Take Me With You 
Catherine Ryan Hyde, 2014
Amazon Publishing
362 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781477820018


Summary
Seth and his little brother Henry haven't had the most stable of upbringings. Their fathcer has been in and out of jail; their mother took off years ago and hasn't been seen since. Life is constantly uncertain—but a twist of fate could be just what they need.

August stopped drinking the day his son died. While on a journey that's very close to his heart, a breakdown leaves him stranded in a small town and at the mercy of the local mechanic—Seth and Henry's father.

But then August is presented with an offer he doesn't expect: take the two boys with him for the summer, and pay no charge for the repairs.

As the unlikely trio set out on their road trip, the most unlikely, unforgettable friendship begins to take shape.

What none of them could have known was how transformative both the trip—and the bonds that develop between them—would prove, driving each to create a new destiny together. (From Random House-New Zealand.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1955
• Where—Buffalo, New York, USA
• Education—High School
• Currently—lives in Cambria, California


Catherine was born into a family of writers, and lived during her early life in the Buffalo, New York. (She points to a favorite teacher, Lenny Horowitz, for helping her change from being "the last kid picked" for a team to finally becoming a writer.) After an accelerated graduation from high school at 17, she headed to New York City planning to do something other than writing—anything that might provide a steadier paycheck. Over the years, she worked as a baker, pastry chef, auto mechanic, dog trainer, and tour guide.

Then, in the early 1980s Hyde decided to dedicate herself to becoming a full-time writer. By the mid-'80s, she had moved to a small town on California’s Central Coast, where she decided to come to terms with her alcohol and drug addiction. Twenty-five years on, Hyde is clean and sober—and now the author of nearly 25 novels, as well as numerous short stories.

She has won literary accolades throughout the world. Her bestselling novel Pay it Forward was adapted into a major motion picture starring Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt, and translated into 23 languages for distribution in over 30 countries.

When not writing, Hyde hikes, kayaks, and visits national parks. The research for Take Me With You was all done from her own little twenty-two-foot motorhome. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/10/2016.)

Book Reviews
Hyde's book digs deeply into the ties of love, between both family and strangers.... Hyde gives her characters great internal depth, and the book’s scope gives readers time to savor this memorable, moving journey.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Take Me With You...then take off on your own:

1. A journey in literature is a classic metaphor for an inward journey (think The Odyssey). In what way is August's trip in Take Me With You an emotional or psychological one? Describe August Schroeder's state of mind at the beginning of the novel and how he changes by the end of the trip.

2. What kind of father is Wes and what is his relationship with his sons?

3. Why does August initially decline to take Seth and Henry with him to Yellowstone? What causes him to change his mind? Is it simply a matter of money?

4. How would you describe the two boys, Seth and Henry, and their relationship as brothers. Why doesn't Henry talk?

5. Then there's Woody—can't forget him. How does he fit into the mix?

6.Talk about the budding relationship among August and the Seth and Henry. Trace its development as they open up to one another. What did you find most affecting?

7. What role does the natural world play in this book in terms of healing? If you are a hiker or spend time outdoors, how well does Catherine Ryan Hyde epict the wonders of Yellowstone National Park? Does the fact that the author herself is a lover of the outdoors—as a kyaker, hiker, and dog lover—come through in her writing?

8. Addiction plays a large part in this novel: both August and Wes suffer from it. How does August work through his own problems with alcohol, and how does he help the boys understand their father's addition?

9. How does the trip eight years later repeat similar themes of the first trip? What has changed—or who has changed—and in what ways?

10. The book asks an important question about what consititues family. Is family what you are born into, or can you create your own? If so, how?

11. Were you satisfied with the novel's conclusion?

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

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The Taker
Alma Katsu, 2011
Simon & Schuster
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439197059

Summary
True love can last an eternity ... but immortality comes at a price . . .

On the midnight shift at a hospital in rural Maine, Dr. Luke Findley is expecting another quiet evening of frostbite and the occasional domestic dispute. But the minute Lanore McIlvrae—Lanny—walks into his ER, she changes his life forever. A mysterious woman with a past and plenty of dark secrets, Lanny is unlike anyone Luke has ever met. He is inexplicably drawn to her, despite the fact that she is a murder suspect with a police escort. And as she begins to tell her story, a story of enduring love and consummate betrayal that transcends time and mortality, Luke finds himself utterly captivated.

Her impassioned account begins at the turn of the nineteenth century in the same small town of St. Andrew, Maine, back when it was a Puritan settlement. Consumed as a child by her love for the son of the town’s founder, Lanny will do anything to be with him forever. But the price she pