-fated trip.... The Sparrow tackles a difficult subject with grace and intelligence.
San Francisco Chronicle

A notable achievement... Russell shows herself to be a skillful storyteller who subtly and expertly builds suspense.
USA Today

Two narratives—the mission to the planet and its aftermath four decades later—interweave to create a suspenseful tale.
Seattle Times

It is rare to find a book about interplanetary exploration that has this much insight into human nature and foresight into a possible future.
San Antonio Express News

If you have to send a group of people to a newly discovered planet to contact a totally unknown species, whom would you choose? How about four Jesuit priests, a young astronomer, a physician, her engineer husband, and a child prostitute-turned-computer-expert? That's who Mary Doria Russell sends in her new novel, The Sparrow. This motley combination of agnostics, true believers, and misfits becomes the first to explore the Alpha Centuri world of Rakhat with both enlightening and disastrous results.... Vivid and engaging... An incredible novel.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Russell's debut novel...focuses on her characters, and it is here that the work truly shines. An entertaining infusion of humor keeps the book from becoming too dark, although some of the characters are so clever that they sometimes seem contrived. Readers who dislike an emphasis on moral dilemmas or spiritual quests may be turned off, but those who enjoy science fiction because it can create these things are in for a real treat.
Science Fiction Weekly

The dense prose in this complex tale may at first seem off-putting, but hang on for the ride; it's riveting! —Jennifer Henderson
Booklist

An enigma wrapped inside a mystery sets up expectations that prove difficult to fulfill in Russell's first novel, which is about first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. The enigma is Father Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit linguist whose messianic virtues hide his occasional doubt about his calling. The mystery is the climactic turn of events that has left him the sole survivor of a secret Jesuit expedition to the planet Rakhat and, upon his return, made him a disgrace to his faith. Suspense escalates as the narrative ping-pongs between the years 2016, when Sandoz begins assembling the team that first detects signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life, and 2060, when a Vatican inquest is convened to coax an explanation from the physically mutilated and emotionally devastated priest. A vibrant cast of characters who come to life through their intense scientific and philosophical debates help distract attention from the space-opera elements necessary to get them off the Earth. Russell brings her training as a paleoanthropologist to bear on descriptions of the Runa and Jana'ata, the two races on Rakhat whose differences are misunderstood by the Earthlings, but the aliens never come across as more than variations of primitive earthly cultures. The final revelation of the tragic human mistake that ends in Sandoz's degradation isn't the event for which readers have been set up. Much like the worlds it juxtaposes, this novel seems composed of two stories that fail to come together.
Publishers Weekly

Brilliant first novel about the discovery of extraterrestrial life and the voyage of a party of Jesuit missionaries to Alpha Centauri. Russell lays down two narratives: One begins in 2059, in the aftermath of the mission; the other in 2019, when a young astronomer intercepts a transmission of haunting songs from Alpha Centauri. In the latter, a linguist and Jesuit priest named Emilio Sandoz swiftly organizes a group of Jesuits and civilian specialists to turn an asteroid into a spaceship. The ship will reach the singing planet, called Rakhat, in four years of passenger time, even though 17 years will pass on Earth. In the narrative beginning in 2059, therefore, the mission's only survivor, Sandoz himself, is only a decade older. But he is a broken man physically and spiritually. The mission began well: Rakhat was beautiful and bountiful, and the men and women from Earth lived peacefully alongside a gentle and dreamy race, rather like the eloi of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, here called the runa. Then, inadvertently, the visitors improve the local diet, causing a surge in births among the Runa; suddenly, another, fiercer race appears to put things right. It seems that the Jana'ata raise the Runa like rabbits. The newborn are slain and eaten, as is the party from Earth, except for Sandoz, who is taken to the strange capitol city and sold into a brothel. There, he is raped repeatedly by the great poet who wrote the angelic songs that fetched the Jesuits in the first place. A startling portrait of an alien culture and of the nature of God as well, since, in his utter humiliation and in the annihilation of his spirit, Sandoz is reborn in faith. Shades of Wells, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Arthur C. Clarke, with just a dash of Edgar Rice Burroughs—and yet strikingly original, even so.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. How do faith, love, and the role of God in the world drive the plot of this story? One reviewer characterized this book as "a parable about faith—the search for God, in others as well as Out There." Do you agree? If so, why?

2. This story takes place from the years 2019 to 2060. The United States is no longer the predominant world power, having lost two trade wars with Japan, which is now supreme in both space and on Earth. Poverty is rampant. Indentured servitude is once more a common practice, and "future brokers" mine ghettos for promising children to educate in return for a large chunk of their lifetime income. What kinds of changes do you think will occur by the twenty-first century—with governments, technology, society, and so on? Do you think America will lose its predominant status in the world?

3. Do you think it likely that we will make contact with extraterrestrials at some time in the future? What will the implications of such an event be? We've always viewed Earth, and human beings, as the center of the universe. Will that still be the case if we discover alien life forms? How will such a discovery change theology? Does God love us best? Will such a discovery confirm the existence of God or cause us to question his existence at all?

4. If, sometime within the next century, we hear radio signals from a solar system less than a dozen light years away from our own, do you think humankind would mount an expedition to visit that place? Who do you think might leadsuch an expedition? If you had to send a group of people to a newly discovered planet to contact a totally unknown species, whom would you choose? Is the trip to Rakhat a scientific mission or a religious one?

5. The Sparrow tells a story by interweaving two time periods—after the mission to Rakhat and before. Do you think this makes the story more interesting and easier to follow or more difficult to follow? How does this story differ from other stories you have read?

6. Why do you think Sandoz resists telling the story of what happened on Rakhat?

7. A basic premise of this story is an evaluation of the harm that results from the explorer's inability to assess a culture from the threshold of exploration. Do you see any parallels between the voyage of the eight explorers on the Rakhat mission and the voyages of other explorers from past history—Columbus, Magellan, Cortez, and others—who inaccurately assessed the cultures they discovered?

8. Despite currently popular revisionism, many historians view the early discoverers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries not as imperialists or colonists but as intellectual idealists burning to know what God's plan had hidden from them. Do you agree? Does this story make you reconsider the motives of those early explorers?

9. One of the mainstays of the Star Trek universe is the "prime directive" which mandates the avoidance of interference in alien cultures at all costs. Would the "prime directive" have changed the outcome of events on Rakhat?

10. In an interview, the author said, "I wanted readers to look philosophically at the idea that you can be seduced by the notion that God is leading you and that your actions have his approval." What do you think she means by that? In what way was Emilio Sandoz seduced by this notion?

11. The discoverers of Rakhat seem to be connected by circumstances too odd to be explained by anything but a manifestation of God's will. Do you think it was God's will that led to the discovery of and mission to Rakhat, as Sandoz initially believes? If that's the case, how could God let the terrible aftermath happen?

12. How is Emilio Sandoz's faith tested on Rakhat? One reviewer suggests that in his utter humiliation and in the annihilation of his spirit, Sandoz is reborn in faith. Do you agree? Consider Sandoz's dilemma on page 394. Did God lead the explorers to Rakhat—step by step—or was Sandoz responsible for what happened? If God was responsible for bringing the explorers to Rakhat, does that mean that God is vicious?

13. One reviewer wrote, "It is neither celibacy, faith, exotics goods, nor (as Sandoz bitterly asserts) the introduction of one of humanity's oldest inventions that leads to the crisis between humans and aliens. The humans get into trouble because they fail to understand how Rakhat society controls reproduction. In short, they fail because they fail to put themselves into the aliens' shoes." Do you agree? If so, why? If not, why not?

14. Is confession good for the soul? Do you think Emilio Sandoz will ultimately recover—both as a man and as a priest—from his ordeal?

15. Why do you think it's so important to Emilio to stand by his vow of celibacy when he so obviously loves Sofia Mendez?

16. The Jesuits saw so many of their fellows martyred all over the world throughout history. Why aren't they more sympathetic in dealing with Sandoz—a man victimized by his faith?

17. What is this story about? Is it a story about coming face-to-face with a sentient race that is so alien as to be incomprehensible, or about putting up a mirror to our own inner selves?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Sparrow Sisters 
Ellen Herrick, 2015
HarperCollins
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062386342


Summary
An enchanting love story about a place where magic whispers just beneath the surface and almost anything is possible, if you aren’t afraid to listen.

The Sparrow Sisters are as tightly woven into the seaside New England town of Granite Point as the wild sweet peas that climb the stone walls along the harbor. Sorrel, Nettie and Patience are as colorful as the beach plums on the dunes and as mysterious as the fog that rolls into town at dusk.

Patience is the town healer and when a new doctor settles into Granite Point he brings with him a mystery so compelling that Patience is drawn to love him, even as she struggles to mend him.

But when Patience Sparrow’s herbs and tinctures are believed to be implicated in a local tragedy, Granite Point is consumed by a long-buried fear—and its three hundred year old history resurfaces as a modern day witch-hunt threatens. The plants and flowers, fruit trees and high hedges begin to wither and die, and the entire town begins to fail; fishermen return to the harbor empty-handed, and blight descends on the old elms that line the lanes.

It seems as if Patience and her town are lost until the women of Granite Point band together to save the Sparrow. As they gather, drawing strength from each other, will they be able to turn the tide and return life to Granite Point?

The Sparrow Sisters is a beautiful, haunting, and thoroughly mesmerizing novel that will capture your imagination. (From the publishers.)

Author Bio
Ellen Herrick was a publishing executive in New York until she moved to London for a brief stint; she returned nearly twenty years later with three grown children (her own, it must be said). She now divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and a small Cape Cod town very much like Granite Point. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
At this point, there are no mainstream press reviews online for The Sparrow Sisters. Head to Amazon to find helpful customer reviews.

Discussion Questions
1. What do you think is the meaning of the first line in The Sparrow Sisters: "All stories are true, some of them actually happened." Do you think, for instance, that it is a reference to the story that is about to be told?

2. The Sparrow Sisters is set in a New England seaside village, Granite Point. Why are we often attracted to stories about small-town life?

3. Living a simple life in a small town is seductive. Yet, Granite Point becomes very complicated as it turns on Patience Sparrow. Is that particular to small towns?

4. The three sisters in this novel each play a role in their family and at the Nursery. Discuss each role and how they complement each other and sometimes conflict with each other.

5. How does the author create the tension that exists between Patience and Henry? How does she create it differently between Sorrel and Charlotte, Simon and Sorrel, Nettie and Ben?

6. The Sparrow Sisters has an old-fashioned feel. In fact, in the early pages it could almost be set many, many years in the past. Do you think this timeless effect makes it easier for the reader to believe the magical realism aspects?

7. There are a handful of vivid characters that inform The Sparrow Sisters even though they are dead. How does the author make those characters real and relevant to the sisters and to the reader?

8. The author paints both a realistic picture of Granite Point and its residents and a fairy-tale one. What elements and senses and words does she use to make her word pictures so vivid? Which of the senses she employs is most appealing to you?

9. Why do you think Henry Carlyle and Patience Sparrow are attracted to each other when they so clearly have very different views on healing?

10. Do you believe that Eliza Howard and Clarissa Sparrow were really witches? Do you believe that Patience Sparrow is a witch?

11. Do you think Rob Short will stay in Granite Point?

12. Do you feel hopeful for Sorrel?

13. Do you believe in magic?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Sparta 
Roxana Robinson, 2013
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374267704


Summary
Giving voice to one of the most crucial issues of our time, the acclaimed novelist Roxana Robinson has created a portrait of the walking wounded among America’s veterans—soldiers who have no physical scars but who cannot overcome the emotional traumas of Operation Iraqi Freedom and its otherworldly horrors.

In Sparta, Conrad Farrell’s family has no military heritage, but as a classics major at Williams College, Conrad is drawn to the Marine Corps ethic: “Semper Fidelis” came straight from the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta, where every citizen doubled as a full-time soldier. After college, Conrad joins the Marines and is deployed to Iraq at the height of U.S. attempts to democratize a nation overrun by brutal factions.

Returning home to New York’s Westchester County after four years of honorable service, Conrad appears to be in perfect shape: he hasn’t been shot, he was never wounded by an IED, and he sticks to a tough workout routine. As strong as he is, it’s soon apparent that the transition from war to peace may destroy him.

As he attempts to reconnect with the people and places he once loved, he is haunted by psychological demons. The survival tactics that brought him home safely are now his worst enemy, winding his psyche into a taut knot of fear and guilt. Picturing dangers and destruction at every turn while questioning the value of his mission in Iraq, he tries to navigate a homeland that no longer feels like home to him.

He longs for help—from his family, his girlfriend, his fellow troops, the VA—but each attempt to reach out ends disastrously. Capturing the nuances of the unique estrangement that modern soldiers face as they attempt to rejoin the society they’ve fought for, Sparta is a powerful testament to the moral consequences of war, for civilians and soldiers alike. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Pine Mountain, Kentucky, USA
• Raised—New Hope, Pennsylvania
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan
• Currently—lives in New York City

Roxana Robinson is an American novelist and biographer whose fiction explores the complexity of familial bonds and fault lines. Her 2013 novel, Sparta, was published to wide acclaim, and her 2008 novel, Cost, was named one of the Five Best Novels of the Year by the Washington Post. She is also the author of Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, and has written widely on American art and issues pertaining to ecology and the environment.

Life and Work
Robinson was born in Pine Mountain, Kentucky, and raised in New Hope, Pennsylvania, the child of educators and the great-great-granddaughter of social reformer Henry Ward Beecher. She graduated from Buckingham Friends School, in Lahaska, and from The Shipley School, in Bryn Mawr. She studied writing at Bennington College with Bernard Malamud and received a B.A. degree in English Literature from the University of Michigan. She worked in the American painting department at Sotheby's and wrote about American art until she began to successfully publish short fiction in the 1980s.

Equally skilled in both long and short form fiction, Robinson is the author of several novels, three story collections and a biography. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic, and Best American Short Stories, and been widely anthologized and broadcast on National Public Radio. Four of her works have been chosen as Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times, and Cost won the Maine Fiction Award and was long-listed for the Dublin Impac Prize for Fiction. She was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, and currently serves on the board of PEN American Center and the Authors Guild. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Robinson has taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Houston and at the New School. Since 1997, she has taught at the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, and is currently teaching in the Hunter College MFA Program.

Robinson is also a biographer and scholar of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art. Her articles have appeared in Arts, ARTnews, and Art & Antiques, as well as in exhibition catalogues for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Katonah Museum of Art and others. Her biography of Georgia O'Keeffe was deemed by Calvin Tomkins, of The New Yorker, "without question the best book written about O'Keeffe,” and named a New York Times Notable Book. Robinson lectures frequently on Georgia O'Keeffe, and appeared in the BBC documentary on the artist.

She reviews books for the New York Times and Washington Post, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, Vogue, Real Simple, and More. She has also written about travel for the New York Times, Travel and Leisure, and elsewhere.

Robinson is passionate about environmental concerns, explored in her novel Sweetwater, and has published numerous op-eds in the Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She has also been a guest blogger for the National Resource Defense Council. She also writes about gardening for publications such as House and Garden, Horticulture, and Fine Gardening. Her garden is listed in the Garden Conservancy Open Days, and has been written about in the New York Times, House and Garden, Traditional Homes, Atlantic, and Gardens Illustrated. She serves on the council of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, which promotes the conservation of natural places statewide.

She lives in New York, Maine and Connecticut with her husband. Her daughter is a painter whose work appeared on both the hardcover and paperback editions of Cost.

Critical Reception
Hailed as “one of our best writers” by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post, and “John Cheever’s heir apparent” by the New York Times Book Review, Robinson has also been said, by Time, to be in the “august company” of Edith Wharton, Louis Auchincloss and Henry James.

With Cost, Robinson moved into a larger arena, and, as critic Ron Charles of the Washington Post has said, she “has crept into corners of human experience [that] each of us is terrified to approach ... the implacable tragedies that shred our sense of how the world should work.” In a New York Times interview on the extensive research she did, Robinson said, “Cost has a larger reach than my previous books, both in terms of emotional risk and experience. Alzheimer's and heroin addiction are things I found both very threatening and compelling. They seemed like things I needed to explore."

Spotlighted for her short fiction in the New York Times Book Review, Robinson compared writing a story to

like doing a cliff dive, the kind that only works when the wave hits just right. You stand on top, poised and fearful, looking at what lies below: you must start your dive when the wave has withdrawn, and there's nothing beneath you but sand and stone. You take a deep breath and throw yourself over, hoping that, by the time you hit, the wave will be back, wild and churning, and full of boiling energy. It's kind of terrifying. It's unbelievably fun.

Robinson has written introductions to The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Matter of Prejudice and Other Stories by Kate Chopin, and a forthcoming edition of the English novelist Elizabeth Taylor's A Game of Hide and Seek. She edited and wrote the introduction to The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, published by NYRB Classics, as well the introduction to Wharton’s The Old Maid: The Fifties, published by Modern Library Classics. Robinson was also a guest on the recent WAMC/Northeast Public Radio program “American Icons,” on which she discussed House of Mirth. She is also on the Advisory Council at The Mount, Wharton’s historic home in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Commenting on her affinity with Wharton, Robinson notes,

Wharton and I come from similar backgrounds. I grew up with the rules that governed her: emotions were to be strictly controlled, pain was not to be acknowledged, and the rules of decorum were to be obeyed. I’ve always been fascinated by her unblinking exegesis of all this, the way you are when someone breaks the rules, the way you are when you read something and think, “What? Are you allowed to write about this?” Wharton wrote about her world in a way that made it possible for me – and for all of us who come after her—to go into our own worlds still further, and to tease out the innermost reaches of pain and passion from the decorous woven fabric of our lives.

Her work is increasingly used for teaching purposes, and the University of Connecticut has taught a course called, “The Works of Roxana Robinson.”A. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/26/2013.)

Book Reviews
Pardon the pun, but Roxana Robinson's new novel, Sparta, which takes us deep inside the troubled head of a Marine returning from four years of active duty in Iraq, really is a tour de force.... Sparta is a novel with a mission—which in a lesser writer's hands could spell its doom. But Robinson manages to convey the difficulties of a warrior returning to society and dramatize how we fail our veterans without reducing her story to a polemic. She pulls this off by expertly deploying three literary weapons: emotional insight, moral nuance and intellectual depth.
Heller McAlpin - Washington Post


Both lyrical and unsentimental, richly honest and humane.
Wall Street Journal


An intelligent, sensitive analyst of family life.
Chicago Tribune


[After] four years of service in Iraq, [Conrad Farrell] finds coming back to his family in Westchester, N.Y., a disorienting experience.... Robinson brings us deep inside Conrad’s soul, and inside the suffocating despair and frustration that can stalk soldiers even when they are ostensibly out of harm’s way. By letting the reader live in Conrad’s skin, Robinson creates a moving chronicle of how we fail our returning troops.
Publishers Weekly


A Marine commander returns home from Iraq badly shaken in this novel...[and] slowly slips off the rails.... Robinson has convincingly summarized the wartime experience, but only rarely does it feel like she's made a full person out of Conrad, who has the distant feel of an Everyvet.... As Conrad's decline accelerates, Robinson hurries the pace of the closing chapters.... A well-intentioned but flawed exploration of an underdiscussed topic.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Explore the novel’s title. How does the description of Spartan life in chapter 4 compare to the life of a U.S. soldier in the twenty-first century? Why was Conrad drawn to classicism? Did he experience any of those ideals as a modern American warrior?

2. If you were in Claire’s position, how would you respond to Conrad’s homecoming? Ultimately, what does he need from her, and from all his loved ones? What makes it hard for him get his needs met without turning people away?

3. What are some of the differences between Marshall’s and Lydia’s approaches to their children? Despite her career as a successful therapist, why is Lydia mystified by Conrad’s symptoms, culminating in chapter 24, when she rejects his rage by telling him, “I can’t stand this. Con, you have to do something about this”?

4. How did Ali change Conrad’s perspective on privilege and political struggles? What common fears did they share?

5. As Conrad observes the dramatic changes in Go-Go’s value system, what does he discover about the way he and his friends have changed since graduation? Are we our true selves during our college years, or is that just an experimental phase? Do the demands of adulthood transform us into our true selves?

6. From chapter 5, where the factions of Fallujah are explained, what clarity did you gain? How did an American soldier’s duties in Iraq compare to those of armed forces in Vietnam and Korea?

7. While being with Jenny, what does Conrad discover about growing older and the changes that took place while he was away? As he walks familiar ground in Katonah and Manhattan, what has changed within him? What did his military service cost him?

8. What does Conrad’s heartrending experience with the VA and his session with Dr. Chandler reveal about the high suicide rates among U.S. soldiers and veterans? What would it take to fully fund psychiatric care in the military and rank it alongside weapons and armor in importance?

9. As Conrad remembers Carleton, Olivera, Anderson, and others, what emotions does he experience beyond guilt? How does his network of survivors cope with the seemingly trivial, naive nature of civilian life?

10. Everyone in Conrad’s world seems to have a purpose tied to meaningful work. Despite his damaged psyche, Conrad tries to find a new mission, enrolling in an economics class and forcing himself through the GMAT. How did his perception of a meaningful life radically change whenhe enlisted?

11. What truths are finally spoken at the end of chapter 24? How does the Farrells’ response to trauma compare to your family’s? Throughout the novel, Conrad told himself that he must keep certain truths from his family. Was he right?

12. What makes Conrad’s relationship with Ollie special? What is Ollie able to see and do that the other family members—and the VA clinician—can’t?

13. In what ways can fiction sometimes capture reality better than a history book? How did Conrad’s story affect your understanding of the challenges faced by veterans and the aftermath of modern warfare?

14. What themes of healing are woven throughout this and other fiction you’ve read by Roxana Robinson? What is both unique and universal about Conrad’s experience?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Marisha Pessl, 2006
Penguin Group USA
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143112129

Summary
Special Topics in Calamity Physics, the dazzling debut of Marisha Pessl, is a buoyant combination of comedy, tragedy, mystery, and romance, a story of disturbing secrets and the eccentric high school student who uncovers them. In vivid prose sprinkled with literary and cultural references, Pessl weaves a complicated tale of self-awakening in a postmodern world.

Blue van Meer is the precocious only daughter of a dashing and scholarly father. After her mother’s death in a car accident when Blue is six, they hit the road together, traveling between her father’s ever-changing teaching positions in obscure college towns. While Blue’s intellectual gifts have been nurtured by her devoted father, she has never had a real home or friends. Instead, she has been raised on her father’s voice and on the literature and political history that he thrives on.

Enter Hannah Schneider and the Bluebloods, an enigmatic clique at St. Gallway, the private school Blue enters for her senior year. Hannah is the gorgeous, mysterious mentor to a select group of St. Gallway seniors, and she invites dutiful and shy Blue to join them. A film studies teacher, Hannah is alluring and unconventional, “the lone bombshell slinking into a Norman Rockwell,” who treats the students as friends and equals. For the first time in her life, Blue finds herself drawn out of the insular family world she and her father have created, and into the lives of these maverick and beautiful peers. 

But after a suspicious death at Hannah’s house, this new world raises some disturbing questions, and Blue’s life begins to come “unstitched like a snagged sweater.” Who is Hannah Schneider and why is she so interested in Blue? Does Blue’s narcissistic father really love constant travel, or is he running away from more than the ghost of her mother? What really happened the day her mother died? Who can Blue really trust? 

In one life-changing year, Blue will unveil a mystery bigger than her own life. Along the way she will learn to act like a teenager, to love unexpectedly, and to think for herself. Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a coming-of-age tale and a disturbing mystery, a snapshot of the dark relationship between ideology and violence but also the poignant tale of a young woman learning to stand on her own. Pessl is a virtuosic writer, energetic and erudite, perceptive about relationships, history, and politics, and able to paint a portrait of contemporary youth alongside a complicated picture of the political battles waged by their parents’ generation. Starting with a “Core Curriculum,” and complete with citations, Web sites, footnotes, and even a final exam, Pessl guides us through the dynamic evolution of Blue van Meer, named after a butterfly, from cocooned caterpillar to free-flying individual. (From Wikipedia.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 26, 1977
• Where—near Detroit, Michigan, USA
• Raised—Asheville, North Carolina
• Education—B.A., Barnard College (Columbia University)
• Currently—New York, New York

Marisha Pessl is an American writer best known for her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, published in 2006.  Her second novel, Night Film, came out in 2013.

Pessl was born in Clarkston, Michigan, to Klaus, an Austrian engineer for General Motors, and Anne, an American homemaker. Pessl's parents divorced when she was three, and she moved to Asheville, North Carolina with her mother and sister.

Pessl had an intellectually stimulating upbringing, recalling that her mother read "a fair chunk of the Western canon out loud" to her and her sister before bed, and entered her in lessons for riding, painting, jazz, and French. She started high school at the Asheville School, a private, co-educational boarding school, but graduated from Asheville High School in 1995. She attended Northwestern University for two years before transferring to Barnard College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English Literature.

After graduating, Pessl worked as a financial consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, while writing in her free time. After two failed attempts at novels, she began writing a third in 2001 about the relationship between a daughter and her controlling, charismatic father. She completed the novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, in 2004 and it was published in 2006 to "almost universally positive" reviews, translated into thirty languages, and eventually becoming a New York Times Best Seller.


Pessl's second novel, Night Film, a psychological literary thriller, was published in 2013 to mixed reviews. Janet Maslin of the New York Times suspected it "was more exciting to write than to read," while Kirkus referred to it as "an inventive—if brooding, strange and creepy—adventure in literary terror."

Pessl married Nic Caiano, a hedge fund manager, in 2003, and they lived in New York City. Pessl and Caiano divorced in 2009.

Pessl was also a contributing musician to The Pierces' third studio album, Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge, released in 2007. She is credited in the liner notes as having played the French horn on track 9 titled "The Power Of..." (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/18/2013.)

Book Reviews
Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics is the most flashily erudite first novel since Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. With its pirouettes and cartwheels, its tireless annotations and digressions, it has a similar whiz-kid eagerness to wow the reader.
The New York Times

This skylarking book will leave readers salivating for more. The joys of this shrewdly playful narrative lie not only in the high-low darts and dives of Pessl's tricky plotting, but in her prose, which floats and runs as if by instinct, unpremeditated and unerring.
The New York Times Book Review

Blue's cross-referencing mania can be surprisingly enjoyable, because Pessl is a vivacious writer who's figured out how to be brainy without being pedantic.
Donna Rifkin - The Washington Post

(Audio version.) Pessl's showy (often too showy) debut novel, littered as it is with literary references and obscure citations, would seem to make an unlikely candidate for a successful audiobook. Yet actor and singer Emily Janice Card (a North Carolina native like the author) has a ball with Pessl's knotty, digressive prose, eating up Pessl's array of voices, impressions and asides like an ice-cream sundae. Card reads as if she is composing the book as she goes along, with a palpable sense of enjoyment present in almost every line reading. Her girlish voice, immature but knowing, is the perfect sound for Pessl's protagonist and narrator Blue van Meer, wise beyond her years even as she stumbles through a disastrous final year of high school. Card brings out the best in Pessl's novel and papers over its weak spots as ably as she can.
Publishers Weekly

Pessl's stunning debut is an elaborate construction modeled after the syllabus of a college literature course 36 chapters are named after everything from Othello to Paradise Lost to The Big Sleep that culminates with a final exam. It comes as no surprise, then, that teen narrator Blue Van Meer, the daughter of an itinerant academic, has an impressive vocabulary and a knack for esoteric citation that makes Salinger's Seymour Glass look like a dunce. Following the mysterious death of her butterfly-obsessed mother, Blue and her father, Gareth, embark, in another nod to Nabokov, on a tour of picturesque college towns, never staying anyplace longer than a semester. This doesn't bode well for Blue's social life, but when the Van Meers settle in Stockton, N.C., for the entirety of Blue's senior year, she befriends sort of a group of eccentric geniuses (referred to by their classmates as the Bluebloods) and their ringleader, film studies teacher Hannah Schneider. As Blue becomes enmeshed with Hannah and the Bluebloods, the novel becomes a murder mystery so intricately plotted that, after absorbing the late-chapter revelations, readers will be tempted to start again at the beginning in order to watch the tiny clues fall into place. Like its intriguing main characters, this novel is many things at once it's a campy, knowing take on the themes that made The Secret History and Prep such massive bestsellers, a wry sendup of most of the Western canon and, most importantly, a sincere and uniquely twisted look at love, coming of age and identity.
Publishers Weekly

Precocious Blue van Meer is used to moving around with her professor father, who travels from job to job and affair to affair. But she's not prepared for the consequences when both a friend and a favorite teacher die tragically.
Library Journal

Donna Tartt goes postmodern in this eclectically intellectual murder mystery. Blue van Meer, daughter of a womanizing widower, has spent her entire life following her erudite father on six-month stints to the small posts he chooses at obscure universities. During her senior year in high school, though, she convinces him to let her stay put for the entire academic year, which she will spend at the St. Gallway School in Stockton, N.C. There, while immediately proving her academic prowess by besting the presumed valedictorian, she also finds herself courted by an intriguing faculty member, Hannah Schneider, and is reluctantly accepted into her group of student followers: Milton, Charles, Leulah and Jade, each of whom seems to be hiding something about their past. The group meets at Hannah's every Sunday for international cuisine and intellectual banter, and soon Blue is also going on social excursions with the girls and secretly lusting after Milton. Things go awry when Blue and her compatriots break into Hannah's house and witness the mysterious drowning of one of Hannah's friends. The drowning becomes a rallying cry for the group to find out more about their teacher's secret life. The plot thickens again when Hannah herself dies, leaving Blue to put the pieces together and determine the truth. Who was Hannah Schneider really? What was the nature of her various relationships? And why did she welcome Blue into her clique so readily? The writing is clever, the text rich with subtle literary allusion. But while even the gimmicks work well (chapters are structured like a literature syllabus; hand-drawn visual aids appear throughout), they don't compensate for the fact that The Secret History came first. Sharp, snappy fun for the literary-minded.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Blue describes herself as a “Jane Goodall,” an observer not a main actor. She is quiet, in thrall to her father, bookish, and solitary. What did you think of her when we first meet her? How does she change over the course of the novel? At the end, what new characteristics has she acquired?

2. Her father, Gareth van Meer, is her opposite: charming and callous, verbose and secretive. He dazzles women, is adored by his students, and is completely committed to his daughter. Yet there are clues that all is not right with Gareth. Go back to some passages in the book where Blue hints that he is hiding something, such as when she describes her frightening apprehension, at the age of eleven, that he is a “terrifying, red-faced stranger bearing his dark, moldy soul” (p. 33). What is your opinion of him at the novel’s conclusion?

3. The relationship between Blue and her father changes over Blue’s senior year. At the start she loves and trusts him unconditionally, but at the end she has hard questions for him. How does Blue’s attitude toward him begin to change? Does he alter the way that he treats her? Try to imagine their future relationship; how might they feel toward each other?

4. The death of Hannah Schneider, movie-star beautiful and charismatic, is the mystery at the heart of the novel. Who was Hannah Schneider? What does Blue learn about her past, and about how they are linked? Do you have sympathy for Hannah? Was she well-intentioned or do you think she was disturbed and dangerous?

5. Hannah takes Blue under her wing and includes her in the group of students, the Bluebloods, that she has befriended and mentored. Why is she so interested in Blue? How does she encourage Blue to act? Try to think of what she provides for each of them that they wouldn’t otherwise have, the way she “reads” each of them “so you thought you were her favorite paperback” (p. 322). Is she a good influence on Blue and the others?

6. Small-town America is also a subject of this book; Gareth is a “perennial visiting lecturer,” who raises Blue in a series of obscure towns throughout America. Think back to some of the places that they have lived, and the accompanying Americana—the Wal-Marts, chain restaurants, and suburbs that Blue and her father drift through. How would you describe this America? How is it different from other, more mainstream, depictions of the country? Do you recognize these places? What do you think Blue thinks of them?

7. Zach Soderberg seems to Blue at first to be bland and simple, a regular guy who does not attract her as the wild and nonconformist Bluebloods do. But what does Zach offer that the others cannot? What do you think he sees in Blue? Why do you think the Bluebloods are so disparaging toward him? What role does he play in Blue’s transformation?

8. Blue calls her father’s endless stream of romantic conquests “June Bugs,” saying “Dad picked up women the way certain wool pants can’t help but pick up lint” (p. 29). What is her relationship to some of these women like? Does she grow more sympathetic to them? Consider some of the specific encounters Blue has with women Gareth is involved with. What does the incident with “Kitty,” in particular, teach her?

9. The Bluebloods are mesmerizing but merciless and are at first cruel even to Blue. How would you describe them as a clique? Individually? Which of them grow more sympathetic, and which become kinder toward Blue? Are any of them redeemed by the end of the story?

10. The relationship between ideology and violence is a subtext that turns into a main theme. Who is particularly ideological or political in this book? What do they believe in and advocate for? Try to trace Gareth van Meer’s beliefs, in particular, by returning to earlier passages in the novel where Blue mentions his ideas, reading material, or lectures.

11. At the end of the book, Blue is faced with a hard choice about the information she has uncovered. How does she act and why? Though he never says, do you think her father is proud of her ultimate decision about the secret she uncovers? What does her decision, which costs her plenty, tell you about Blue’s morals and inner strength? What would you have done?

12. Much of the investigation that Blue undertakes depends on her interpreting various clues and events correctly. Sometimes she succeeds, sometimes she fails. Who attempts to mislead her, and how do they do it? What enables her to grow better at understanding the machinations of the adults around her? Do you agree with her final assessment of the mystery at the heart of her origins and of the novel? Or do you agree with Gareth that “we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things” (p. 261)?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Spill Simmer Falter Wither 
Sara Baume, 2015 (2016, U.S.)
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544716193


Summary
A debut novel already praised as "unbearably poignant and beautifully told" (Eimear McBride) this captivating story follows—over the course of four seasons—a misfit man who adopts a misfit dog.

It is springtime, and two outcasts—a man ignored, even shunned by his village, and the one-eyed dog he takes into his quiet, tightly shuttered life—find each other, by accident or fate, and forge an unlikely connection.

As their friendship grows, their small, seaside town suddenly takes note of them, falsely perceiving menace where there is only mishap; the unlikely duo must take to the road.
 
Gorgeously written in poetic and mesmerizing prose, Spill Simmer Falter Wither has already garnered wild support in its native Ireland, where the Irish Times pointed to Baume’s "astonishing power with language" and praised it as "a novel bursting with brio, braggadocio and bite."

It is also a moving depiction of how—over the four seasons echoed in the title—a relationship between fellow damaged creatures can bring them both comfort. One of those rare stories that utterly, completely imagines its way into a life most of us would never see, it transforms us not only in our understanding of the world, but also of ourselves. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1984
• Where—Lancashire, England (UK)
• Raised—County Cork, Ireland
• Education—M.F.A., Trinity College
• Awards—Davy Byrnes Short Story Award
• Currently—lives in County Cork, Ireland


Sara Baume has always immersed herself in images. In addition to being a highly acclaimed debut author (yes, "debut"—attaining resounding success with her very first novel), she is also a visual artist. It is an artistic sensibility that finds its way into her writing:

First and foremost I see; I see the world and then I describe it.... I don't know another way to write. I always anchor everything in an image.

That anchoring is clearly evident in her 2015 novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither. Critics have praised the book's vivid, poetic, even "dazzling" descriptions of the natural landscape.

Baume's short fiction has appeared in The Moth, Stinging Fly, Irish Independent, and other publications. Her story, "Solesearcher1," won the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award. Simmer Falter actually began as a short story before morphing into a novella and eventually into a full-fledged novel.
 
Personal
Baume was born in a caravan in Lancaster, England; her English father worked on rural gaslines, so the family traveled from place to place. But when there came to be too many children to fit in the van, they settled down in her mother's home country of Ireland. Lyndsay was four when the family moved to County Cork, and it is where she lives today with her two dogs. (Adapted from interviews with NPR and Totally Dublin. Retrieved 3/20/2016.)

Be sure to visit the author's blog.

Book Reviews
[A] lovely book…destined to become a small classic of animal communion literature.
Wall Street Journal


A tour de force.... No writer since JM Coetzee or Cormac McCarthy has written about an animal with such intensity. This is a novel bursting with brio, braggadocio and bite. Again and again it wows you with its ambition…. At its heart is a touching and inspiriting sense of empathy, that rarest but most human of traits. Boundaries melt, other hearts become knowable…. This book is a stunning and wonderful achievement by a writer touched by greatness.
Joseph O'Connor - Irish Times


An ambitious stylist with an astonishing eye for detail and a clear passion for language. But it is the beautifully measured control of plot and the authenticity of the narrative voice that most impresses.
Irish Examiner


A deft and moving debut.... To capture this constrained setting and quiet character requires specific skills, which Baume has in spades.... It’s not easy to tell such a sparse tale, to be so economic with story, but the book hums with its own distinctiveness, presenting in singing prose an unforgettable landscape peopled by two unlikely Beckettian wanderers, where hope is not yet lost.
Guardian (UK)


Told in splendid prose, with lyrical descriptions of the landscape, it’s an involving story and possibly the best first novel to emerge from Ireland since Eimear McBride’s debut.
Herald (UK)


"[A] joltingly original debut.... Baume charts the growing dependency between these two stray souls with remarkable deftness and almost unbearable poignancy.
Mail on Sunday (UK)


Sara Baume’s exquisite debut has a simple plot: an outcast man and his dog One Eye take to the road in a ramshackle car and watch the world, weather and seasons change as they drive through the highways and byways of Ireland. But the prose is full of wonder, inventive, poetic and dazzling, concerned with the smallest detail of the natural landscape and the terrain of human emotion, as Baume heartbreakingly describes how an ordinary life can falter and stall.
Sunday Express (UK)


[A] fine debut.... Baume succeeds in reawakening her reader's capacity for wonder...so much so that the book and its one-eyed dog became companions I was loathe to leave.
Observer-Guardian (UK)


Ambitious and impressive.... Baume’s engaging, intriguing and brightly original first novel may mark a comparably significant debut.
Times Literary Supplement


One of the most quietly devastating books of the year…With Spill Simmer Falter Wither she has created a dark, tender portrait of what it’s like to live life on the margins.
Sydney Morning Herald


An unsettling literary surprise of the best sort. This first novel’s voice is singular in its humility and imaginative range.... What gives Baume’s book its startling power…is her portrait of an unexpectedly protean mind at work.... Baume’s prose makes sure we look and listen. Her book insists we take notice.
Atlantic


[Baume’s] rhythmic, intimate prose abounds with startling sights, smells and sounds.... [Her] sympathy for her 'wonkety' characters is infectious and their relationship—in all its drama and ordinariness—beautifully conveyed. Places and smells, plants and animals are conjured with loving attention, the narrative propelled by a striking linguistic intensity.... Baume’s capacity for wonder turns this portrait of an unusual friendship into a powerful meditation on humanity.
New Statesman


(Starred review.) This haunting debut novel by an award-winning Irish short story writer will appeal to readers who don't mind a little darkness in their dog stories. The detailed and almost poetic descriptions of the natural world as the seasons change add an element of enchantment to this lovely story. —Dan Forrest, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green
Library Journal


Elegant, heartbreaking, and inspiring.... The lyric, lilting style of Baume’s voice will endear even animal non-lovers to her thrilling and transformative story. With echoes of Mark Haddon’s narrative style and a healthy dose of empathy for the lost and lonely among us, Spill Simmer Falter Wither is a superlative first novel.
Booklist


[I]t seems unreal that Ray could grow up without attending school and without any social services intervention. Baume perhaps means to make a statement about marginalized people..., but something doesn't quite ring true in Ray's isolation. The vague, sad ending doesn't help.
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)

1. Describe Ray. Why is he such an outcast? What about him makes the villagers keep their distance, even shun him? How would you react to Ray?

2. Follow-up to Question 1: In what way are Ray and One-Eye alike? Talk about how man's and dog's pasts have left them deeply scarred? In other words, how have their pasts shaped them both?

3. Talk about the presence of Ray's father, even though he died 18 months before the opening of the book. What role does he play in Ray's life, now and in the past?

4. Ray tells One Eye: "You have to learn to fathom your way through a world of which you are frightened." How do the two "fathom their way" together? How do you fathom your way through life?

5. We originally think of Ray as inward, trapped within himself and unable to focus on others. Yet it turns out he is attuned to others in an unusual way. He's ever curious, once asking Ray, for instance, "what exactly people do, all day long, every day?" Find other examples of how Ray thinks about people or animals?

6. Ray says to One Eye: "I wish I’d been born with your capacity for wonder." Does Ray, by the story's end acquire that capacity, or has he had it all along? By the end of the book, have you felt wonder?

7. Talk about the quality of compassion, which stands at the center of this book. Start with the advertisement for One Eye, which asks for a "compassionate and tolerant owner." Where else does compassion come into play...and importantly, where (or in whom) is it missing?

8. Baume's use of the second-person narrative is unusual. Why might the author have chosen that point of view? What does it allow her to do? What affect does it have you how you read the work?

9. Spill Simmer Falter Wither is heartrending. Does it leave any space for hope?

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime use these, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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A Spool of  Blue Thread 
Anne Tyler, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
386 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101874271


Summary
It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon. . .

This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture.

Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.

Brimming with all the insight, humor, and generosity of spirit that are the hallmarks of Anne Tyler’s work, A Spool of Blue Thread tells a poignant yet unsentimental story in praise of family in all its emotional complexity. It is a novel to cherish. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 25, 1941
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B.A., Duke University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize (see below)
• Currently—lives in Baltimore, Maryland


Anne Tyler  is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published 20 novels, the best known of which are Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1983), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the third won it.

She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail" (New York Times), and her "rigorous and artful style" and "astute and open language" (also, New York Times). While many of her characters have been described as quirky or eccentric, she has managed to make them seem real through skillfully fleshing out their inner lives in great depth.

Her subject in all her novels has been the American family and marriage: the boredom and exasperating irritants endured by partners, children, siblings, parents; the desire for freedom pulling against the tethers of attachments and conflicted love; the evolution over time of familial love and sense of duty. Tyler celebrates unremarkable Americans and the ordinary details of their everyday lives. Because of her style and subject matter, she has been compared to John Updike, Jane Austen, and Eudora Welty, among others.

Childhood
The eldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father, Lloyd Parry Tyler, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Phyllis Mahon Tyler, a social worker. Both her parents were Quakers who were very active with social causes in the Midwest and the South.  Her family lived in a succession of Quaker communities in the South until they settled in 1948 in a Quaker commune in Celo, in the mountains of North Carolina near Burnsville.

The Celo Community settlement was founded by conscientious objectors and members of the liberal Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends, with community labor needs shared by the residents. Tyler lived there from age 7 through 11 and helped her parents and others with caring for livestock and organic farming. While she did not attend formal public school in Celo, lessons were taught in art, carpentry, and cooking in homes and in other subjects in a tiny school house. Her early informal training was supplemented by correspondence school.

Her first memory of her own creative story-telling was of crawling under the bed covers at age 3 and "telling myself stories in order to get to sleep at night." Her first book at age 7 was a collection of drawings and stories about "lucky girls...who got to go west in covered wagons." Her favorite book as a child was The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton. Tyler acknowledges that this book, which she read many times during this period of limited access to books, had a profound influence on her, showing how the years flowed by, people altered, and nothing could ever stay the same."

This early perception of changes over time is a theme that reappears in many of her novels decades later, just as The Little House itself appears in her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Tyler also describes reading Little Women 22 times as a child. When the Tyler family left Celo after four years to move to Raleigh, NC, 11-year-old Anne had never attended public school and never used a telephone. This unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view "the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise."

Raleigh, North Carolina
It also meant that Tyler felt herself to be an outsider in the public schools she attended in Raleigh, a feeling that has followed her most of her life. She believes that this sense of being an outsider has contributed to her becoming a writer:

I believe that any kind of setting-apart situation will do [to become a writer]. In my case, it was emerging from the commune…and trying to fit into the outside world.

Despite her lack of public schooling prior to age 11, Anne entered school academically well ahead of most of her classmates in Raleigh. With access now to libraries, she discovered Eudora Welty, Gabriel García Márquez, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. Welty remains one of her favorite writers, and she credits Welty with showing her that books could be about the everyday details of life, not just about major events.

During her years at N. B. Broughton High School in Raleigh, she was inspired and encouraged by a remarkable English teacher, Phyllis Peacock. Peacock had previously taught the writer Reynolds Price, under whom Tyler would later study at Duke University. She would also later teach the writer Armistead Maupin. Seven years after high school, Tyler would dedicate her first published novel to "Mrs. Peacock, for everything you’ve done."

Education
Tyler won a full scholarship to Duke University, which her parents urged her to go accept it because they also needed money for the education of her three younger brothers. At Duke, Tyler enrolled in Reynolds Price's first creative writing class, which also included a future poet, Fred Chappell. Price was most impressed with the sixteen-year-old Tyler, describing her as "frighteningly mature for 16," "wide-eyed," and "an outsider." Years later Price would describe Tyler as "one of the best novelists alive in the world,… who was almost as good a writer at 16 as she is now."

While an undergraduate, Tyler published her short story "Laura" in the Duke literary journal Archive, for which she won the newly created Anne Flexner award for creative writing. She wrote many short stories, one of which impressed Reynolds Price so that he later stated that it was the "most finished, most accomplished short story I have ever received from an undergraduate in my thirty years of teaching." "The Saints in Caesar’s Household" was published in Archive also and won her a second Anne Flexner award. This short story led to her meeting Diarmuid Russell, to whom Price had sent it with kudos. Russell, who was an agent for both Reynolds Price and for Tyler’s "crowning influence" Eudora Welty, later became Tyler’s agent.

Tyler majored in Russian Literature at Duke—not English—and graduated in 1961, at age 19, having been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. With her Russian Literature background she received a fellowship to graduate school in Slavic Studies at Columbia University although she left after a year without her master's degree. She returned to Duke where she got a job in the library as a Russian bibliographer. It was there that she met Taghi Modarressi, a resident in child psychiatry in Duke Medical School and a writer himself, and they were married a year later (1963).

Early writing
While working at the Duke library—before and after marrying Modarressi—Tyler continued to write short stories, which appeared in The New Yoker, Saturday Evening Post, and Harpers. She also started work on her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, eventually published 1964, followed by The Tin Can Tree in 1965. Years later she disowned both of these novels, as well as many of the short stories she wrote during this period, going so far as to say she "would like to burn them." She feels that most of this early work suffers from the lack of thorough character development and her failure to rework material repeatedly.

After the birth of two children (1965 and 1967), followed by a move from Montreal, Canada, to Baltimore in the U.S., Tyler had little time or energy for writing. She published nothing from 1965 to 1970. By 1970, however, she began writing again and published three more novels by 1974—A Slipping-Down Life, The Clock Winder, and Celestial Navigation. In her own opinion, her writing improved considerably during this period; with her children entering school, she was able to devote more time—and focus more intensely—than at any time since her undergraduate days.

National recognition
With Celestial Navigation, Tyler began to get wider recognition. Morgan's Passing (1980) won her the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction and was nominated for both the American Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

With her next novel (her ninth), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Tyler truly arrived as a recognized artist in the literary world. (She considers Homesick her best work.) Her tenth novel, The Accidental Tourist, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985. It was also made into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. The popularity of this well-received film further increased the growing public awareness of her work. Her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was Time magazine’s "Book of the Year." It was adapted into a 1994 TV movie, as eventually were four other of her novels.

Since her Pulitzer Prize with Breathing Lessons, Tyler has written 9 more novels, all of favorably reviewed, many Book of the Month Club Main Selections and New York Times Bestsellers.

Analysis
In Tyler’s own words, the characters are the driving forces behind the stories and the starting point for her writing:

I do make a point of writing down every imaginable facet of my characters before I begin a book, trying to get to know them so I can figure out how they’ll react in any situation…..My reason for writing now is to live lives other than my own, and I do that by burrowing deeper and deeper….till I reach the center of those lives.

The magic of her novels starts with her ability to create those characters in the reader’s mind through the use of remarkably realistic details. The late Canadian author Carol Shields, writing about Tyler's characters, observes:

Tyler has always put her characters to work. Their often humble or eccentric occupations, carefully observed and threaded with humor, are tightly sewn to the other parts of their lives, offering them the mixed benefit of tedium and consolation, as well as a lighted stage for the unfolding of their dramatic selves. She also allows her men and women an opportunity for redemption.

Tyler has clearly spelled out the importance of her characters to her stories: "As far as I’m concerned, character is everything. I never did see why I have to throw in a plot, too."

Stylistically, Tyler's writing is difficult to categorize or label. Novelist Cathleen Schine describes how her "style without a style" manages to pull the reader into the story:

So rigorous and artful is the style without a style, so measured and delicate is each observation, so complex is the structure and so astute and open the language, that the reader can relax, feel secure in the narrative and experience the work as something real and natural.

The San Francisco Chronicle made a similar point: "One does not so much read a Tyler novel as visit it.

While Tyler herself does not like to think of her novels in terms of themes, numerous reviewers and scholars have noted the importance of family and marriage relationships to her characters and stories. Reviewing Noah's Compass, New York Times' Mitchiko Kakutani noted that

The central concern of most of this author’s characters has always been their need to define themselves in terms of family—the degree to which they see themselves as creatures shaped by genetics, childhood memories and parental and spousal expectations, and the degree to which they are driven to embrace independent identities of their own.

Tyler is not without her critics. The most common criticism is that her works are "sentimental," "sweet," and "charming and cosy." Even Kakutani has also occasionally bemoaned a "cloying cuteness," noting that "her novels—with their eccentric heroes, their homespun details, their improbable, often heartwarming plots—have often flirted with cuteness." In her own defense, Tyler has said,

For one thing I think it is sort of true. I would say piss and vinegar for [Philip] Roth and for me milk and cookies. I can’t deny it…. [However] there’s more edge under some of my soft language than people realize.

Also, because almost all of Tyler’s work covers the same territory—family and marriage relationships—and are located in the same setting, she has come under criticism for being repetitive and formulaic.

Tyler’s advice to beginning writers:

They should run out and buy the works of Erving Goffman, the sociologist who studied the meaning of gesture in personal interactions. I have cause to think about Erving Goffman nearly every day of my life, every time I see people do something unconscious that reveals more than they’ll ever know about their interiors. Aren’t human beings intriguing? I could go on writing about them forever."

Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/10/2015.)

Book Reviews
The seemingly effortless, leisurely pace at which Tyler introduces her complicated, multigenerational family and lets the plot unfold belie the skill with which she compresses information into a relatively short space.... Anne Tyler’s novels are invitations to spend time in the houses of the Baltimore neighborhood that she has built—house by house, block by block, word by word—over her long and bright career.
Francine Prose - New York Review of Books


Tyler slyly dismantles the myth-making behind all our family stories.... She does so with a compassion that recognizes that few of us will be immune to similar accommodations with the truth.... The novel [makes] piercing forays into the long-distant past.... We are not reading the fiction of estrangement, or of disorientation, but its power derives from the restless depths beneath its unfractured surface.
Alex Clark - Guardian (UK)


Tyler tenderly unwinds the tangled skeins of three generations, then knits them together . . . in precise often hilarious detail.... By the end of this deeply beguiling novel, we come to know a reality entirely different form the one at the start. Not that anyone’s lying, only that everything—the way we see the world and the way we understand it to work—is changed by the intimate, incremental shifts of daily life.
Roxana Robinson - O magazine


It is wonderful to pick up a novel from a bonafide literary superstar. A Spool of Blue Thread is Anne Tyler’s twentieth novel and it shows in every flawless sentence.... A stunning novel about family life which just rings so true—it depicts the bonds and the tensions, the love and the exasperation beautifully.... A terrific novel. (Book of the Month)
Bookseller (UK)


Thoroughly enjoyable but incohesive.... [An] interlude [about the parents] proves jarring for the reader, who at this point has invested plenty of interest in the siblings. Despite this, Tyler does tie these sections together, showing once again that she’s a gifted and engrossing storyteller.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) It's been half a century since Tyler debuted with If Morning Ever Comes, and her writing has lost none of the freshness and timelessness that has earned her countless awards and accolades. Now 73, she continues to dazzle with this multigenerational saga, which glides back and forth in time with humor and heart and a pragmatic wisdom that comforts and instructs.  —Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Tyler is as fleet and graceful as a skater, her prose as transparent as ice.... We get swept up in the spin of conversations, the slipstream of consciousness, and the glide and dip of domestic life, then feel the sting of Tyler’s quick and cutting insights into unjust assumptions about class, gender, age, and race.... Tyler’s long dedication to language and story [is] an artistic practice made perfect in this charming, funny, and shrewd novel of the paradoxes of self, family, and home. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


(Starred review.) Tyler gives us lovely insights into an ordinary family who, ‘like most families . . . imagined they were special.’ They will be special to readers thanks to the extraordinary richness and delicacy with which Tyler limns complex interactions and mixed feelings familiar to us all and yet marvelously particular to the empathetically rendered members of the Whitshank clan. The texture of everyday experience transmuted into art.... Family life in Baltimore [is] still a fresh and compelling subject in the hands of this gifted veteran.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What are the main themes of the novel? Which did you find most thought-provoking?

2. The novel opens and closes with Denny. Do you think he’s the main character? If not, who is?

3. We don’t learn the full significance of the title until nearly (on page 350). How did this delay make the metaphor more powerful? What is the metaphor?

4. On page 10, Tyler writes, "Well, of course they did hear from him again. The Whitshanks weren’t a melodramaticfamily." What type of family are they? Compare the way you see them with the way they see themselves.

5. Chapter 2 begins with the Whitshank family stories: "These stories were viewed as quintessential—as defining, in some way—and every family member, including Stem’s three-year-old, had heard them told and retold and embroidered and conjectured upon any number of times." (page 40) Why are these two stories so important? Why is the story of Red’s sister important to Red’s family?

6. "Patience, in fact, was what the Whitshanks imagined to be the theme of their two stories—patiently lying in wait for what they believed should come to them." (page 57) Others might say it was envy or disappointment. Which interpretation makes the most sense to you? Can you think of another linking theme?

7. How does Abby’s story about the day she fell in love with Red fit into the Whitshank family history? Why isn’t it one of the family’s two defining stories?

8. Much is made of Abby’s "orphans," which we learn also include Stem. What does her welcoming of strangers into her home say about her character? How do the others’ responses set up a subtle contrast?

9. Discuss the character Denny. Why is he so resentful of Stem? Why is he so secretive about his life?

10. Do Red and Abby have favorite children and grandchildren? Who do you think each one favors? 

11. On page 151, Tyler writes about Abby: "She had always assumed that when she was old, she would have total confidence, finally. But look at her: still uncertain." Do you think Abby’s family sees her as uncertain or lacking in confidence? Why?

12. Abby dies suddenly in an accident, just like Red’s parents did. When it came to his parents, "Red was of the opinion that instantaneous death was a mercy…" (page 153) Do you think he felt the same way after Abby’s death?

13. Why didn’t Abby tell Red about Stem’s mother? Why didn’t Denny tell Stem? And why, after they learn the truth, does Stem make Red and Denny promise not to tell anyone else?

14. At Abby’s funeral, Reverend Alban speculates that heaven may be "a vast consciousness that the dead return to," bringing their memories with them. (page 189) What do you think of his theory? What do you imagine Abby would say about it?

15. Why did Red’s pausing to count the rings on the felled poplar make Abby fall in love with him?

16. The novel isn’t structured chronologically. How does Tyler use shifts in time to reveal character and change the reader’s perception?

17. What is the significance of the porch swing? What does it tell us about Linnie Mae and Junior?

18. After reading their story, how did your opinion of Linnie Mae change?

19. The Whitshank house, built by Junior and maintained by Red, is practically a character in the novel. What does it mean to the Whitshank family? Why, in the end, does it seem easy for Red to leave?

20. On the train at the end of the novel, Denny sits next to a teenage boy who cries quietly. What is the significance of this scene?

(Questions issued by the publisher. Thanks, Dorothy.)

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Spoonbenders
Daryl Gregory, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524731823


Summary
Teddy Telemachus is a charming con man with a gift for sleight of hand and some shady underground associates. In need of cash, he tricks his way into a classified government study about telekinesis and its possible role in intelligence gathering.

There he meets Maureen McKinnon, and it’s not just her piercing blue eyes that leave Teddy forever charmed, but her mind—Maureen is a genuine psychic of immense and mysterious power.

After a whirlwind courtship, they marry, have three gifted children, and become the Amazing Telemachus Family, performing astounding feats across the country. Irene is a human lie detector. Frankie can move objects with his mind. And Buddy, the youngest, can see the future. Then one night tragedy leaves the family shattered.

Decades later, the Telemachuses are not so amazing. Irene is a single mom whose ear for truth makes it hard to hold down a job, much less hold together a relationship. Frankie’s in serious debt to his dad’s old mob associates. Buddy has completely withdrawn into himself and inexplicably begun digging a hole in the backyard.

To make matters worse, the CIA has come knocking, looking to see if there’s any magic left in the Telemachus clan. And there is: Irene’s son Matty has just had his first out-of-body experience. But he hasn’t told anyone, even though his newfound talent might just be what his family needs to save themselves — if it doesn’t tear them apart in the process.

Harnessing the imaginative powers that have made him a master storyteller, Daryl Gregory delivers a stunning, laugh-out-loud new novel about a family of gifted dreamers and the invisible forces that bind us all. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1965
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Illinois State University
• Awards—Crawford Award; World Fantasy Award; Shirley Jackson Award
• Currently—Oakland, California


Daryl Gregory is an American science fiction, fantasy and comic book author and won the 2009 Crawford Award for his novel Pandemonium. His most recent novel, Spoonbenders, was released in 2017.

Personal life
Daryl Gregory was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, with his two sisters. He graduated from Illinois State University in 1987 with majors in English and theater. After graduation, he taught high school in Michigan for three years and attended the Michigan State University Clarion science fiction workshop.

When his wife, Kathleen Bieschke, attained a job at the University of Utah, the couple moved to Salt Lake City. Later they moved to State College, Pennsylvania, where Bieschke took a job with Penn State University. Gregory worked for Minitab, a company producing statistical analysis software. They have two adult children but are now divorced. In 2016 Gregory moved to Oakland, California, where he writes full time and lives Liza Groen Trombi, Locus Magazine Publisher and Editor in Chief.

Career
In 1990 Gregory sold his first story to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His first novel, Pandemonium, came out in 2008, winning him the Crawford Award for best first fantasy book. The novel was also nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the Mythopoeic Awards and the Shirley Jackson Award.

Gregory's second novel, The Devil's Alphabet, was published in 2009 and named one of the best books of 2009 by Publishers Weekly. It was additionally nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. In 2011 he published Raising Stony Mayhall, as well as the short story collection, Unpossible and Other Stories. Publishers Weekly named the collections one of the five best science fiction books of the year.

In 2010 Gregory was hired by Boom! Studios to co-write Dracula: Company of Monsters with Kurt Busiek and later the Planet of the Apes tie-in comic. He also wrote the stand-alone graphic novel, The Secret Battles of Genghis Khan, published in 2013.

Neuro-SF novel Afterparty came out in 2014, and his novella, "We Are All Completely Fine," in 2014. The novella was a Nebula Award finalist, and won the 2015 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella, as well as the Shirley Jackson Award. (Adapted from Wikiipedia. Retrieved 7/13/2017.)

Book Reviews
Daryl Gregory’s heartfelt and immensely entertaining novel takes us inside a wacky family endowed with psychic gifts. Maybe “gifts” is the wrong word — because not one of the family’s psychic powers is in good working order, nor does anyone in the family even want them. For the most part, the Telemachus family would prefer to be ordinary suburban folks left alone to live their lives in peace. But of course … that won’t happen. And we know it won’t because we’re told, right at the outset, that 14-year-old Mattie Telemachus has just taken his first astral-plane trip out of his body. What else would a kid do with such power but get into trouble? READ MORE …
P.J. Adler - LitLovers


[F]unny and charming.… Gregory writes with humor and charm, offering up a rollicking and quick-paced plot tailor-made for summer, but what makes the novel magical is his exploration of what it means to harbor these gifts, and to be the World’s Most Powerful Psychic.… At times, Gregory speeds us through moments that should be lingered over or leaves loose ends untied. Other ends he ties too tightly.… But as with all novels, choices must be made, and the danger of creating such an enjoyable world is that it leaves a reader longing for more.
Manuel Gonzales - New York Times Book Reivew


A family plagued with malfunctioning superpowers, persistent federal agents, and the mafia should make for a fast-paced and enthralling story, but a stalled plot grounds the [novel]…. Gregory seamlessly switches between different points of view, creating vivid voices for each Telemachus family member. But the intermittent bursts of incomplete information…result in a less-than-concrete understanding.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Masterful.… [G]racefully balances the outrageous melodrama of Chicago mobsters and shadowy government agencies with the ordinary mysteries of family dynamics.… Readers will emerge from the fray sure they know each Telemachus down to the smudges on their hearts. A skillfully written family drama that employs quirk and magic with grace.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What happens when the Telemachus family goes on Mike Douglas’s television show? What leads to the act not going as planned? What impact does it have on the family thereafter?

2. Why is Irene unable to trust anyone? How does this affect her relationships, including her relationship with Joshua? Is she able to overcome this? What advice does her father give her about this dilemma? Why is Irene exhilarated by online communication?

3. Why does Teddy refuse to invest in any of Frankie’s proposed ventures? What does Teddy believe is "the ultimate test of evolutionary fitness" (50)? How has Teddy succeeded in this test?

4. Why doesn’t Buddy speak most of the time even though he is able to? What is the question that haunts him the most? What does he mean when he thinks "Duty eats free will for breakfast"?

5. According to Teddy, what effect did "fear of the Russians" have on the U.S. government during the Cold War? What is the correlation between fear and gullibility?

6. What is "the great catch" in Irene’s ability? What might this suggest about truth?

7. After Maureen falls ill, she confesses to Teddy that she allied herself with a dissident Russian and reported false results to her government employer. Why did she choose to do this? Were her actions justified? Explain. 

8. Why does Buddy take Frankie to the casino boat even though he knows what will happen to his brother? Where does Buddy go when he disappears?

9. Who is Archibald and what is his relationship to the Telemachus family? Is Archibald responsible for Maureen’s death as Frankie believes? 

10. What does Maureen make Teddy promise before her death and why? Does Teddy honor his promise? Why or why not? 

11. Are the Telemachuses’ powers ultimately beneficial or are they more of a hindrance or a curse? Discuss.

12. Despite their powers, what common problems or obstacles does the Telemachus family face? How do they resolve these issues? What seems to unite the family? 

13. What does the book indicate about the power of suggestion? Which of the characters in the book are swayed by placebos, cons, and the power of suggestion? What is the most surprising example of this? Do we learn what causes these characters to believe in something that isn’t true or real?

14. What are "the moment the future ends" (86) and "the Zap"? What favor does Buddy ask of his sister on the day the future ends? How is he changed as a result?

15. At the end of the story, where does Matty go? Who does he believe is his "partner in transparency" (399)? What does Matty ultimately realize navigation is an act of?
(Questions issued by publishers.)

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The Sport of Kings 
C.E. Morgan, 2016
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
560 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250131843


Summary
An American tale centered on a horse and two families: one white, a Southern dynasty whose forefathers were among the founders of Kentucky; the other African-American, the descendants of their slaves.

It is a dauntless narrative that stretches from the fields of the Virginia piedmont to the abundant pastures of the Bluegrass, and across the dark waters of the Ohio River; from the final shots of the Revolutionary War to the resounding clang of the starting bell at Churchill Downs.

As C. E. Morgan unspools a fabric of shared histories, past and present converge in a Thoroughbred named Hellsmouth, heir to Secretariat and a contender for the Triple Crown. Newly confronted with one another in the quest for victory, the two families must face the consequences of their ambitions, as each is driven — and haunted — by the same, enduring question: How far away from your father can you run?

A sweeping narrative of wealth and poverty, racism and rage, The Sport of Kings is an unflinching portrait of lives cast in the shadow of slavery and a moral epic for our time. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1976
• Where—Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.M., Berea College; Th.M., Harvard Divinity School
• Awards—Whiting Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in Berea, Kentucky


Catherine Elaine Morgan is an American author of the novels, The Sport of Kings (2016) and All the Living (2009) She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. As an undergraduate, she studied voice at Berea College, a tuition-free labor college for students from poor and working-class backgrounds in Appalachia. In exchange for a free education, all students work for the college while enrolled. Morgan also attended Harvard Divinity School, where she studied literature and religion and attained her Masters in Theology. While at Harvard, she wrote her first novel, All the Living. She lives in Berea, Kentucky, with her husband.

Recognition and Awards
2009 - National Book Foundation "5 under 35" Award
2010 - Lannan Literary Fellowship
2012 - United States Artists Fellow Award
2013 - Whiting Award
2016 - Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes (Fiction)
2016 - Kirkus Prize (Fiction)
2017 - Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
2017 - Finalist, James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
2017 - Finalist, Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (former Orange Prize)
2017 - Finalist, Rathbones Folio Prize
2017 - Longlist, Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence 
(Author Bio dapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/29/2017.)

Book Reviews
[R]avishing and ambitious…a mud-flecked epic, replete with fertile symbolism, that hurtles through generations of Kentucky history. On its surface, The Sport of Kings has enough incident (arson, incest, a lynching, miscegenation, murder) to sustain a 1980s-era television mini-series.… But Ms. Morgan is not especially interested in surfaces, or in conventional plot migrations. She's an interior writer, with deep verbal and intellectual resources. She fills your head with all that exists in hers, and that is quite a lot—she has a special and almost Darwinian interest in consanguinity, in the barbed things that are passed on in the blood of people and of horses, like curses, from generation to generation…Ms. Morgan's prose has some of [Terrence Malick's] elastic sense of time. Her pace frequently slows to a dream-crawl as she scrutinizes the natural world as if cell by cell. Then, with the flick of a thoroughbred's tail, we are catapulted generations forward or back.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

The Sport of Kings…abounds with Faustian characters and dangerous learning…C. E. Morgan [possesses]…a boundless breadth of knowledge on the darker history of humans and horses in Kentucky…[a] riverine, gorgeously textured novel…There is life, wild joy and finally salvation in the language itself. C. E. Morgan has more nerve, linguistic vitality and commitment to cosmic thoroughness in one joint of her little finger than the next hundred contemporary novelists have in their entire bodies and vocabularies
Jaimy Gordon - New York Times Book Review


Morgan has dared to write the kind of book that was presumed long extinct: a high literary epic of America.
Telegraph (UK)


Sport of Kings boasts a plot that maintains tension and pace, and Morgan weaves its characters, its themes, its several histories together in a marvelous display of literary control and follow-through.
Christian Science Monitor


[A] rich and compulsive new novel.… This book confirms [Morgan] as the new torchbearer of the Southern Gothic tradition.… What emerges is a panoramic view of race relations in America, from the slow crumbling of the Jim Crow laws until shortly before the election of Barack Obama, with occasional glimpses into the more distant past. Racing provides the novel’s overarching metaphor for race (a set of tracks that determine the course of a life, and for which the correct breeding is essential), and Morgan’s white characters are hardly less constricted by history than her black ones.… It’s a bleak and bitter inversion of the American dream — a world in which circumstances are impossible to change, and legacies impossible to shake.… [Morgan is]…an immersive storyteller.… Her prose is often ravishingly beautiful, displaying an unerring instinct for metaphor and music.
Financial Times (UK)


Remarkable achievement.… The Sport of Kings hovers between fiction, history, and myth, its characters sometimes like the ancient ones bound to their tales by fate, its horses distant kin to those who drew the chariot of time across the sky . . . Novelists can do things that other writers can’t—and Morgan can do things that other novelists can’t.… Tremendous, the work of a writer just starting to show us what she can do.
New Yorker


[A]sprawling, magisterial Southern Gothic for the twenty-first century.
Oprah Magazine


[E]njoyable if overwritten…. The novel starts strong out of the gate…then blows it in the backstretch with a series of melodramatic incidents that undermines the care with which Morgan has created these larger-than-life characters. However, …the novel’s authentically pungent shed-row atmosphere, [is] ultimately satisfying as a mint julep on Derby Day.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Though set in the 21st century, the narrative establishes each character's backstory to reveal how the tendrils of …racial history continue to color and coil around the present.… A dense meditation on the ugliness that undergirds much of the sublime we as humans strive for and admire in life. —Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM
Library Journal


C.E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings takes the kind of dauntless, breathtaking chances readers once routinely expected from the boldest of American novels.… It is a profoundly orchestrated work that is both timeless and up-to-the-minute in its concerns, the most notable of which is what another Kentucky-bred novelist, Robert Penn Warren, once labeled "the awful responsibility of time."
Judges' panel - Kirkus Prize for Fiction


(Starred review.) [A]n epic novel steeped in American history and geography.… Vaultingly ambitious, thrillingly well-written, charged with moral fervor and rueful compassion. How will this dazzling writer astonish us next time?
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The Sport of Kings opens with a question that resounds throughout the story: "How far away from your father can you run?" Later, Henry Forge reflects, "That was the game of youth, wasn’t it — murdering one’s father?" (p. 312) Henry, Henrietta, and Allmon Shaughnessy all rebel against their fathers’ identities and values. How far away does each of them ultimately manage to run? What impact do their mothers have, present and absent?

2. John Henry Forge mixes learning with cruelty, arrogance, and isolation as he fashions an education for his son, Henry. How do Henry’s lessons with his father compare to his teaching of Henrietta? And how does this compare with what Allmon learns during his time in juvenile detention? (p. 269)

3. When teaching Henrietta about Thoroughbreds, Henry says, "Evolution is a ladder, and our aim is to climb it as quickly as possible." (p. 105) There are many references to ladders throughout the book. What might these signify beyond Henry’s understanding of evolution?

4. Unlike the Forges, Jamie Barlow, Ginnie Miller, Penn, and Lou, the veterinarians are not wealthy or powerful. They speak a plain language about a simple world, thereby offering comfort, relief, and sanctuary. What wisdom do they try to convey to Henry and Henrietta? How do they compare with the nonfamilial influences in Allmon’s life?

5. When Henry is at last free of his father, letting the Forge farm go fallow so he can plant clover and raise horses, does he break free of the past or is he somehow perpetuating the legacy of his ancestors?

6. The Sport of Kings comprises a narrative thread about the Forge family and Hellsmouth interspersed with self-contained stories. Some of these stories read like myths or folktales; others have biblical echoes. How do these inform the main narrative, and how do they contribute to the themes of this novel?

7. What are Henrietta’s passions as a girl and how do they shape the woman she becomes? How does she change after her encounter with Penn?

8. Are there times in their lives when the main characters experience real love as opposed to lust, admiration, greed, or other emotions they mistake or substitute for love? Do Henrietta and Allmon love each other?

9. Discuss the culture and codes of the Jockey Club. What is at stake besides money? What are the parallels between Hellsmouth’s captivity and Allmon’s?

10. What does Allmon learn from his grandfather? What is the meaning of his sermon? (pp. 215–221) How does the jockey Reuben Bedford Walker III relate to the Reverend?

11. What does the genesis story, featuring the God of Pine Mountain, say about the origins of human suffering?

12. How does Henry feel about horses as a boy? As a breeder? After Henrietta’s death? Based on the last line of chapter 6, what might Hellsmouth’s future hold?

13. Why doesn’t Allmon kill Henry? When he goes into Henry’s house to set it on fre, what is he seeking to destroy?

14. The book is structured with six chapters, fve interludes, and an epilogue. What is the purpose of the interludes? Did they distract from or enhance your experience as a reader? How did you interpret the epilogue? Is there redemption in The Sport of Kings?

15. In The Sport of Kings and in her debut novel, All the Living, what images of longing and hunger does C. E. Morgan create? What is the ultimate source of solace for her characters? How do both novels capture humanity’s relationship to the natural world?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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A Spot of Bother
Mark Haddon, 2006
Knopf Doubleday
354 pp.
ISBN-13:9780307278869

Summary
George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not at quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood, or manly bonhomie. He does not understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. “The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.” Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored.

At 61, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels and listening to a bit of light jazz. Then his tempestuous daughter, Katie, announces that she is getting re-married, to the deeply inappropriate Ray. Her family is not pleased—as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has “strangler’s hands.”

Katie can’t decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband’s ex-colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials.

Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.

The way these damaged people fall apart—and come together—as a family is the true subject of Haddon’s disturbing yet amusing portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 26, 1962
• Where—Northampton, UK
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Whitbread Book of the Year; Common-
   wealth Writer's Prize
• Currently—lives in Oxford, UK


Mark Haddon was born in Northampton and educated at Uppingham School and Merton College, Oxford, where he studied English.

In 2003, Haddon won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and in 2004, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Overall Best First Book for his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a book which is written from the perspective of a boy with Asperger syndrome. Haddon's knowledge of Asperger syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum, comes from his work with autistic people as a young man. In an interview at Powells.com, Haddon claimed that this was the first book that he wrote intentionally for an adult audience; he was surprised when his publisher suggested marketing it to both adult and child audiences.

His second adult novel, A Spot of Bother, was published in September 2006, and The Red House in 2012.

Mark Haddon is also known for his series of Agent Z books, one of which, Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars, was made into a 1996 Children's BBC sitcom. He also wrote the screenplay for the BBC television adaptation of Raymond Briggs's story Fungus the Bogeyman, screened on BBC1 in 2004. In 2007 he wrote the BBC television drama Coming Down the Mountain.

Haddon is a vegetarian, and enjoys vegetarian cookery. He describes himself as a 'hard-line atheist'. In an interview with The Observer, Haddon said "I am atheist in a very religious mould". His atheism might be inferred from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time in which the main character declares that those who believe in God are stupid.

In 2009, he donated the short story "The Island" to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Haddon's story was published in the Fire collection. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Recent retiree George Hall, convinced that his eczema is cancer, goes into a tailspin in Haddon's (Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) laugh-out-loud slice of British domestic life. George, 61, is clearly channeling a host of other worries into the discoloration on his hip (the "spot of bother"): daughter Katie, who has a toddler, Jacob, from her disastrous first-marriage to the horrid Graham, is about to marry the equally unlikable Ray; inattentive wife Jean is having an affair-with George's former co-worker, David Symmonds; and son Jamie doesn't think George is OK with Jamie's being queer. Haddon gets into their heads wonderfully, from Jean's waffling about her affair to Katie's being overwhelmed (by Jacob, and by her impending marriage) and Jamie's takes on men (and boyfriend Tony in particular, who wants to come to the wedding). Mild-mannered George, meanwhile, despairing over his health, slinks into a depression; his major coping strategies involve hiding behind furniture on all fours and lowing like a cow. It's an odd, slight plot-something like the movie Father of the Bride crossed with Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" (as skin rash)-but it zips along, and Haddon subtly pulls it all together with sparkling asides and a genuine sympathy for his poor Halls. No bother at all, this comic follow-up to Haddon's blockbuster (and nicely selling book of poems) is great fun.
Publishers Weekly

A spot of bother is quite an understatement for what Haddon's characters endure in his impressive second novel (after his best-selling Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time). George Hall, retired and content with building his painting studio, discovers a lesion on his skin. Despite a diagnosis of eczema, he thinks he is dying of cancer, but no one in George's family notices his mental decline because of their own bit of trouble. Wife Jean is having a not-so-secret affair with David, one of George's old coworkers. Daughter Katie will soon marry someone unsuitable in the eyes of her family. Son Jamie feels "he's landed on the wrong planet, in the wrong family," as he copes with a breakup with his boyfriend. In the carnival atmosphere of Katie's wedding, the toilet overflows, unexpected guests bring their dog, and George goes after David in a rage because he can't stand the smug look on his face, but their lives are mended as well as they could be. Haddon perfectly captures his characters' frailties and strengths while injecting humor with pinpoint accuracy. Highly recommended for all public libraries. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO 
Library Journal

A novelist of major potential puts his artistic ambition on hold with this minor follow-up to his audacious breakthrough. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) would be a tough act for any writer to follow. Haddon earned raves from critics and readers alike for the ingenious narrative voice of his protagonist, an autistic teenaged math genius investigating the disappearance of his mother and the death of a dog. The British author's first shot at adult fiction (following a number of children's books) was so strikingly original that it's particularly disappointing to find him here settling into the sort of conventional domestic comedy that so many have done before and that some have done better. George Hall is a 61-year-old retiree, a dutiful father and a dull, dependable husband. He has been living on autopilot until he discovers a spot on his skin and convinces himself that he has cancer. When neither his family nor his doctor takes his self-diagnosis seriously, he starts to think he's losing his mind. Wife Jean has been distracted by her affair with one of George's former coworkers. Their divorced daughter, Katie, announces her impending marriage to a man who might even be duller than George, but who provides security and emotional support for her son. Her gay brother, Jamie, ismainly concerned with whether to bring his lover to the wedding, knowing that his parents are in denial and that the guests will be scandalized. Will George die or go crazy? Will Jean leave him? Will Katie go through with the wedding? Will Jamie bring his lover? Will the reader care? Though Haddon is a clever writer with an eye and ear for the absurdities of everyday life, the results here fall somewhere between the psychological depth of Anne Tyler and the breeziness of Nick Hornby. Takes too long to arrive at its farcical finale and seems too slight in the process.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What methods does Haddon use to create the tremendous narrative energy of A Spot of Bother? How do chapter lengths, paragraph lengths, and the predominance of dialogue affect the pace of the novel?

2. A Spot of Bother takes the form of a romantic comedy in which a couple must overcome a series of obstacles before they can be married. What internal and external obstacles must Katie and Ray overcome? To what degree do Jamie and Tony and George and Jean have to overcome similar obstacles?

3. What are some of the most humorous moments in A Spot of Bother? What makes them so funny?

4. While he’s playing with Jacob and Ray, George thinks that “if he could find the handle he might be able to open up the secret door and slide down that long chute all the way back to childhood and someone would take care of him and he would be safe” [p. 23]. Why does George feel this desire to return to the safety of childhood?

5. Jamie, Jean, and George (and even, at times, Katie) initially regard Ray with suspicion, mild contempt, and outright dislike. Why do they come to accept and appreciate him over the course of the novel? Does Ray himself change or do their perceptions of him change?

6. In what ways are the Halls a typical family? In what ways are they unusual? How does their family dynamic change over the course of the novel?

7. Why doesn’t George tell anyone after he sees his wife having sex with David? Why doesn’t he confront Jean? What are the consequences of his thinking that he could put the image in the back of his mind where he hopes that after a time it will “fade and lose its power”. [p. 127]?

8. George tells Katie: “I’ve wasted my life.... Your mother doesn’t love me. I spent thirty years doing a job that meant nothing to me. And now...it hurts so much” [p. 138]. Has George wasted his life? Is this feeling the source of his mental unraveling?

9. A Spot of Bother is a deeply comic and at times farcical novel. But it is also a novel about the fear of death. How does George try to manage his fear of dying?

10. Why does Katie fall in love with Ray only after the wedding has been called off? Is theirs likely to be a good marriage? Why do Jamie and Jean similarly realize the true worth of their relationships only after they seem to be lost?

11. Near the end of the novel, Ray says: “Eventually you realize that other people’s problems are other people’s problems” [p. 346]. Is this a wise or a selfish way of looking at things? In what ways is it relevant to what’s happened in the novel itself? What does it reveal about Ray that no one had really noticed before?

12. Jean thinks to herself: “Her life with George was not an exciting life. But wouldn’t life with David go the same way eventually?... Perhaps the secret was to make the best of what you had” [p. 311]. In what ways do all the major characters in the novel come to realize the truth of this view?

13. After the various catastrophes of their wedding day have subsided, Ray tells Katie: “We’re just the little people on top of the cake. Weddings are about families. You and me, we’ve got the rest of our lives together” [p. 302]. Why are weddings about families? What effects does Ray and Katie’s wedding have on the Hall family?

14. At the very end of the book, George says: “it was time to stop all this nonsense” [p. 354]. What does he mean?

15. A Spot of Bother is very specifically about one family, but what larger truths about the human condition does it express?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Spring Moon
Bette Bao Lord, 1981
HarperCollins
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060599751

Summary
At a time of mystery and cruelty...in an ancient land of breathtaking beauty and exotic surprise...a courageous woman triumphs over her world's ultimate tragedy.

Behind the garden walls of the House of Chang, pampered daughter Spring Moon is born into luxury and privilege. But the tempests of change sweep her into a new world—one of hardship, turmoil, and heartbreak, one that threatens to destroy her husband, her family, and her darkest secret love.

Through a tumultuous lifetime, Spring Moon must cling to her honor, to the memory of a time gone by, and to a destiny, foretold at her birth, that has yet to be fulfilled. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 3, 1938
• Where—Shanghai, China
• Education—B.A., Tufts University; M.A., Fletcher School of
   Law and Diplomacy (at Tufts)
• Awards—Award of Excellence from The International Center
   in New York
• Currently—N/A

She was born in Shanghai, China with her mother and father Dora and Sandys Bao and came to the United States at the age of eight when her father, a British-trained engineer, was sent there in 1946 by the Chinese government to purchase equipment. In 1947 Bao Lord and her family were stranded in the United States when Mao Zedong and his communist rebels won the civil war in China.

Bao Lord has written eloquently about her painful childhood experiences as a Chinese immigrant in the post-World War II United States in her autobiographical children's book In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. In this book she describes her struggle to learn English and to become accepted by her classmates.

Today, Bao Lord is a distinguished novelist and writer, and serves as chair of the Board of Trustees of Freedom House.

President Clinton has hailed Ms. Bao Lord as "someone who writes so powerfully about the past and is working so effectively to shape the future." Her First novel, Spring Moon (1981), set in pre-revolutionary China, was an international bestseller and American Book Award nominee for best first novel. The Middle Heart (1996), Bao Lord's second novel, spans 70 years of modern Chinese history, ending in 1989 with the student-led demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.

Bao Lord graduated with her BA from Tufts University and received an MA from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She married Winston Lord, later an Ambassador to China, in 1963. They have a daughter and son.

Ms. Bao Lord is a recipient of The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
An excellent novel.
Wall Street Journal

The interwoven fates of five generation...Murder, passion, betrayal, incest and intrigue...and the conflict of generations.
Boston Globe

A Chinese Gone With The Wind.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. At the beginning of the novel, Spring Moon's happy existence is thrown into turmoil because of the family's plan for her servant, Plum Blossom. Her young uncle, Noble Talent, explains: "Plum Blossom is not yours ... [S]he belongs to the House of Chang." How do honor and duty factor into family decision making in the House of Chang?

2. How does the death of Old Venerable affect Bold Talent's life and responsibilities? How is Bold Talent received upon his untimely return to Soochow? What steps does he take to shed the Western manners and behaviors and reacquaint himself with Chinese traditions and customs?

3. How would you characterize the initial relationship between Spring Moon and her uncle, Bold Talent? What elements of Spring Moon's character does Bold Talent admire? Why does he agree to teach SpringMoon how to read and write? How does the House of Chang react to Bold Talent's decision to educate Spring Moon?

4. What aspects of China's political life cause unrest between Bold Talent and Noble Talent? How does Noble Talent feel about China's entering into agreements that weaken its power as a nation? When Soochow becomes a treaty port, how does Bold Talent react to protect China's interests?

5. Spring Moon's reaction to the news of her arranged marriage with Pan Tai Tai's son? Why does she go to Bold Talent and reveal the news of her marriage to him? Were you surprised by Bold Talent's willingness to intervene to rescue Spring Moon? Why does the Matriarch encourage him to find a husband for Spring Moon? Were you at all surprised by his choice of a husband? Why does Spring Moon feign grief at the news of her newly arranged marriage to Glad Promise?

6. Describe Spring Moon's mode of travel on her ten-day journey from Soochow to Peking. What does her treatment as a new bride suggest about the roles and opportunities of upper-class women in China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? How does Spring Moon and Glad Promise's wedding night defy tradition?

7. Discuss the significance of ancestors and filial obligation in Spring Moon. How important are ancestors and ancestor worship in this novel? How is the role of ancestors evident in rites of passage like births, betrothals, New Year's celebrations, weddings, and deaths?

8. What motivates Glad Promise to return to Peking and leave his pregnant wife? Why does Spring Moon decide not to bind Lustrous Jade's feet? How does the Woo clan treat her and her daughter after Glad Promise's departure?

9. What changes does Spring Moon find in Soochow when she returns with Lustrous Jade from Peking? How is she received by her family? How would you describe Bold Talent's marriage to Golden Virtue? How does Spring Moon's return affect that relationship? Discuss the implications of Spring Moon's decision to conceal her pregnancy and the birth and adoption of Enduring Promise from Bold Talent and his wife.

10. How does Lustrous Jade's awakening to Christianity and Communism affect her relationship with Spring Moon? How do Lustrous Jade and Resolute Spirit get entangled in affairs with Noble Talent? Discuss how Lustrous Jade's political fervor differs from that of her granduncle.

11. What elements of Chinese history did you find most compelling as they played out in the chronicle of the House of Chang? What aspects of Spring Moon's experience resonated most for you as a reader?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Spy 
Paulo Coelho, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524732066


Summary
In his new novel, Paulo Coelho, brings to life one of history's most enigmatic women: Mata Hari. The story of her celebrated yet mysterious life as an exotic dancer and courtesan, and her controversial execution as a spy during the First World War unfolds as a fascinating first-person narrative of self-creation and bravery.

Her only crime was to be an independent woman: "I do not know if the future will remember me, but if it should, may no one ever view me as a victim, but as someone who moved forward with courage, and paid the price she had to pay."

On the occasion of the centenary of Mata Hari's execution for espionage in 1917, Paulo Coelho reconsiders her life and character in a fictional memoir.

In a series of letters, written from prison on the eve of her death, Mata Hari reflects on the choices she has made to always pursue her own truth—from her childhood in a small Dutch town, to unhappy years as the wife of an alcoholic diplomat in Java, to her calculated and self-fashioned rise to celebrity in Paris and across Europe as an exotic dancer and confidante to the most powerful men of the time.

Though there was little evidence to incriminate her, Mata Hari was unable to escape persecution and prosecution by French military intelligence, and at the novel's end, Coelho re-creates a final letter, written by Mata Hari's lawer, Edouard Clunet, that offers a captivating view of Europe at war and the fatal price of suspicion. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 24, 1947
• Where—Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Education—Left law school in second year
• Awards—Crystal Award (Switzerland); Rio Branco Order (Brazil); Legion d’Honneur (France);
   Brazilian Academy of Letters (Brazil)
• Currently—lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil


Paulo Coelho de Souza is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist. He is the recipient of numerous international awards, amongst them the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. He is best know for his novel The Alchemist (1987, 1994), which has been translated into 80 languages.

Early life
Coelho was born in Brazil and attended a Jesuit school. As a teenager, Coelho wanted to become a writer. Upon telling his mother this, she responded,

My dear, your father is an engineer. He's a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be a writer?

At 17, Coelho's introversion and opposition to following a traditional path led to his parents committing him to a mental institution from which he escaped three times before being released at the age of 20

Born into a Catholic family, his parents were strict about the religion and faith. Coelho later remarked that

It wasn't that they wanted to hurt me, but they didn't know what to do... They did not do that to destroy me, they did that to save me.

At his parents' wishes, Coelho enrolled in law school and abandoned his dream of becoming a writer. One year later, he dropped out and lived life as a hippie, traveling through South America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe and started using drugs in the 1960s Upon his return to Brazil, Coelho worked as a songwriter, composing lyrics for Elis Regina, Rita Lee, and Brazilian icon Raul Seixas. Composing with Raul led to Coelho being associated with magic and occultism, due to the content of some songs.

In 1974, Coelho was arrested for "subversive" activities by the ruling military government, who had taken power ten years earlier and viewed his lyrics as left-wing and dangerous. Coelho also worked as an actor, journalist, and theatre director before pursuing his writing career.

In 1986, Coelho walked the 500-plus mile Road of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, a turning point in his life. On the path, he had a spiritual awakening, which he described autobiographically in The Pilgrimage In an interview, he aserted,

[In 1986], I was very happy in the things I was doing. I was doing something that gave me food and water— to use the metaphor in The Alchemist, I was working, I had a person whom I loved, I had money, but I was not fulfilling my dream. My dream was, and still is, to be a writer.

Coelho would leave his (by then) lucrative career as a songwriter and pursue writing full-time.

Writing career
In 1982, Coelho published his first book, Hell Archives, which failed to make a substantial impact. In 1986 he contributed to the Practical Manual of Vampirism, although he later tried to take it off the shelves since he considered it "of bad quality."

After making his 1986 pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, Coelho wrote The Pilgrimage (1987), and the following year, he wrote The Alchemist, publishing d it through a small Brazilian house with an initial print run of 900 copies. It was decided not to issue another reprint.

Later, however, he found a larger publishing house, and with the publication of his next book Brida, The Alchemist took off. HarperCollins, then the biggest publishing House in the U.S., decided to publish the book in 1994. It became, first, a Brazilian bestseller and, later, a world-wide phenomenon. The Alchemist has gone on to sell more than 83 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling books in history, and has been translated into 67 different languages, winning the Guinness World Record for most translated book by a living author.

The Alchemist, easily known as his most successful book, is a story about a young shepherd who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried in the Pyramids. No one knows what the treasure is or if Santiago will be able to surmount the obstacles along the way. But what starts out as a journey to find worldly goods turns into a discovery of the treasure found within.

Later writing
Since the publication of The Alchemist, Coelho has generally written one novel every two years, in total, some 30 books. Three of them—The Pilgrimage,The Valkyries and Aleph—are autobiographical, while the majority of the rest are fictional, although rooted in his life experiences. Others, like Maktub, The Manual of the Warrior of Light, and Like the Flowing River, are collections of essays, newspaper columns, or selected teachings. In total, Coelho has sold more than 210 million books in over 170 countries worldwide (June 2015 sales figures), and his works have been translated into 80 languages

Coelho writes up to three blog posts a week at his blog,[16] and has over 28.5 million fans on Facebook, and more than 11.1 million followers on Twitter, a higher number than authors such as Stephen King and J.K. Rowling.[17] Coelho discussed his relationship with readers through social media platforms with The Wall Street Journal in August 2014.[17]
Não Pare na Pista

In November 2014, Paulo Coelho finished uploading around 80,000 documents-manuscripts, diaries, photos, reader letters, press clippings-and created a virtual Paulo Coelho Foundation,[19] together with the physical foundation which is based in Geneva.

Personal life
Coelho has been married to his wife, the artist Christina Oiticica, since 1980. Together they had previously spent half the year in Rio de Janeiro and the other half in a country house in the Pyrenees Mountains of France. Coelho and Oiticica now permanently reside in Geneva, Switzerland.

In 1996, Coelho founded the Paulo Coelho Institute, which provides support to children and the elderly. He continues to write, following his own version of The Alchemist's "Language of the World."

Though he was raised in a Catholic family, he left his faith in his 20's. However, he later returned to his faith and is a devout Catholic now, attending Holy Mass regularly and participating in several charity programs organized by the Church. Though he accepts the supremacy of the supreme pontiff, the Pope, he is suspicious and often criticises various views of the Church, such as the its views on gay marriage. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/5/2016).

Book Reviews
[S]triking.... Although...not Coelho's strongest work, the ending is brilliant in its irony, and throughout, he displays an ability to inhabit her voice.... [R]eaders will believe they've read Zelle's actual letters.
Publishers Weekly


The absurdity of the charges against Mata Hari comes through clearly, but even as she tells her own story we never get a sense of her humanity, only her various personas and masks. A sympathetic but sketchy portrait of a legend.
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. After reading Coelho's book, what do you think of Margaretha Zelle AKA Mata Hari? How would you describe her? Do you find her, say, admirable or deeply flawed, astute or devious, manipulated or manipulative (did she use men, or they her)? Did she ever understand the ease with which her power over men could be be demonized?

2. Discuss the views of Mata Hari's contemporaries: how did the society in which she lived see her?

3. What was the evidence was used to accuse and convict Mata Hari?

4. Performing undressed on stage, what does Mata Hari mean when she says, "I was nothing, not even my body. I was just movements communing with the universe." She asks that her attitudes about sexuality and self-expression be taken as universal truths. Do you think they are? If not then, are they now, a century later?

5. How well does Coelho portray the character of his heroine? Is his depiction superficial or does he plumb her depths? Does Mata Hari come to life for you?

6.  Could Mata Hari's life have ended another way? Was her execution inevitable? What about the men who could have stepped forward to free her—why didn't they?

7. Mata Hari was a victim of patriarchy. Do you consider her a proto-feminist, perhaps even a martyr to feminism? Or do you see her as a self-promoter, as someone who led a daring but thoughtlessly reckless life?

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

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Squeeze Me 
Carl Hiaasen, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524733452


Summary
A hilarious new novel of social and political intrigue, set against the glittering backdrop of Florida's gold coast.

It's the height of the Palm Beach charity ball season: for every disease or cause, there's a reason for the local luminaries to eat (minimally), drink (maximally), and be seen.

But when a prominent high-society dowager suddenly vanishes during a swank gala, and is later found dead in a concrete grave, panic and chaos erupt.

Kiki Pew was notable not just for her wealth and her jewels—she was an ardent fan of the Winter White House resident just down the road, and a founding member of the POTUSSIES, a group of women dedicated to supporting their President.

Never one to miss an opportunity to play to his base, the President immediately declares that Kiki was the victim of rampaging immigrant hordes. This, it turns out, is far from the truth.

The truth might just lie in the middle of the highway, where a bizarre discovery brings the First Lady's motorcade to a grinding halt (followed by some grinding between the First Lady and a love-struck Secret Service agent).

Enter Angie Armstrong, wildlife wrangler extraordinaire, who arrives at her own conclusions after she is summoned to the posh island to deal with a mysterious and impolite influx of huge, hungry pythons. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 12, 1953
• Where—Plantation, Florida, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Florida
• Awards—Newbery Honor Award
• Currently—lives in Tavernier, Florida

When one thinks of the classics of pulp fiction, certain things—gruff, amoral antiheroes, unflinching nihilism, and a certain melodramatic self-seriousness—inevitably come to mind. However, the novels of Carl Hiaasen completely challenge these pulpy conventions. While the pulp of yesteryear seems forever chiseled in an almost quaint black and white world, Hiaasen's books vibrate with vivid color. They are veritable playgrounds for wild characters that flout clichés: a roadkill-eating ex-governor, a bouncer/assassin who takes care of business with a Weed Wacker, a failed alligator wrestler named Sammy Tigertail. Furthermore, Hiaasen infuses his absurdist stories with a powerful dose of social and political awareness, focusing on his home turf of South Florida with an unflinching keenness.

Hiaasen was born and raised in South Florida. During the 1970s, he got his start as a writer working for Cocoa Today as a public interest columnist. However, it was his gig as an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald that provided him with the fundamentals necessary for a career in fiction. "I'd always wanted to write books ever since I was a kid," Hiaasen told Barnes & Noble.com. "To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills—you learn to listen, you learn to take notes—everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels."

Hiaasen made the transition from journalism to fiction in 1981 with the help of fellow reporter Bill Montalbano. Hiaasen and Montalbano drew upon all they had learned while covering the Miami beat in their debut novel Powder Burn, a sharp thriller about the legendary Miami cocaine trade, which the New York Times declared an "expertly plotted novel." The team followed up their debut with two more collaborative works before Hiaasen ventured out on his own with Tourist Season, an offbeat murder mystery that showcased the author's idiosyncratic sense of humor.

From then on, Hiaasen's sensibility has grown only more comically absurd and more socially pointed, with a particular emphasis on the environmental exploitation of his beloved home state. In addition to his irreverent and howlingly funny thrillers (Double Whammy, Sick Puppy, Nature Girl, etc), he has released collections of his newspaper columns (Kick Ass, Paradise Screwed) and penned children's books (Hoot, Flush). With his unique blend of comedy and righteousness ("I can't be funny without being angry."), the writer continues to view hallowed Florida institutions—from tourism to real estate development—with a decidedly jaundiced eye. As Kirkus Reviews has wryly observed, Hiassen depicts "...the Sunshine State as the weirdest place this side of Oz.

Extras
• Perhaps in keeping with his South Floridian mindset, Hiaasen keeps snakes as housepets. He says on his web site, "They're clean and quiet. You give them rodents and they give you pure, unconditional indifference."

• Hiaasen is also a songwriter: He's co-written two songs, "Seminole Bingo" and "Rottweiler Blues", with Warren Zevon for the album Mutineer. In turn, Zevon recorded a song based on the lyrics Hiaasen had written for a dead rock star character in Basket Case.

• In Hiaasen's novel Nature Girl, he gets the opportunity to deal with a long-held fantasy. "I'd always fantasized about tracking down one of these telemarketing creeps and turning the tables—phoning his house every night at dinner, the way they hassle everybody else," he explains on his web site. "In the novel, my heroine takes it a whole step farther. She actually tricks the guy into signing up for a bogus ‘ecotour' in Florida, and then proceeds to teach him some manners. Or tries. (Bio fom Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
If you could use some wild escapism right now, Hiaasen is your guy. In its themes and its wild imagination, Squeeze Me offers some familiar pleasures, akin to a Greatest Hits collection. Anyone who’s read him will know what a prime recommendation that is…. Angie is a tonic, as Hiaasen’s heroines tend to be.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


By the evidence of the scabrous and unrelentingly hilarious Squeeze Me, the Trump era is truly Carl Hiaasen’s moment.… Just dive in and have a wonderful time.
Washington Post


Squeeze Me is funny, but as with Hiaasen’s best work, it’s grounded in genuine outrage over the corruption that increasingly defines American political and cultural life. And it turns out there’s no better place to invoke that outrage than the wealthy swamps of Florida.
New Republic


Pink pearls, pythons and a philandering president add up to a rather unusual Palm Beach social season in Carl Hiaasen’s riotously funny new novel, Squeeze Me…. [Hiaasen] knows and loves Florida and hates what has been done to it as much as anyone I know of, and those passions shape his razor-sharp satirical fiction.
Tampa Bay Times


Squeeze Me is vintage Hiaasen—wry humor, social commentary and satire akin to Jonathan Swift, and all fun.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel


A frothy blend of murder mystery and political satire.… Yes, the humor gets wild and the satire a little outlandish… [but] never loses its buoyancy thanks to Hiaasen’s deftly drawn characters and zingy dialogue. This exuberant elegy for Florida's paved-over paradise performs the near miracle of making us laugh even as we despair.
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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Standing in the Rainbow
Fannie Flagg, 2003
Random House
560 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345452887

Summary
Good news! Fannie’s back in town—and the town is among the leading characters in her new novel.

Along with Neighbor Dorothy, the lady with the smile in her voice, whose daily radio broadcasts keep us delightfully informed on all the local news, we also meet Bobby, her ten-year-old son, destined to live a thousand lives, most of them in his imagination; Norma and Macky Warren and their ninety-eight-year-old Aunt Elner; the oddly sexy and charismatic Hamm Sparks, who starts off in life as a tractor salesman and ends up selling himself to the whole state and almost the entire country; and the two women who love him as differently as night and day. Then there is Tot Whooten, the beautician whose luck is as bad as her hairdressing skills; Beatrice Woods, the Little Blind Songbird; Cecil Figgs, the Funeral King; and the fabulous Minnie Oatman, lead vocalist of the Oatman Family Gospel Singers.

The time is 1946 until the present. The town is Elmwood Springs, Missouri, right in the middle of the country, in the midst of the mostly joyous transition from war to peace, aiming toward a dizzyingly bright future.

Once again, Fannie Flagg gives us a story of richly human characters, the saving graces of the once-maligned middle classes and small-town life, and the daily contest between laughter and tears. Fannie truly writes from the heartland, and her storytelling is, to quote Time, "utterly irresistible." (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Real Name—Patricia Neal
• Birth—September 21, 1944
• Where—Birmingham, Alabama, USA
• Education—University of Alabama
• Currently—lives in Montecito, California
Fannie Flagg began writing and producing television specials at age nineteen and went on to distinguish herself as an actress and writer in television, films, and the theater. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (which was produced by Universal Pictures as Fried Green Tomatoes), Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, Standing in the Rainbow, and A Redbird Christmas. Flagg’s script for Fried Green Tomatoes was nominated for both the Academy and Writers Guild of America awards and won the highly regarded Scripters Award. Flagg lives in California and in Alabama.

Before her career as a novelist, Flagg was known principally for her on-screen television and film work. She was second banana to Allen Funt on the long-running Candid Camera, perhaps the trailblazer for the current crop of so-called reality television. (Her favorite segment, she told Entertainment Weekly in 1992, was driving a car through the wall of a drive-thru bank.) She appeared as the school nurse in the 1978 film version of Grease, and on Broadway in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. And she was a staple of the Match Game television game shows in the '70s.

Quite early on in her writing career, Fannie Flagg stumbled onto the holy grail of secrets in the publishing world: what editors are actually good for.

Attending the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference in 1978 to see her idol, Eudora Welty, Flagg won first prize in the writing contest for a short story told from the perspective of a 11-year-old girl, spelling mistakes and all—a literary device that she figured was ingenious because it disguised her own pitiful spelling, later determined to be an outgrowth of dyslexia. But when a Harper & Row editor approached her about expanding the story into a full-length novel, she realized the jig was up. In 1994 she told the New York Times:

I just burst into tears and said, "I can't write a novel. I can't spell. I can't diagram a sentence." He took my hand and said the most wonderful thing I've ever heard. He said, "Oh, honey, what do you think editors are for?"

Writing
And so Fannie Flagg—television personality, Broadway star, film actress and six-time Miss Alabama contestant—became a novelist, delving into the Southern-fried, small-town fiction of the sort populated by colorful characters with homespun, no-nonsense observations. Characters that are known to say things like, "That catfish was so big the photograph alone weighed 40 pounds."

Her first novel, an expanded take on that prize-winning short story, was Coming Attractions: A Wonderful Novel, the story of a spunky yet hapless girl growing up in the South, helping her alcoholic father run the local bijou. But it was with her second novel where it all came together. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe—a novel, for all its light humor, that infuses its story with serious threads on racism, feminism, spousal abuse and hints at Sapphic love -- follows two pairs of women: a couple running a hometown café in the Depression-era South and an elderly nursing home resident in the late 1980s who strikes up an impromptu friendship with a middle-aged housewife unhappy with her life.

The result was not only a smash novel, but a hit movie as well, one that garnered Flagg an Academy Award nomination for adapting the screenplay. She won praise from the likes of Erma Bombeck, Harper Lee and idol Eudora Welty, and the Los Angeles Times critic compared it to The Last Picture Show. The New York Times called it, simply, "a real novel and a good one."

As a writer, though, this Birmingham, Alabama native found her voice as a chronicler of Southern Americana and life in its self-contained hamlets. "Fannie Flagg is the most shamelessly sentimental writer in America," The Christian Science Monitor wrote in a 1998 review of her third novel. "She's also the most entertaining. You'd have to be a stone to read Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! without laughing and crying. The cliches in this novel are deep-fat fried: not particularly nutritious, but entirely delicious."

The New York Times, also reviewing Baby Girl, took note of the spinning-yarns-on-the-front-porch quality to her work: "Even when she prattles—and she prattles a great deal during this book—you are always aware that a star is at work. She has that gift that certain people from the theater have, of never boring the audience. She keeps it simple, she keeps it bright, she keeps it moving right along—and, most of all, she keeps it beloved."

But, lest she be pegged as simply a champion of the good ol’ days, it's worth noting that her writing can be something of a clarion call for social change. In Fried Green Tomatoes, Flagg comments not only on the racial divisions of the South but also on the minimization of women in both the 1930s and contemporary life. Just as Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison commit to a life together—without menfolk—in the Depression-era days of Whistle Stop, Alabama, middle-aged Evelyn Couch in modern-day Birmingham discovers the joys of working outside the home and defining her life outside meeting the every whim of her husband.

On top of her writing, Flagg has also stumped for the Equal Rights Amendment.

I think it's time that women have to stand up and say we do not want to be seen in a demeaning manner," Flagg told a Premiere magazine reporter in an interview about the film adaptation of Fried Green Tomatoes.

Extras
• Flagg approximated the length of her first novel by weight. Her editor told her a novel should be around 400 pages. "So I weighed 400 pages and it came to two pounds and something," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1987." I wrote until I had two pounds and something, and, as it happened, the novel was just about done."

• She landed the Candid Camera gig while a writer at a New York comedy club. When one of the performers couldn't go on, Flagg acted as understudy, and the show's host, Allen Funt, was in the audience.

• Flagg went undiagnosed for years as a dyslexic until a viewer casually mentioned it to her in a fan letter. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Flagg writes page-turners and this is one in spades.... The characters come at you thick and fast...Dorothy, prodigious pie-baker, supremely likeable and conscientious neighbor, [and] hostess of a wildly popular daily radio program; Minnie Oatman, the generously fleshed and bighearted lead singer (baritone) of the Oatman Family Gospel Singers; Beatrice, the Little Blind Songbird, who appears regularly on the Neighbor Dorothy program until she is swept away by the Oatmans; prickly Aunt Elner, who owns a series of orange cats, all named Sonny. Flagg’s inventiveness never loses its energy.
Newsday


What is so appealing about Elmwood Springs? It’s Fannie Flagg’s unswerving devotion to folksy, sly humor and her uncanny ability to make a small town a big character in her sweetly engaging fourth novel.... Flagg ushers you into the residents’ hearts and minds with a flourish. She sits you right down in Neighbor Dorothy’s home during her radio broadcast, hands you a plate of homemade cookies, and assures you that putting up your feet and staying a bit is the right thing to do.
Miami Herald


A warm, witty, refreshing journey through fifty years with the residents of Elmwood Springs, Missouri.... As time rolls along until the year 2000, we watch an assortment of lovable characters adapt to a changing America. And we thank Fannie Flagg for a look at those years before "the world had flipped over like a giant pancake."
Dallas Morning News


From the talented storyteller whose Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe became a beloved bestseller and a successful film comes a sprawling, feel-good novel with an old-fashioned beginning, middle and end. The predominant setting is tiny Elmwood Springs, Mo., and the protagonist is 10-year-old Bobby Smith, an earnest Cub Scout also capable of sneaking earthworms into his big sister's bed. His father is the town pharmacist and his mother is local radio personality Neighbor Dorothy (whom readers will recognize from Flagg's Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!). In 1946, Harry Truman presides over a victorious nation anticipating a happy and prosperous future. During the next several decades, the plot expands to include numerous beguiling characters who interact with the Smith family among them, the Oatman Family Southern Gospel Singers, led by matriarch Minnie, who survive misadventures galore to find fame after an appearance on the Arthur Godfrey show in 1949, the same year Bobby's self-esteem soars when he wins the annual town bubble gum contest. Also on hand are tractor salesman Ham Sparks, who becomes amazingly successful in politics, despite his marriage to overwhelmingly shy Betty Raye Oatman, and well-liked mortician Cecil Figgs, a sponsor of Neighbor Dorothy, who, as a bachelor in the mid-century South, also enjoys a secret life. The effects of changing social mores are handled deftly; historical events as they impact little Elmwood Springs are duly noted, and everything is infused with the good humor and joie de vivre that are Flagg's stock-in-trade.
Publishers Weekly


Touching moments border on syrupy, but Flagg's straightforward, unadorned prose keeps them sweet and pure and grounded in everyday life. If there's a flaw in the narrative, it's the 50-year span; too soon Bobby grows up, times change, and one pines for those days once again. —Mary Frances Wilkens
Booklist


Welcome to Elmwood, Missouri, 1946-2000.... And meet Neighbor Dorothy (she of Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, 1998), the motherly host of a radio chat-show broadcast throughout the rural Midwest and South from her Elmwood backyard, just one of a host of deftly drawn local eccentrics. Although she doesn't think that there's anything particularly odd about her family and friends-it's more that odd things have a way of happening to them. For instance, the Oatman Family Southern Gospel Singers, who travel with Chester, a Scripture-quoting ventriloquist's dummy, just decided to drop their tongue-tied daughter Betty Raye at Dorothy's house. Betty Raye doesn't say much, but she's a quick study. And there's Dorothy's ten-year-old son Bobby, who daydreams about being the unrecognized son of Dale Evans and Roy Rogers, when not sneaking off to take a blind singer on his mother's radio show to thrill rides at the carnival. And poor Tot, whose senile mother steals the Christmas presents and hides them in the backyard. Tot wanders through the story like the lost member of an ancient Greek chorus (if ancient Greek chorus members wore chenille bathrobes). She has more than her mother to contend with: husband Dwayne Sr. is a drunk, and feckless son Dwayne Jr. is no use to anyone. Terminally gracious Ida, who believes that only the heathen eat without a tablecloth, clucks and fusses. Then there's Hamm Sparks, a young tractor-salesman with the natural affability of a born politician. He surprises everyone by marrying Betty Raye, and one fine day she surprises them even more by becoming governor of Missouri. As the decades unfold, each character flowers in unexpected ways-and wonder of wonders, Hamm experiences a truly southern apotheosis and gets to heaven in a fishing boat. Hilarious, charming, authentic-a winner all the way.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The novel starts in the immediate aftermath of World War II. How does the period compare with the times following more modern wars—Vietnam, Gulf War, Desert Storm, etc.?

2. In what ways is Bobby the typical pre-teenage son?
Does he differ in any important details? Does his active imagination hamper him, confuse him, or fuel his ambitions?

3. In what ways is Neighbor Dorothy a good neighbor? What makes her such an effective seller of her sponsors’ products or services?

4. Does Neighbor Dorothy speak through the silences surrounding some farmers’ wives—the silent or the working-all-day husband, for example. Or the limited view the nation had of housewives at that time? Or perhaps the distance between towns and cities and countryside? Was this the loneliness that can come with working alone in a house almost all the time?

5. How does Dorothy succeed in making small events into larger ones—an anniversary, the birth of a kitten, some honor bestowed in school or church, one of the ordinary
recognitions?

6. Is the humor in the novel satire—or not?

7. How does Hamm break out of the tractor salesman category?

8. How does he use his salesmanlike skills to win the young woman who becomes his wife?

9. Hamm eventually takes on a mistress and advisor. How does Vita not fit into the usual Other Woman mold? We see their relationship grow—but what of that between his wife and his mistress?

10. With all the evidence of “dysfunctional” families these days, why do some marriages in the novel work out so well?

11. Why do you think the author begins the novel with Tot, the voice of one of theminor characters?

12. The Oatman family of gospel singers: Do they reveal a “hidden” aspect of American culture (hidden, that is, unless you grew up with such entertainments and forms of worship)? What other pockets of American life are almost invisible to white, middle-class, urban Americans?

13. Hamm’s politics seem to be a bit all over the place. He’s not a true conservative or liberal; he’s not a true demagogue or, on the other hand, a true blue Boy Scout, or without endless ambition. At what point does he leave off being a populist do-gooder and let ambition take over? Is the process gradual or sudden?

14. Because of the author’s attitude toward her characters and presumably the world, some might call this a feel-good novel. In what ways does she allow some of the harsher realities to creep in?

15. Is small-town life any better per se than city life?

16. Is the Midwestern small town indistinguishable from the Southern small town in Fried Green Tomatoes, for example?

17. The decade of the ’50s occurs in the middle of the novel. It was the time of the Eisenhower presidency, the end of the war in Korea, etc. For years, much of the
intelligentsia portrayed those years as dull ones, uneventful, complacent, unremarkable. Later, there was a revision in opinion. They were special years of peace (despite the Cold War), stability, growth, etc. What is your opinion? 

18. Aunt Elner, Norma, Macky.... Can you think of counterparts in real life? Do you know a character or two who exhibit some of their characteristics?

19. Do you agree that Aunt Elner would have made a good governor? Or that Poor Tot would make a splendid Secretary of Health and Human Services?

20. If you’re a woman, don’t you wish you could find a nightgown just like the one Macky so admired on Norma? What did it do for her?

21. How would you like a two-week vacation, all expenses paid, in Elmwood Springs, “The Most Middle Town in America.” How would you spend the time?

22. Transformations occur with fair frequency in the lives of these characters. Can you name some? Do you know of similar transformations in your own life experience?

23. “You can’t go home again,” wrote Thomas Wolfe, famously. Bobby tries it with mixed results. But can you ever get away from home, no matter how far you travel?

24. Macky eases into retirement only to find that everything rubs him the wrong way. But one gift, one wonder of modern technology, changes all that. What was it? And has that invention done the same for you?

25. How would you write the next chapter, beyond the ending of the novel, to see the surviving characters through the next phase of their lives?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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A Star for Mrs. Blake 
April Smith, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307958846


Summary
The United States Congress in 1929 passed legislation to fund travel for mothers of the fallen soldiers of World War I to visit their sons’ graves in France. Over the next three years, 6,693 Gold Star Mothers made the trip. In this emotionally charged, brilliantly realized novel, April Smith breathes life into a unique moment in American history, imagining the experience of five of these women.

They are strangers at the start, but their lives will become inextricably intertwined, altered in indelible ways. These very different Gold Star Mothers travel to the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery to say final good-byes to their sons and come together along the way to face the unexpected: a death, a scandal, and a secret revealed. 

None of these pilgrims will be as affected as Cora Blake, who has lived almost her entire life in a small fishing village off the coast of Maine, caring for her late sister’s three daughters, hoping to fill the void left by the death of her son, Sammy, who was killed on a scouting mission during the final days of the war. Cora believes she is managing as well as can be expected in the midst of the Depression, but nothing has prepared her for what lies ahead on this unpredictable journey, including an extraordinary encounter with an expatriate American journalist, Griffin Reed, who was wounded in the trenches and hides behind a metal mask, one of hundreds of “tin noses” who became symbols of the war.  

With expert storytelling, memorable characters, and beautiful prose, April Smith gives us a timeless story, by turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, set against a footnote of history—little known, yet unforgettable. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1950
• Raised—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.S. Boston University; M.F.A., Standord University
• Currently—lives in Santa Monica, California


April Smith is the author of the successful novels featuring FBI Special Agent Ana Grey as the central character. She is also an Emmy-nominated television writer and producer. In her research for A Star for Mrs. Blake (2014), she traveled to Maine, New York City, Paris, Verdun, and the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. Her home base is Santa Monica, California, where she lives with her husband.

A 1967 graduate of The Bronx High School of Science, Smith earned a BS in English from Boston University and a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Stanford University.
Television producer and writer.

Smith worked on several hit television series from the late 1970s through 2000 as producer, writer, and executive story editor, including Lou Grant, Cagney and Lacey, and Chicago Hope. She also adapted stories by Stephen King for the TNT series Nightmares & Dreamscapes.

She wrote teleplays for several made-for-TV movies, including the critically acclaimed 1998 remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and the 1999 adaptation of the Anna Quindlen novel Black and Blue. She was nominated for an Emmy Award for her screenplay for Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984).

In 2011 Smith penned the adaptation of her own novel Good Morning, Killer, for the TNT Mystery Movie Night series.

Smith's work has been nominated for three Emmys and two Writer's Guild awards.

Smith wrote four novels with FBI Special Agent Ana Grey as the central character: North of Montana (1994), Good Morning, Killer (2003), Judas Horse (2008), and White Shotgun (2011). She also is the author of Be the One (2000), and two novels based on the TV series James at 15. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/20/2014.)

Book Reviews
A first rate novel that is well worth reading.... Smith has the unique ability to take a long forgotten story and craft it into a page turner.... She’s found an important but forgotten postscript in America’s past and has written a compelling historical novel that confronts racism, class and economic differences as well as government bureaucracy. Smith conveys all of these topics through story and characters rather than a soapbox, and her subtle approach has far more impact than the histrionics of any television or radio pundit.
Huffington Post


A moving novel [that] gives readers a detailed and colorful description of life during the interim between the War to End All Wars and the next world war that quickly followed. . . This is not simply a story of grieving mothers but a story of America—rich in the lives of each of the characters who raise small boys to become part of the dream but instead bury them in a faraway land.... The questions are posed: How do we achieve peace? What are the costs of war? Can freedom and patriotism co-exist in America? And, for us in this century, how are our lives richer for the sacrifices of those who served before us?
Lorinda Hayes - Pittsburgh Post


Smith writes with great depth of detail and of emotion, giving voice to these Gold Star Mothers who traveled from America to their sons’ graves in France.
Historical Novel Society


[A] touching story, set in the 1930s, of Gold Star Mothers—the mothers of fallen U.S. service members—visiting their sons’ graves in France.... Smith captures the mothers’ interactions in beautiful detail and delves into the government’s not-entirely-altruistic reasons for sponsoring the trip. Several plot threads, however, are unresolved, leaving the reader wanting more at the end of this captivating read.
Publishers Weekly


What initially feels like a straightforward and heartwarming road trip novel becomes more complicated as the women draw nearer to their destination and squabbles over class and personality differences give way to increasing criticism of the government and military bureaucracy. Though some later plot developments are a bit far-fetched, Smith...artfully maintains a generally warm tone while also allowing her characters to ask hard questions about the war and its consequences.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [A] heartfelt glimpse into a little-known episode in U.S. history, the journey taken by mothers of U.S. soldiers fallen in WWI to visit their sons’ graves in Europe. Smith focuses on five mothers whose sons were buried at the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in France. Their unofficial leader is Cora Blake, a single mother from Maine.... Smith’s foray into historical fiction is captivating and enlightening. —Deborah Donovan
Booklist


During the early 1930s, the U.S. government arranged for grieving "Gold Star Mothers" to visit the French burial sites of their sons killed during World War I.... While the line-by-line writing is engaging, this take on historic events is made shallow by broad brush strokes and lots of heartstring pulling.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The Gold Star Mother’s group was founded after World War I. Why was President Herbert Hoover so eager to pass legislation to fund these pilgrimages? Was there more to it than wanting to honor the fallen soldiers and their mothers.

2. Consider the Gold Star Mothers in Party A featured in April Smith’s book. How would you characterize their relationship with one another? How are the women different? How are they similar? What tensions are evident between them and what is at the root of these problems?

3. The parents of each soldier had the choice of whether to inter their son’s remains in America or in France. What was behind Cora Blake’s ultimate decision to have her son interred in France? Do you think she was at peace with that decision?

4. What cultural issues does the mix-up of Wilhelmina Russell and Selma Russell expose? There is documentation that some “Negro mothers” would not go on the trip when they found out they wouldn’t be treated as equals to the “white mothers.” Do you agree with these mothers’ decisions not to go?

5. What does Smith mean when she writes of war and “the democracy of death” (page 22)? What examples are found in the book?

6. How are the mothers treated in America? How are they received in France? What does this seem to indicate about international opinions of America’s role in the war?

7. While much of the focus of the story is on the physical and emotional journey of each of the Gold Star Mothers, what kind of journeys do Lieutenant Thomas Hammond and Nurse Lily undertake? How do they change from the start of the pilgrimage to its conclusion? What causes these changes?

8. The book features several expatriate characters. Does Smith indicate why these Americans are living in France? What kinds of occupations do they have? What do they share in common? What do these characters suggest about postwar living in Europe? Who are some real-life expatriates and how do they compare with Smith’s expatriates?

9. The tension between Clancy Hayes and Griffin Reed helps to illuminate issues of ethics, propaganda, and the role of the press in determining how war is presented. How does each journalist approach the task of writing about war and its effects? Why does Reed have such a problem with Hayes? How is Reed’s version of the story of the Gold Star Mothers different than Hayes’s version? What is the overall effect of the article Reed writes? How is it received? Why is this important?

10. There are different ideas about war expressed by the book’s characters: the mothers, the journalists, Nurse Lily, and Lieutenant Hammond. What are those ideas and how do they compare? How does General Perkins’s point of view affect our understanding of the issues at hand? Who do you sympathize with the most?

11. American expatriate journalist Griffin Reed wears a mask because of his severe disfigurement, but this mask may also be interpreted as a symbol of secrets, the inner self, and the emotional masks we all wear. What secrets do each of the characters keep? Is one more surprising than another? Why is Cora’s telling of her story to Reed so important? Does he keep her secret? How do the characters react to the revelation or discovery of each other’s secrets?

12. What part does legacy play in the book? Cora says that her family’s military involvement dates back to the time of the Revolutionary War. Perkins is from an army family, as is Lieutenant Hammond. How do tradition and the will to break from tradition feature as themes of the book? Consider Minnie Seibert’s reaction to the young woman on the bus. Why is Minnie so disgruntled by the young woman’s initial response to her?

13. Each of the female characters is confronted with her own personal choices. What do their situations tell us collectively about the role of women during this time? Do the women change throughout the story, or do they continue to adhere to societal norms and roles?

14. Evaluate the motif of pilgrimage in the book. How is a pilgrimage different from a trip? How does this categorization tie the book in with a greater thread in American history? What does this tell us about common experience? What common plights and challenges do all pilgrims face and how do they surmount these?

15. Discuss the treatment of faith in the book. What examples of faith are found throughout? Besides religious faith, what other kinds of faith are depicted? Which characters experience a loss of their faith or a conflict of faith? Do they ever regain their faith? If so, how? At the conclusion of the book, what do the characters seem to find faith in?

16. Many of the characters exhibit a strong sense of duty at one time or another. Does this change throughout the story? Is duty to something always external? Or are there any examples in the story of duty to one’s self?

17. Griffin Reed says that Cora worries over “what a war mother is really supposed to do” (274). Is this question answered by the end of the book? How does Smith’s story change or confirm your own ideas about duty and sacrifice?

18. A Star for Mrs. Blake is anchored in a footnote of history. The book is inspired by a diary of a real-life American colonel and Gold Star Mother liaison officer, but the story is from the author’s imagination. Discuss the role of truth and accuracy in historical fiction. What other books can this one be likened to? What do these books indicate about war and its effects and the way that we view them? What can a reader take away from reading about events in a novel rather than in a history book?

19. Nelson DeMille, author of Word of Honor, said, “Everyone who has served or is serving in the military, and also their families and friends, should read this book.” Why do you think he suggests this and do you agree?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Starless Sea 
Erin Morgenstern, 2019
Knopf Doubleday
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385541213


Summary


From the author of The Night Circus, a timeless love story set in a secret underground world—a place of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a starless sea.

Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a mysterious book hidden in the stacks.

As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood.

Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues—a bee, a key, and a sword—that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to an ancient library hidden far below the surface of the earth.

What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians—it is a place of lost cities and seas, lovers who pass notes under doors and across time, and of stories whispered by the dead.

Zachary learns of those who have sacrificed much to protect this realm, relinquishing their sight and their tongues to preserve this archive, and also of those who are intent on its destruction.

Together with Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired protector of the place, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances, Zachary travels the twisting tunnels, darkened stairwells, crowded ballrooms, and sweetly soaked shores of this magical world, discovering his purpose—in both the mysterious book and in his own life. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Marshfield, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Smith College
• Currently—lives Massachusetts

Erin Morgenstern is a writer and artist. Most of her writings and paintings are fairy tales, in one way or another. She lives in Massachusetts. (From the publisher.)

In her words
I’m a Cancerian with a Leo Moon and Taurus rising and, yes, I know what all of that means.

I studied theatre & studio art at Smith College.

I grew up in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Steve Carrell now owns the store where I bought penny candy and blue raspberry Slush Puppies as a child. This both amuses and disturbs me.

I was reading Stephen King at age 12 and J.K. Rowling at age 21. This likely speaks volumes about my literary development.

I currently live in Salem, Massachusetts & will be relocating to Boston in the foreseeable future. Kittens are looking forward to the impending influx of cardboard boxes. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
[A]n abstruse series of fragmented fables... [and] the Starless Sea, a labyrinthine underground repository of stories embedded in paper, ribbons, skin, funeral shrouds and candies…. Sound thrilling? It certainly might be, but it isn’t.... [It] is strangely devoid of tension…. We flit from story to story… never knowing where we might land, or who will turn out to really be who, or if the pirate is a real pirate or a metaphor, or whether any of it has a point.
New York Times Book Review


[M]ythical… a story about stories, all essentially relating to Fate and Time.… The Starless Sea is the kind of book that could spawn a Harry Potter-esque cult. I can imagine fan sites devoted to mapping, analyzing and connecting the dots among its fantastical intricacies. I predict readers for whom it will become a holy of holies, one of their most treasured books of all time. It’s that kind of book.
Long Island Newsday


The most joyous reading experience I’ve had in recent memory.… It is, not to put too fine a point on it, wonderful…  a master-class in plotting and prestidigitation… unabashedly romantic… [and] a warm, honeyed bath of words and ideas
Toronto Star


Assuredly beautiful…. The novel reads like panel after panel of mythic illustrations…. It demands that its readers interpret it in an older way; the way we read The Faerie Queene…. Well-written…. the novel’s scope and ambition are undeniable.
Guardian (UK)


A mystical adventure in an enchanted universe.… The novel is not simply a quest narrative—it’s also a meta-examination of stories that demands the reader’s patience—and then rewards it…. Morgenstern’s elegant, poetic prose keeps the pages turning as she begins to draw connections within a web of tales…. For Zachary, that pleasure outweighs any temptation he might have to return to school and his regular life. It leads, instead, to a journey of sacrifice and self-discovery as he unearths his own place in the puzzling book’s narrative. For everyone else, the thrill comes from watching him on the ride.
Time


Erin Morgenstern has magic to make… [in] a new fantastical fairy-tale for grown-ups…. The Starless Sea poses big questions about stories—the ones we read, the ones we live, and the ones we tell ourselves. And at the heart of her work lies the themes that have provoked those comparisons: redemption, sacrifice, fate, time, reincarnation.… The Starless Sea is a door to another world—one just waiting for readers to open it.
Entertainment Weekly


A richly imaginative ode to books and storytelling…. [T]his fantasy-filled novel entwines a mysterious underground world with the story of a grad student on a quest to understand his past.
People


(Starred review) Built from fables, myths, and fairy tales, Morgenstern’s long-awaited second fantastical novel delves into a vast subterranean library… This love letter to bibliophiles is dreamlike and uncanny, grounded in deeply felt emotion, and absolutely thrilling.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) [A] grad student discovers a mysterious book in his university library stacks…. What results is a magnificent quest,unfolding adventure and danger, gold-wrought fantasy, and endless provocation on what storytelling really means. Highly recommended.
Library Journal


(Starred review) Morgenstern's new fantasy epic is a puzzlebox of a book…, the very concept of what we expect and want from our stories…. She [gives] the book a mythic quality that will stick with readers long after they put it down. [R]eaders will be clamoring to recapture the magic of [her debut].
Booklist


(Starred review) A withdrawn graduate student embarks on an epic quest to restore balance to the world in this long-anticipated follow-up to The Night Circus.… This novel is a love letter to readers,… an ambitious and bewitching gem of a book with mystery and passion inscribed on every page.
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. Talk about the underground realm of the Starless Sea. How would you describe the library to someone who has never read the book?

2. Three of the book's most prominent symbols, in a book full of them, are a sword, a key, and a bee. What is the role each symbol plays in the book and what does each signify, or represent?

3. One of the novel's central ideas is that we are our stories. How does this theme unfold during the course of the story?

4. (Follow-up to Question 3) In what way is this book about Zachary's life story—that as a child he made a choice not to open a magical door? What does he learn throughout this book about how that decision altered his life? What about turning points in your own life. Do you think back on some of them and wonder how a different decision might have led you on a completely different path?

5. (Follow-up to Question 4) The novel asks the question, if a single decision can alter the direction of our lives, to what degree are we in charge of our own stories/lives? Are our lives subject to fate, or destiny?

6. In what way is The Starless Sea also about how stories take over our lives? Zachary, for instance is presented with "a labyrinthine of tunnels and rooms filled with stories." How can he (or we) not be drawn in?

7. Morgenstern has packed her novel with literary allusions. Even Zachary's own name contains three of them. Can you unpack others: consider works by Lewis Carroll, Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling. J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Jules Verne. Can you identify others? Are the literary references clever "affectations," or do they actually affect the plot of the novel?

8. Which of the mysterious characters were you most puzzled by… intrigued by… or drawn to? Take any one of the following, for instance: Rhyme, the Keeper, Mirabel (is she Fate…or is she the Moon?), Allegra, Eleanor, and Simon. Any others?

9. Zachary observes at one point that reading a novel is like "playing a game where all the choices have been made for you ahead of time by someone who is much better at this particular game." Care to comment on that statement?

10. What was your experience reading The Starless Sea? Was it what you had hoped for? More than you'd hoped for? Less? Did you find yourself entering a world of enchantment… or a cluttered, confusing world? In other words, were you pleased or disappointed? How would you compare this book to Morgenstern's first, The Night Circus?

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

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The Stars Are Fire 
Anita Shreve, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385350907


Summary
An exquisitely suspenseful new novel about an extraordinary young woman tested by a catastrophic event and its devastating aftermath--based on the true story of the largest fire in Maine's history.

In October 1947, after a summer long drought, fires break out all along the Maine coast from Bar Harbor to Kittery and are soon racing out of control from town to village.

Five months pregnant, Grace Holland is left alone to protect her two toddlers when her husband, Gene, joins the volunteer firefighters.

Along with her best friend, Rosie, and Rosie's two young children, Grace watches helplessly as their houses burn to the ground, the flames finally forcing them all into the ocean as a last resort. The women spend the night frantically protecting their children, and in the morning find their lives forever changed: homeless, penniless, awaiting news of their husbands' fate, and left to face an uncertain future in a town that no longer exists.

In the midst of this devastating loss, Grace discovers glorious new freedoms--joys and triumphs she could never have expected her narrow life with Gene could contain--and her spirit soars. And then the unthinkable happens--and Grace's bravery is tested as never before. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1946
• Raised—Dedham, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A. Tufts University
• Awards—PEN/L.L. Winship Award; O. Henry Prize
• Currently—lives in Longmeadow, Massachusetts


Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of nearly 20 books—including two works of nonfiction and 17 of fiction. Her novels include, most recently, Stella Bain (2013), as well as The Weight of Water (1997), a finalist for England's Orange prize; The Pilot's Wife (1998), a selection of Oprah's Book Club; All He Even Wanted (2003), Body Surfing (2007); Testimony (2008); A Change in Altitude (2010). She lives in Massachusetts. (From the publisher.)

More
For many readers, the appeal of Anita Shreve’s novels is their ability to combine all of the escapist elements of a good beach read with the kind of thoughtful complexity not generally associated with romantic fiction. Shreve’s books are loaded with enough adultery, eroticism, and passion to make anyone keep flipping the pages, but the writer whom People magazine once dubbed a "master storyteller" is also concerned with the complexities of her characters’ motivations, relationships, and lives.

Shreve’s novels draw on her diverse experiences as a teacher and journalist: she began writing fiction while teaching high school, and was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975 for her story, "Past the Island, Drifting." She then spent several years working as a journalist in Africa, and later returned to the States to raise her children. In the 1980s, she wrote about women’s issues, which resulted in two nonfiction books—Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone—before breaking into mainstream fiction with Eden Close in 1989.

This interest in women’s lives—their struggles and success, families and friendships—informs all of Shreve’s fiction. The combination of her journalist’s eye for detail and her literary ear for the telling turn of phrase mean that Shreve can spin a story that is dense, atmospheric, and believable. Shreve incorporates the pull of the sea—the inexorable tides, the unpredictable surf—into her characters’ lives the way Willa Cather worked the beauty and wildness of the Midwestern plains into her fiction. In Fortune’s Rocks and The Weight of Water, the sea becomes a character itself, evocative and ultimately consuming. In Sea Glass, Shreve takes the metaphor as far as she can, where characters are tested again and again, only to emerge stronger by surviving the ravages of life.

A domestic sensualist, Shreve makes use of the emblems of household life to a high degree, letting a home tell its stories just as much as its inhabitants do, and even recycling the same house through different books and periods of time, giving it a sort of palimpsest effect, in which old stories burn through the newer ones, creating a historical montage. "A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell," she says. "I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house."

Shreve’s work is sometimes categorized as "women’s fiction," because of her focus on women’s sensibilties and plights. But her evocative and precise language and imagery take her beyond category fiction, and moderate the vein of sentimen-tality which threads through her books. Moreover, her kaleidoscopic view of history, her iron grip on the details and detritus of 19th-century life (which she sometimes inter-sperses with a 20th-century story), and her uncanny ability to replicate 19th-century dialogue without sounding fusty or fussy, make for novels that that are always absorbing and often riveting. If she has a flaw, it is that her imagery is sometimes too cinematic, but one can hardly fault her for that: after all, the call of Hollywood is surely as strong as the call of the sea for a writer as talented as Shreve. (Adapted from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Characterizations, however, are less convincing; Gene’s cruelty to Grace seems disproportionate to its purported rationale, and the novel’s final pages feel implausible and anachronistic.… [Still,] many readers will…be eager to debate the ethical decisions [Grace] makes
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.)  Based on the harrowing true story of the largest fire to ravage the coast of Maine.… Shreve's prose mirrors the action of the fire, with popping embers of action, licks of blazing rage, and the slow burn of lyrical character development. Absolutely stunning. —Julie Kane, Washingrton & Lee Lib., Lexington, VA
Library Journal


Shreve shakes things up in a way that descends into woman-in-jeopardy territory. The back stories of the main characters are so sketchy that their actions seem unmotivated and arbitrary. Formulaic plot aside, worth reading for the period detail and the evocative prose.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The epigraph is a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: "Doubt thou the stars are fire; / Doubt thou the sun doth move; / Doubt truth to be a liar; / But never doubt I love." What does it mean? What does it have to do with the novel it introduces?

2. "Containerize, her own mother once told Grace, as if imparting the secret of sanity. Her mother meant children as well as dry goods." (pages 9–­10) In what ways does Grace follow this advice? When does she disregard it?

3. Grace intends to seduce Gene on page 15, but the results are degrading and painful. If the novel were set in the present, might this be considered marital rape? How are things different now from in the 1940s?

4. On page 22, Grace thinks, "It feels true that she might have wished her mother-­in-­law gone. Not dead, just gone. It feels true that she caused the hurtful night in bed, even though she sort of knows she didn’t." Why does she blame herself for these things? When does she stop blaming herself?

5. Discuss Grace’s relationship with Rosie. Why is this friendship so important to Grace? What function does Rosie serve in her life?

6. Before reading The Stars Are Fire, what did you know about the fires that tore through Maine in 1947?

7. Can you think of anything Grace could have done differently to prepare?

8. After the fire, after losing the baby, Grace believes Gene may have used the chaos as cover for him to leave the family. What makes her think this? Would she rather that he fled, or died fighting the fire?

9. Why do Matthew and Joan take in Grace and the children? How does their action help her to heal?

10. At various points in the novel, Grace either ignores or heeds her intuition—­for instance, when Claire has a fever, or when Grace lets Aidan stay in the house. How does she decide when to follow her gut, and when to disregard it? Does her faith in her intuition grow over the course of the novel?

11. What do you think would have happened to Grace and the children if Marjorie hadn’t found them?

12. When does Grace begin to believe in her ability to survive and even thrive on her own? Is it purely a matter of necessity?

13. How does the notion of a "diaspora" figure into the story?

14. Which does more to pull Grace toward Aidan, their conversations or his music?

15. Why do you think Merle hid her jewelry where she did? What would have happened to Grace and the children if Grace hadn’t found it?

16. What prompts Grace to lie to her mother about Dr. Lighthart and about the money?

17. When Gene reappears, Grace thinks, "She will live in this house with this injured man on the couch until one of them dies. She will never again go to a job. She will never make love again. She will not have friends." (page 175) What prompts her to find a way to escape this fate?

18. Are there any ways in which Gene’s rage about his situation is justified?

19. On page 195, Gene says, " ‘Goddamnit, Grace. What’s got into you?’ " She replies, " ‘What’s gone out of me is a better question." What does she mean?

20. In her goodbye letter to Gene, Grace writes, "I think that if the fire hadn’t happened, we’d have continued as the little family that we were. In time, I believe, we would have come to care about each other in a way that was companionable." (page 221) Without the upheaval of the fire, do you think Grace would have stayed in her marriage?

21. When Grace decided to drive north, where did you think she was going? Did the epilogue surprise you?

22. The novel ends on a serendipitous note. Did you find it satisfying?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Stars Over Sunset Boulevard 
Susan Meissner, 2016
Penguin
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451475992


Summary
Two women working in Hollywood during its Golden Age discover the joy and heartbreak of true friendship.

Los Angeles, Present Day. When an iconic hat worn by Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind ends up in Christine McAllister’s vintage clothing boutique by mistake, her efforts to return it to its owner take her on a journey more enchanting than any classic movie…

Los Angeles, 1938.  Violet Mayfield sets out to reinvent herself in Hollywood after her dream of becoming a wife and mother falls apart, and lands a job on the film-set of Gone With the Wind.

There, she meets enigmatic Audrey Duvall, a once-rising film star who is now a fellow secretary. Audrey’s zest for life and their adventures together among Hollywood’s glitterati enthrall Violet...until each woman’s deepest desires collide.

What Audrey and Violet are willing to risk, for themselves and for each other, to ensure their own happy endings will shape their friendship, and their lives, far into the future. (From the publishers.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 9, 1961
• Where—San Diego, California, USA
• Education—Point Loma Nazarene University
• Currently—lives in San Diego, California


Susan Meissner is an American writer born and raised in San Diego, California. She began her literary career at the age of eight and since then has published more than a dozen novels (though that part came a bit later in her life).

Early years and career
Susan attended Point Loma Nazarene University, married a U.S. Air Force man, raised four children, and spent five years overseas and several more in Minnesota. Those were the years she put her novel-writing itch on hold. In 1995, however, she took a part-time reporting job at her county newspaper, became a columnist three years later, and eventually editor of a local weekly paper. One of the things she is most proud of that her paper was named the Best Weekly Paper in Minnesota in 2002.

That was the same year Susan's latent novel-writing itch resurfaced, and she began working on her first novel, Why the Sky is Blue. In a little more than a year, the book was written, published, and in the bookstores. She's been noveling ever since—with a string of 12 books under her name. Historical Fiction is one of her favorite genres.

Booklist placed A Fall of Marigolds on its "Top Ten" list of women's fiction for 2014. In 2008, Publishers Weekly named The Shape of Mercy as one of the year's 100 Best Novels.

Personal
Susan lives with her husband and four children in San Diego where her husband is a pastor and Air Force Reserves chaplain. She teaches in writing workshops. In addition to writing books, she enjoys spending time with her family, making and listening to music, reading, and traveling. (Based on the author's website.)

Books
2016 - Stars Over Sunset Boulevard
2015 - Secrets of a Charmed Life
2014 - A Fall of Marigolds
2013 - The Girl in the Glass
2011 - A Sound Among the Trees
2010 - Lady in Waiting
2009 - White Picket Fences
2008 - The Shape of Mercy
2008 - Blue Heart Blessed
2006 - A Seahorse in the Thames
2006 - In All Deep Places
2005 - The Remedy for Regret
2003 - Why the Sky is Blue

Book Reviews
Meissner spins an entertaining, touching story of two friends who meet on the buzzing set of one of the most famous movies in history and whose dreams, hopes, and ambitions will be forever entwined. A lovely, well-crafted story that peeks at a fascinating moment in cinematic history and examines the power and vulnerability of sincere friendship.
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 Stars Over Sunset Boulevard:

1. Consider the two protagonists, Violet and Audrey. How are they different (or similar?) in their personalities, their dreams, and in the way each reacts to life's events? Did you admire or sympathize with one over the other? Did your attitudes toward either change by the novel's end?

2. What secrets was each woman hiding...and why?

3. What did you learn about the behind-the-scenes filming of Gone With the Wind? Did you know, for instance, that Vivienne Leigh was cast only after filming had begun?

4. Are there parallels between what happens in the film...and what happens in the novel? Consider, for example, destroying the draperies to make a dress—and the way Violet uses that analogy to justify her own choices.

5. Consider this quote: "Unhappiness has an insatiable appetite. It does not care what it might have to kill to feed its cravings.” What does that mean?  If you were in either woman's shoes, how much would you be willing to sacrifice to attain your lifelong dreams?

6. Much of the story is taken up with the idea of beauty and desire. Locate and discuss passages in the book that relate to those concepts. For instance...

Beauty is all about perception, Vi. Your own perception is right up there with everyone else's. True...or not? Is our concept of beauty truly subjective? How much of our own lives, as well as the lives in this story, is driven by the attainment of beauty?

Don't ever sleep with a man to get what you want, because you wont' get it. He will, but you won't." Does that maxim hold true today?

7. Was the ending a suprise or predictable?

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

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Started Early, Took My Dog
Kate Atkinson, 2011
Little, Brown & Company
371 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316066730

Summary
Tracy Waterhouse leads a quiet, ordered life as a retired police detective—a life that takes a surprising turn when she encounters Kelly Cross, a habitual offender, dragging a young child through town. Both appear miserable and better off without each other—or so decides Tracy, in a snap decision that surprises herself as much as Kelly. Suddenly burdened with a small child, Tracy soon learns her parental inexperience is actually the least of her problems, as much larger ones loom for her and her young charge.

Meanwhile, Jackson Brodie, the beloved detective of novels such as Case Histories, is embarking on a different sort of rescue—that of an abused dog. Dog in tow, Jackson is about to learn, along with Tracy, that no good deed goes unpunished. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—York, England, UK
• Education—M.A., Dundee University
• Awards—Whitbread Award; Woman's Own Short Story Award; Ian St. James Award;
   Saltire Book of the Year Award; Prix Westminster
• Currently—lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK


Kate Atkinson was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature which she failed at the viva stage. During her final year of this course, she was married for the first time, although the marriage lasted only two years.

After leaving the university, she took on a variety of miscellaneous jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, Yorkshire for a time, before moving to Edinburgh, where she taught at Dundee University and began writing short stories. She now lives in Edinburgh.

Writing
She initially wrote for women's magazines after winning the 1986 Woman's Own Short Story Competition. She was runner-up for the Bridport Short Story Prize in 1990 and won an Ian St James Award in 1993 for her short-story "Karmic Mothers," which she later adapted for BBC2 television as part of its Tartan Shorts series.

Atkinson's breakthrough was with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award, ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins biography of William Ewart Gladstone. The book has been adapted for radio, theatre and television. She has since written several more novels, short stories and a play. Case Histories (2004) was described by Stephen King as "the best mystery of the decade." The book won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster.

Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, and the surprising twists and plot turns. Four of her novels have featured the popular former detective Jackson Brodie—Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News (2008), and Started Early, Took My Dog (2010). She has shown that, stylistically, she is also a comic novelist who often juxtaposes mundane everyday life with fantastic magical events, a technique that contributes to her work's pervasive magic realism.

Life After Life (2013) revolves around Ursula Todd's continual birth and rebirth. Janet Maslin of the New York Times called it "a big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways that underscore its author's fully untethered imagination."

A God in Ruins (2015), the companion book to Life After Life, follows Ursula's brother Todd who survived the war, only to succumb to disillusionment and guilt at having survived.

Atkinson was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to literature. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[Atkinson's] books cannot be simply read. They must also be wrestled with, and that's where much of the fun lies…Ms. Atkinson remains a wonderful stylist and Grade A schemer.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


[C]omplicated, elegant and completely satisfying…Atkinson's dark wit and mastery at sketching connections—between people, places, times, things, emotions—are reminiscent of Ruth Rendell, and Atkinson shares that grand master's facility in balancing cynicism, compassion and pragmatism. The result is crime fiction that's also splendid modern literature.
Kevin Allman - Washington Post


British author Atkinson's magnificently plotted fourth novel featuring Jackson Brodie (after When Will There Be Good News?) takes the "semi-retired" PI back to his Yorkshire hometown to trace the biological parents of Hope McMasters, a woman adopted by a couple in the 1970s at age two. Jackson is faced with more questions than answers when Hope's parents aren't in any database nor is her adoption on record. In the author's signature multilayered style, she shifts between past and present, interweaving the stories of Tracy Waterhouse, a recently retired detective superintendent now in charge of security at a Leeds mall, and aging actress Tilly Squires. On the same day that Jackson and Tilly are in the mall, Tracy makes a snap decision that will have lasting consequences for everyone. Atkinson injects wit even in the bleakest moments—such as Jackson's newfound appreciation for poetry, evoked in the Emily Dickinson inspired title—yet never loses her razor-sharp edge.
Publishers Weekly


Jackson Brodie returns in Atkinson's fourth novel (Case Histories; One Good Turn; When Will There Be Good News?) featuring the former policeman. Jackson (semiretired at 50) is doing some private detective work and trying to come to grips with his personal life, which includes a teenage daughter from his first marriage, a son with a former lover, and a second wife who stole his savings. Jackson adds a small dog to the mix by rescuing it from its abusive owner as he undertakes an "innocent" request from a woman in Australia: Could Jackson help her find her birth parents in England? In this literary mystery on the theme of missing children, nothing is innocent or simple. The intricate narrative, composed with deftness and humor, moves among scenes set alternately in 1975 and the present and contains a cast of well-drawn characters whose relationships unfold like the layers of a peeled onion. Verdict:  This book will not disappoint Atkinson and Jackson Brodie fans, but it might be a stretch for some readers to keep up with the multifaceted plot, though it is well worth the effort. —Nancy Fontaine, Dartmouth Coll., Hanover, NH
Library Journal


British private detective Jackson Brodie, star of three previous Atkinson novels (When Will There Be Good News, 2008, etc.), finds himself embroiled in a case which shows that defining crime is sometimes as difficult as solving it.  Tracy Waterhouse, who is middle-aged, overweight and lonely, heads security for a mall in Leeds. Retired from the local police force, she remains haunted by one of her earliest cases, when she and her partner found a little boy abandoned in the apartment where his mother had been murdered days earlier. Although the murderer was supposedly found (but died before being brought to trial), Tracy never learned what happened to the child with whom she'd formed a quick bond. When Tracy sees a known prostitute/lowlife mistreating her child at the mall, she impulsively offers to buy the child, and the woman takes the money and runs. Tracy knows she has technically broken the law and even suspects the woman might not be the real mother, but her protective instinct and growing love for the little girl named Courtney overrides common sense; she begins arrangements to flee Leeds and start a new life with the child. Meanwhile, Jackson has come to Leeds on his own case. Raised and living in Australia, adoptee Hope McMaster wants information about her birth parents, who supposedly died in a car crash in Leeds 30 years ago. As he pursues the case, Jackson considers his relationships with his own kids—a troublesome teenage daughter from his first marriage and a young son whom DNA tests have recently proved he fathered with a former lover. Jackson's search and Tracy's quest intertwine as Jackson's questions make the Leeds police force increasingly nervous. It becomes clear that the 1975 murder case Tracy worked on is far from solved and has had lasting repercussions.  The sleuthing is less important than Atkinson's fascinating take on the philosophic and emotional dimensions of her characters' lives.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. “For want of a nail the shoe was lost / For want of a shoe the horse was lost....” How do you think this traditional proverb, quoted by Kate Atkinson before the start of the novel, relates to what happens in Started Early, Took My Dog?

2. Another epigraph quotes Peter Sutcliffe, suggesting that this novel was partly inspired by the 1970s Yorkshire Ripper. Are there any other true crime cases that come to mind that resonate with the stories in this book?

3. A reviewer called this a “state of the nation novel — far sharper and more observant and satirically understanding than anything else out there at the moment.” Do you agree, and if so, what did the novel reveal for you about Britain today?

4. This is the fourth Jackson Brodie novel. What qualities make the former police detective so attractive to readers? And would you want to see him appear in another novel after this?

5. Another reviewer called Kate Atkinson “possibly the only author writing crime fiction that is also literary fiction alive today.” What are the elements that turn Started Early, Took My Dog into crime fiction, and what are its literary features? And do you agree with the way fiction is commonly classified into these separate genres by the critics, and also in libraries and bookshops?

6. On an impulse, Tracy Waterhouse buys little Courtney for a wad of cash from a woman she assumes to be her mother, after witnessing her behaving abusively toward the child. What do you think of Tracy’s motives, and do you think this kind of unusual transaction could ever be morally justified?

7. How do Courtney and Tracy change each other’s lives, and in what ways are they important to one another? How does their relationship compare to Jackson’s relationship with the dog?

8. The book alternates between telling part of the story in the 1970s and part of the story in the present day. What has changed between what was going on in the seventies in the police force and what is going on now? What is the same? How does Atkinson weave these two time periods together?

9. The characters in Started Early, Took My Dog are all tied to the past in different ways; some are held victim to it, but no one can escape it. How does the past influence the present lives of the characters in the book?

10. Discuss the role of guilt in the novel, and how it affects different people (e.g., Barry Crawford, Len Lomax, Ray Strickland, and Linda Pallister).

11. Sexism is an issue that shows itself in many forms throughout the novel, particularly in the police force in the 1970s. What type of sexism did Tracy and the other female characters face? How is that reflected in the way female prostitutes and female victims are portrayed in the book? Were you able to see past the sexism of some of the characters in the novel?

12. Kate Atkinson’s novels have often featured lost or abandoned children. Discuss the role of the lost girls — Courtney and Hope McMaster — in Started Early, Took My Dog. How do they relate to the other lost girls in Jackson’s own life?

13. Many of the women in the novel have no children of their own, for various reasons. How does each character manage her desire to have children, or her struggles when she loses her children?

14. The title is taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, a poet Jackson Brodie has recently discovered, and it ends with another Dickinson poem, “Hope.” Why do you think Kate Atkinson decided to finish on this note?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Starting Now (Blossom series 9)
Debbie Macomber, 2013
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345528810


Summary
#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber returns to Seattle’s beloved Blossom Street in this heartfelt tale of friendship, renewal, and discovering what’s truly important in life.

For years Libby Morgan dreamed only of making partner in her competitive, high-pressure law firm. She sacrificed everything for her career—her friends, her marriage, her chance at creating a family. When her boss calls Libby into his office, she assumes it will finally be good news, but nothing can prepare her for the shocking reality: She’s been let go and must rebuild her entire life...starting now.

With no job prospects in sight, Libby reaches out to old friends and spends her afternoons at A Good Yarn, the local knitting store. There she forms a close bond with Lydia, the sweet-natured shop owner; Lydia’s spirited teenage daughter, Casey; and Casey’s best friend, Ava, a shy yet troubled girl who will shape Libby’s future in surprising and profound ways.

As A Good Yarn becomes a second home—and the women a new kind of family—Libby relishes the different person she’s become. She even finds time for romance with a charming and handsome doctor who seems to be her perfect match. But just as everything is coming together, Libby must make a choice that could forever change the life she holds so dear.

Warmly told and richly textured, Starting Now is filled with the promise of new beginnings and the unending delights of companionship and love. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 22, 1948
• Where—Yakima, Washington, USA
• Education—high school
• Awards—Quill Award; RITA and Distinguished Lifetime Achievement (Romance Writers of America)
• Currently—Port Orchard, Washington


Debbie Macomber is a best-selling American author of over 150 romance novels and contemporary women's fiction. Over 170 million copies of her books are in print throughout the world, and four have become made-for-TV-movies. Macomber was the inaugural winner of the fan-voted Quill Award for romance in 2005 and has been awarded both a Romance Writers of America RITA and a lifetime achievement award by the Romance Writers of America.

Beginning writer
Although Debbie Macomber is dyslexic and has only a high school education, she was determined to be a writer. A stay-at-home mother raising four small children, Macomber nonetheless found the time to sit in her kitchen in front of a rented typewriter and work on developing her first few manuscripts. For five years she continued to write despite many rejections from publishers, finally turning to freelance magazine work to help her family make ends meet.

With money that she saved from her freelance articles, Macomber attended a romance writer's conference, where one of her manuscripts was selected to be publicly critiqued by an editor from Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. The editor tore apart her novel and recommended that she throw it away. Undaunted, Macomber scraped together $10 to mail the same novel, Heartsong, to Harlequin's rival, Silhouette Books. Silhouette bought the book, which became the first romance novel to be reviewed by Publishers Weekly.

Career
Although Heartsong was the first of her manuscripts to sell, Starlight was the first of her novels to be published. It became #128 of the Silhouette Special Edition category romance line (now owned by Harlequin). Macomber continued to write category romances for Silhouette, and later Harlequin. In 1988, Harlequin asked Macomber to write a series of interconnected stories, which became known as the Navy series. Before long, she was selling "huge" numbers of books, usually 150,000 copies of each of her novels, and she was releasing two or three titles per year. By 1994, Harlequin launched the Mira Books imprint to help their category romance authors transition to the single title market, and Macomber began releasing single-title novels. Her first hardcover was released in 2001.

In 2002, Macomber realized that she was having more difficulty identifying with a 25-year-old heroine, and that she wanted to write books focusing more on women and their friendships. Thursdays at Eight was her first departure from the traditional romance novel and into contemporary women's fiction.

Since 1986, in most years Macomber has released a Christmas-themed book or novella. For several years, these novels were part of the Angel series, following the antics of angels Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy. Macomber, who loves Christmas, says that she writes Christmas books as well because "Every woman I know has a picture of the perfect Christmas in her mind, the same way we do romance. Reality rarely lives up to our expectations, so the best we can do is delve into a fantasy."

In general, Macomber's novels focus on delivering the message of the story and do not include detailed descriptive passages. Her heroines tend to be optimists, and the "stories are resolved in a manner that leaves the reader with a feeling of hope and happy expectation." Many of the novels take place in small, rural town, with her Cedar Cove series loosely based on her own hometown. Because of her Christian beliefs, Macomber does not include overly explicit sexual details in her books, although they do contain some sensuality.

Over 170 million copies of her books are in print throughout the world. This Matter of Marriage, became a made-for-tv movie in 1998. In 2009, Hallmark Channel broadcast "Debbie Macomber's Mrs. Miracle," their top-watched movie of the year. The next year Hallmark Channel aired "Call Me Mrs. Miracle," based on Debbie's novel of the same name, and it was the channel's highest rated movie of 2010. In 2011 Hallmark premiered "Trading Christmas," based on Debbie's novel When Christmas Comes (2004).

Debbie also now writes inspirational non-fiction. Her second cookbook, Debbie Macomber's Christmas Cookbook, and her second children's book, The Yippy, Yappy Yorkie in the Green Doggy Sweater (written with Mary Lou Carney), were released in 2012. There is also a Debbie Macomber line of knitting pattern books from Leisure Arts and she owns her own yarn store, A Good Yarn, in Port Orchard, Washington.

Now writing for Random House, Debbie published two Ballantine hardcovers in 2012, The Inn at Rose Harbor and Angels at the Table (November). The same year also saw the publication of two inspirational non-fiction hardcovers, One Perfect Word (Howard Books) and Patterns of Grace (Guideposts April). Starting Now, the ninth in her Blossom Street series, was issued in 2013.

Recognition
Macomber is a three-time winner of the B. Dalton Award, and the inaugural winner of the fan-voted Quill Award for romance (2005, for 44 Cranberry Point). She has been awarded the Romantic Times Magazine Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award and has won a Romance Writers of America RITA Award, the romance novelist's equivalent of an Academy Award, for The Christmas Basket. Her novels have regularly appeared on the Waldenbooks and USAToday bestseller lists and have also earned spots on the New York Times Bestseller List. On September 6, 2007 she made Harlequin Enterprises history, by pulling off the rarest of triple plays—having her new novel, 74 Seaside Avenue, appear at the #1 position for paperback fiction on the New York Times, USAToday and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. These three highly respected bestseller lists are considered the bellwethers for a book's performance in the United States.

She threw out the first pitch in Seattle Mariners games at Safeco Field in 2007 and 2012. The Romance Writers of America presented Debbie with their prestigious 2010 Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award.

Personal
Macomber has mentored young people, is the international spokesperson for World Vision’s Knit for Kids and serves on the Guideposts National Advisory Cabinet. She was appointed an ambassador for the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America national office in 1997.

Debbie and her husband, Wayne, raised four children and have numerous grandchildren. They live in Port Orchard, Washington and winter in Florida. When not writing, she enjoys knitting, traveling with Wayne and putting on Grandma Camps for her grandchildren, for whom she has built a four-star tree house behind her home in Port Orchard. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/11/2015.)

Book Reviews
Macomber’s latest is a by-the-numbers tale of midlife crisis and renewal. High-powered attorney Libby Morgan has abandoned her friends and marriage in order to make partner at her firm. One morning, in the sixth year of her eight-year partnership track, her boss lets her go.... But when a tantalizing offer comes from her old firm, she may drop everything and return to her old ways.... Libby and Stone are archetypes who come with no surprises. Readers have read this story too many times.
Publishers Weekly


No. 1 New York Times best seller Macomber takes us back to Blossom Street, site of her popular series and a fabulous place called A Good Yarn. That's where Libby Morgan washes up after the law job she's sacrificed everything for comes crashing down. Libby becomes close to Good Yarn owner Lydia, her teenage daughter, and the daughter's best friend and even has time to fall for the local doctor. Then she faces a tough decision. Fans will clamor.
Library Journal


When Libby Morgan is expecting to be named partner of her law firm but instead gets laid off, she's shocked and angry, but it may prove to be just what she needs to create the life she deserves....  Libby's journey is more about self-discovery and understanding what "a good life" truly means for her, while opening her heart to other damaged characters in the story broadens her understanding of love and purpose. Macomber's writing and storytelling deliver what she's famous for—a smooth, satisfying tale with characters her fans will cheer for and an arc that is cozy, heartwarming and ends with the expected happily-ever-after.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Starting Now is not only the title of this book, it also suggests the idea of starting over, one of the book's themes. Besides Libby, what other characters in the book are coping with life-changing developments? How are they handling the upheaval in their lives?

2. During Libby’s time of unemployment, she learned she was a survivor. Share with your group about a time in your life when you had to start over or went through a similar period of adversity. What did you learn about yourself in the process?

3. When Libby’s boss lets her go, he advises her to get a life outside of work. What did you think about Libby’s attempts to do that?  Would you have approached it differently than she did? Why do some people struggle more than others to maintain a balance in life? What do you think are the keys to achieving that balance?

4. Libby discovers great joy by volunteering at the hospital. What do you think it was about the experience that proved so fulfilling? Would a different type of volunteer work have had the same impact?

5. Libby demonstrated her optimistic outlook on life when she told her friend, Robin, that eventually everything would right itself. Even so, Libby still had setbacks and disappointments. Do you believe that everything works out like it’s supposed to? Did you agree with how Libby faced her challenges?  How would you have responded differently?

6. For Libby, re-discovering knitting is therapeutic. What is it about this activity that helps her? Have you had similar experiences with taking up a hobby?

7. Both Libby and Phillip have a tendency towards being workaholics but this is something Phillip has taken action to address when the book opens.  How do you think this tendency impacts their relationship? Is the fact that these two characters are cut from the same cloth, so to speak, a benefit or a hindrance?

8. Several of the characters in Starting Now, including Libby and Ava, feel they have been defined by their mothers.   Likewise, Casey is having a much different mother/daughter experience with Lydia. Discuss these characters and how their mothers have had an impact on them, particularly at critical crossroads in their lives.

9. Which character in Starting Now do you relate to the most—and why?

10. Libby and Robin have a falling out. Do you think Robin was justified in being upset with Libby? How would you have handled it differently?

11. Starting Now demonstrates the resilience of the human spirit. By the story’s end, in what ways was Libby’s life better because of her ability to turn adversity into opportunity?

Caution! Spoiler Alert Questions
12. Lydia seeks out Ava’s grandmother when she and Libby are made aware of Ava’s pregnancy, and they debate about whether or not this is the best course to take. Intervention by outsiders into private family matters can be challenging and controversial. Did you agree with this course of action?  How might you have handled it differently?

13. When Libby thought she was going to adopt Ava’s baby, she planned on it being an open adoption, where Ava could be a part of the baby’s life. Do you think Libby’s decision was wise? If you were in Libby’s shoes, would you choose an option adoption? Why or why not?

14. How do you think things would have played out if Libby had been able to adopt Ava’s baby? How would it have affected her career? Would the course of her relationship with Phillip have been any different?
(Questions from the author's website.)

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State of Wonder
Ann Patchett, 2011
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062049810


Summary
Ann Patchett raises the bar with State of Wonder, a provocative and ambitious novel set deep in the Amazon jungle.

Research scientist Dr. Marina Singh is sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have disappeared in the Amazon while working on an extremely valuable new drug. The last person who was sent to find her died before he could complete his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey into the insect-infested jungle in hopes of finding answers to the questions about her friend's death, her company's future, and her own past.

Once found, Dr. Swenson is as imperious and uncompromising as ever. But while she is as threatening as anything the jungle has to offer, the greatest sacrifices to be made are the ones Dr. Swenson asks of herself, and will ultimately ask of Marina.

State of Wonder is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss. It is a tale that leads the reader into the very heart of darkness, and then shows us what lies on the other side. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1963
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Raised—Nashville, Tennessee
• Education—B.A., Sarah Lawrence College; M.F.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellowship; PEN/Faulkner Award; Orange Prize
• Currently—lives in Nashville, Tennessee


Ann Patchett is an American author of both fiction and nonfiction. She is perhaps best known for her 2001 novel, Bel Canto, which won her the Orange Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award and brought her nationwide fame.

Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her mother is the novelist Jeanne Ray. Her father, Frank Patchett, who died in 2012 and had been long divorced from her mother, served as a Los Angeles police officer for 33 years, and participated in the arrests of both Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan. The story of Patchett's own family is the basis for her 2016 novel, Commonwealth, about the individual lives of a blended family spanning five decades.

Education and career
Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls run by the Sisters of Mercy. Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College and took fiction writing classes with Allan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. She managed to publish her first story in The Paris Review before she graduated. After college, she went on to the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa

For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine, writing primarily non-fiction; the magazine published one of every five articles she wrote. She said that the magazine's editors could be cruel, but she eventually stopped taking criticism personally. She ended her relationship with the magazine following a dispute with one editor, exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!"

In 1990-91, Patchett attended the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was there she wrote The Patron Saint of Liars, which was published in 1992 (becoming a 1998 TV movie). It was where she also met longtime friend Elizabeth McCracken—whom Patchett refers to as her editor and the only person to read her manuscripts as she is writing.

Although Patchett's second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994, her fourth book, Bel Canto, was her breakthrough novel. Published in 2001, it was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and won the PEN/Faulkner Award and Britain's Orange Prize.

In addition to her other novels and memoirs, Patchett has written for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Oprah Magazine, ELLE, GQ, Gourmet, and Vogue. She is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories.

Personal
Patchett was only six when she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and she lives there still. She is particularly enamored of her beautiful pink brick home on Whitland Avenue where she has lived since 2004 with her husband and dog. When asked by the New York Times where would she go if she could travel anywhere, Patchett responded...

I've done a lot of travel writing, and people like to ask me where I would go if I could go anyplace. My answer is always the same: I would go home. I am away more than I would like, giving talks, selling books, and I never walk through my own front door without thinking: thank-you-thank-you-thank-you.... [Home is] the stable window that opens out into the imagination.

In 2010, when she found that her hometown of Nashville no longer had a good book store, she co-founded Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes; the store opened in November 2011. In 2012, Patchett was on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is a vegan for "both moral and health reasons."

In an interview, she once told Barnes and Noble that the book that influenced her writing more than any other was Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow.

I think I read it in the tenth grade. My mother was reading it. It was the first truly adult literary novel I had read outside of school, and I read it probably half a dozen times. I found Bellow's directness very moving. The book seemed so intelligent and unpretentious. I wanted to write like that book.

Books
1992 - The Patron Saint of Liars
1994 - Taft
1997 - The Magician's Assistant
2004 - Truth and Beauty: A Friendship
2001 - Bel Canto
2007 - Run
2008 - What Now?
2011 - State of Wonder; The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
2013 - This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
2016 - Commonwealth
2019 - The Dutch House
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/5/2016.)

Book Reviews
The large canvas of sweeping moral issues, both personal and global, comes to life through careful attention to details, however seemingly mundane—from ill-fitting shoes and mosquito bites to a woman tenderly braiding another woman’s hair.
O Magazine


Patchett (Bel Canto) is a master storyteller who has an entertaining habit of dropping ordinary people into extraordinary and exotic circumstances to see what they're made of. In this expansive page-turner, Marina Singh, a big pharma researcher, is sent by her married boss/lover to the deepest, darkest corner of the Amazon to investigate the death of her colleague, Anders Eckman, who had been dispatched to check on the progress of the incommunicado Dr. Annick Swenson, a rogue scientist on the cusp of developing a fertility drug that could rock the medical profession (and reap enormous profits). After arriving in Manaus, Marina travels into her own heart of darkness, finding Dr. Swenson's camp among the Lakashi, a gentle but enigmatic tribe whose women go on bearing children until the end of their lives. As Marina settles in, she goes native, losing everything she had held on to so dearly in her prescribed Midwestern life, shedding clothing, technology, old loves, and modern medicine in order to find herself. Patchett's fluid prose dissolves in the suspense of this out-there adventure, a juggernaut of a trip to the crossroads of science, ethics, and commerce that readers will hate to see end.
Publishers Weekly


In this superbly rendered novel, Patchett (Run) takes the reader into the primitive world of the Amazon in Brazil. Pharmacologist Marina Singh from Minnesota works for the pharmaceutical company Vogel. Her colleague Anders Eckman dies in the jungle while trying to locate Dr. Annick Swenson, who has been working on a fertility drug for Vogel by studying the Lakashi people, whose women bear children into old age. Marina's journey to the Amazon to find the uncommunicative and intimidating Dr. Swenson and to discover the details of Anders's death is fraught with poisonous snakes and poisonous memories, malarial mosquitoes and sickening losses, but her time among the Lakashi tribe is transformative. Verdict: Not a sentimental view of a primitive people, Patchett's portrayal is as wonderful as it is frightening and foreign. Patchett exhibits an extraordinary ability to bring the horrors and the wonders of the Amazon jungle to life, and her singular characters are wonderfully drawn. Readers who enjoy exotic locales will especially be interested, but all will find this story powerful and captivating. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal


In fluid and remarkably atmospheric prose, Patchett captures not only the sights and sounds of the chaotic jungle environment but also the struggles and sacrifice of dedicated scientists.
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. How would you describe Marina Singh? How has the past shaped her character? Discuss the anxieties that are manifested in her dreams.

2. “Marina was from Minnesota. No one ever believed that. At the point when she could have taken a job anywhere she came back because she loved it here. This landscape was the one she understood, all prairie and sky.” What does this description say about the character?

3. Talk about Marina’s relationship with her boss, Mr. Fox. Would you call what they share love? Do they have a future? Why does he want Marina to go to the Amazon? What propels her to agree?

4. What drew Marina to her old mentor, Annik Swenson? Compare and contrast the two women. How does Annick see Marina? Barbara Bovender, one of Annik’s caretakers/gatekeepers tells Marina, “She’s such a force of nature. . . . a woman completely fearless, someone who sees the world without limitations.” Is this a fair assessment of Annik? How would you describe her? How has the elderly doctor’s past shaped the person she is and the choices she has made?

5. Describe the arc of Marina and Annik’s relationship from the novel’s beginning to its end. Do you like these women? Did your opinion of them change as the story unfolded? Why didn’t Marina ever tell anyone the full story of her early experience with Annick?

6. Consider Annik’s research in the Amazon. Should women of any age be able to have children? What are the benefits and the downsides? Why does this ability seem to work in the Lakashi culture? What impact does this research ultimately have on Marina? Whether you are a man or woman, would you want to have a child in your fifties or sixties? How far should modern science go to “improve” on nature?

7. In talking about her experiences with the indigenous people, Annik explains, “the question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you; or if you choose to go on as if you had never arrived. “ How does Marina respond to this? Did Annik practice what she preached? How do these women’s early choices impact later events and decisions? How does Annik’s statement extend beyond the Amazon to the wider world? Would you rather make a “disturbance” in life, or go along quietly?

8. Talk about the Lakashi people and the researchers. How do they get along? Though the scientists try not to interfere with the natives’ way of life, how does their being there impact the Lakashi? What influence do the Lakashi have on the scientists?

9. Would you be able to live in the jungle as the researchers and natives do? Is there an appeal to going back to nature; from being removed from the western constraints of time and our modern technological society?

10. What role does nature and the natural world—the jungle, the Amazon River—play in Marina’s story? How does the environment influence the characters—Marina, Annik, Milton, Anders, Easter, and the others? Annik warns Marina, “It’s difficult to trust yourself in the jungle. Some people gain their bearings over time but for others that adjustment never comes.” Did Marina ultimately “gain her bearings”?

11. Marina travels into hell, into her own Conradian “heart of darkness.” What keeps her in the jungle longer than she’d ever thought she’d stay? How does this journey transform her and her view of herself and the world? Will she ever return—and does she need to?

12. What is your opinion of the choices Marina made regarding Easter? What role did the boy play in the story? Do you think Marina will ever have the child—one like Easter—that she wants?

13. What do you think happens to Marina after she returns home?

14. State of Wonder is rich in symbolism. Identify a few—for example, Eden Prairie (Marina’s Minnesota home), Easter (the young deaf native boy), Milton (the Brazilian guide)—and talk about how Ann Patchett uses them to deepen the story.

15. State of Wonder raises questions of morality and principle, civilization, culture, love, and science. Choose a few events from the book to explore some of these themes.

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Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804172448


Summary
An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead.

That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.

Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: "Because survival is insufficient." But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.
 
Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all.

A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979-80
• Where—Comox, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—Toronto Dance Theater.
• Awards—Prix Mystere de la Critique (France)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York, USA


"St. John's my middle name. The books go under M."

Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.

Mandel's latest novel, The Glass Hotel, was released in 2020 to high praise and numerousf starred reviews. Her fourth novel, Station Eleven, published in 2014 was long listed for the National Book Award. All three of her previous novels—Last Night in Montreal, The Singer's Gun, and The Lola Quartet—were Indie Next Picks, and The Singer's Gun was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystere de la Critique in France.

Mandel's short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013. She lives in New York City with her husband. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Mandel is an able and exuberant storyteller, and many readers will be won over by her nimble interweaving of her characters' lives and fates…Station Eleven is as much a mystery as it is a post-apocalyptic tale, and Mandel is especially good at planting clues and raising the kind of plot-thickening questions that keep the reader turning pages…. If Station Eleven reveals little insight into the effects of extreme terror and misery on humanity, it offers comfort and hope to those who believe, or want to believe, that doomsday can be survived, that in spite of everything people will remain good at heart, and that when they start building a new world they will want what was best about the old.
Sigrid Nunez - New York Times Book Review


In Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, the Georgia Flu becomes airborne the night Arthur Leander dies during his performance as King Lear. Within months, all airplanes are grounded, cars run out of gas and electricity flickers out as most of the world’s population dies. The details of Arthur’s life before the flu and what happens afterward to his friends, wives and lovers create a surprisingly beautiful story of human relationships amid such devastation. Among the survivors are Kirsten, a child actor at the time of Arthur’s death who lives with no memory of what happened to her the first year after the flu.... A gorgeous retelling of Lear unfolds through Arthur’s flashbacks and Kirsten’s attempt to stay alive.
Nancy Hightower - Washington Post


Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven sensitively explores the dynamics of....a theater troupe called the Traveling Symphony whose musicians and actors perform Shakespeare for small communities around the Great Lakes. Ms. Mandel.... writ[es] with cool intelligence and poised understatement. Her real interest is in examining friendships and love affairs and the durable consolations of art.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal


If you’re planning to write a post-apocalyptic novel, you’re going to have to breathe some new life into it. Emily St. John Mandel does that with her new book, Station Eleven.... The story is told through several characters, including an A-list actor, his ex-wives, a religious prophet and the Traveling Symphony, a ragtag group of Shakespearean actors and musicians who travel to settlements performing for the survivors. Each bring a unique perspective to life, relationships and what it means to live in a world returned to the dark ages.... Mandel doesn’t put the emphasis on the apocalypse itself (the chaos, the scavenging, the scientists trying to find a cure), but instead shows the effects it has on humanity. Despite the state of the world, people find reasons to continue.... Station Eleven will change the post-apocalyptic genre. While most writers tend to be bleak and cliched, Mandel chooses to be optimistic and imaginative. This isn’t a story about survival, it’s a story about living.
 Andrew Blom - Boston Herald


Mandel deviates from the usual and creates what is possibly the most captivating and thought-provoking post-apocalyptic novel you will ever read....  Beautiful writing.... An assured handle on human emotions and relationships.... Though not without tension and a sense of horror, Station Eleven rises above the bleakness of the usual post-apocalyptic novels because its central concept is one so rarely offered in the genre—hope.
Independent (UK)


A beautiful and unsettling book, the action moves between the old and new world, drawing connections between the characters and their pasts and showing the sweetness of life as we know it now and the value of friendship, love and art over all the vehicles, screens and remote controls that have been rendered obsolete. Mandel's skill in portraying her post-apocalyptic world makes her fictional creation seem a terrifyingly real possibility. Apocalyptic stories once offered the reader a scary view of an alternative reality and the opportunity, on putting the book down, to look around gratefully at the real world. This is a book to make its reader mourn the life we still lead and the privileges we still enjoy.
Sunday Express (UK)


A novel that carries a magnificent depth.... We get to see something that is so difficult to show or feel – how small moments in time link together. And how these moments add up to a life.... Her best yet. It feels as though she took the experience earned from her previous writing and braided it together to make one gleaming strand.... An epic book.
Claire Cameron - Globe and Mail (Toronto)


So impressive.... Station Eleven is terrifying, reminding us of how paper-thin the achievements of civilization are. But it’s also surprisingly— nd quietly—beautiful.... As Emily Dickinson knew and as Mandel reminds us, there’s a sumptuousness in destitution, a painful beauty in loss.... A superb novel. Unlike most postapocalyptic works, it leaves us not fearful for the end of the world but appreciative of the grace of everyday existence.
Anthony Domestic - San Francisco Chronicle


Darkly lyrical.... An appreciation of art, love and the triumph of the human spirit.... Mandel effortlessly moves between time periods.... The book is full of beautiful set pieces and landscapes; big, bustling cities before and during the outbreak, an eerily peaceful Malaysian seashore, and an all-but-abandoned Midwest airport-turned museum that becomes an all important setting for the last third of the book.... Mandel ties up all the loose ends in a smooth and moving way, giving humanity to all her characters — both in a world that you might recognize as the one we all live in today (and perhaps take for granted) and a post-apocalyptic world without electricity, smartphones and the Internet. Station Eleven is a truly haunting book, one that is hard to put down and a pleasure to read.
Doug Knoop - Seattle Times


Haunting and riveting.... In several moving passages, Mandel's characters look back with similar longing toward the receding pre-plague world, remembering all the things they'd once taken for granted — from the Internet to eating an orange.... It's not just the residents of Mandel's post-collapse world who need to forge stronger connections and live for more than mere survival. So do we all.
Mike Fischer - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


Though it centers on civilization’s collapse in the aftermath of a devastating flu, this mesmerizing novel isn’t just apocalyptic fantasy—it’s also an intricately layered character study of human life itself. Jumping back and forth between the decades before and after the pandemic, the narrative interlaces several individuals’ stories, encompassing a universe of emotions and ultimately delivering a view of life that’s both chilling and jubilant.
People


Emily St. John Mandel’s tender and lovely new novel, Station Eleven.... miraculously reads like equal parts page-turner and poem.... One of her great feats is that the story feels spun rather than plotted, with seamless shifts in time and characters.... "Because survival is insufficient," reads a line taken from Star Trek spray painted on the Traveling Symphony’s lead wagon. The genius of Mandel’s fourth novel...is that she lives up to those words. This is not a story of crisis and survival. It’s one of art and family and memory and community and the awful courage it takes to look upon the world with fresh and hopeful eyes.
Karen Valby -  Entertainment Weekly


Few themes are as played-out as that of post-apocalypse, but St. John Mandel finds a unique point of departure from which to examine civilization’s wreckage.... With its wild fusion of celebrity gossip and grim future, this book shouldn’t work nearly so well, but St. John Mandel’s examination of the connections between individuals with disparate destinies makes a case for the worth of even a single life.
Publishers Weekly


A movie star who's decided to pound the boards as King Lear collapses and dies mid-performance, and shortly thereafter civilization collapses and starts dying as well. The narrative then moves between the actor's early career and a journey through the blasted landscape 15 years after the book's opening events. Indie Next darling Mandel breaks out with a major publisher.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Survivors and victims of a pandemic populate this quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness.... Mandel spins a satisfying web of coincidence and kismet while providing numerous strong moments.... [S]olid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Now that you’ve read the entire novel, go back and reread the passage by Czeslaw Milosz that serves as an epigraph. What does it mean? Why did Mandel choose it to introduce Station Eleven?

2.  Does the novel have a main character? Who would you consider it to be?

3. Arthur Leander dies while performing King Lear, and the Traveling Symphony performs Shakespeare’s works. On page 57, Mandel writes, "Shakespeare was the third born to his parents, but the first to survive infancy. Four of his siblings died young. His son, Hamnet, died at eleven and left behind a twin. Plague closed the theaters again and again, death flickering over the landscape." How do Shakespearean motifs coincide with those of Station Eleven, both the novel and the comic?

4. Arthur’s death happens to coincide with the arrival of the Georgia Flu. If Jeevan had been able to save him, it wouldn’t have prevented the apocalypse. But how might the trajectory of the novel been different?

5.  What is the metaphor of the Station Eleven comic books? How does the Undersea connect to the events of the novel?

6. "Survival is insufficient," a line from Star Trek: Voyager, is the Traveling Symphony’s motto. What does it mean to them?

7. On page 62, the prophet discusses death: "I’m not speaking of the tedious variations on physical death. There’s the death of the body, and there’s the death of the soul. I saw my mother die twice." Knowing who his mother was, what do you think he meant by that?

8. Certain items turn up again and again, for instance the comic books and the paperweight—things Arthur gave away before he died, because he didn’t want any more possessions. And Clark’s Museum of Civilization turns what we think of as mundane belongings into totems worthy of study. What point is Mandel making?

9. On a related note, some characters—like Clark—believe in preserving and teaching about the time before the flu. But in Kirsten’s interview with François Diallo, we learn that there are entire towns that prefer not to: "We went to a place once where the children didn’t know the world had ever been different...." (page 115). What are the benefits of remembering, and of not remembering?

10. What do you think happened during the year Kirsten can’t remember?

11. In a letter to his childhood friend, Arthur writes that he’s been thinking about a quote from Yeats, "Love is like the lion’s tooth." (page 158). What does this mean, and why is he thinking about it?

12. How does the impending publication of those letters affect Arthur?

13. On page 206, Arthur remembers Miranda saying "I regret nothing," and uses that to deepen his understanding of Lear, "a man who regrets everything," as well as his own life. How do his regrets fit into the larger scope of the novel? Other than Miranda, are there other characters that refuse to regret?

14. Throughout the novel, those who were alive during the time before the flu remember specific things about those days: the ease of electricity, the taste of an orange. In their place, what do you think you’d remember most?

15. What do you imagine the Traveling Symphony will find when they reach the brightly lit town to the south?

16. The novel ends with Clark, remembering the dinner party and imagining that somewhere in the world, ships are sailing. Why did Mandel choose to end the novel with him?
(Questions are issued by the publisher.)

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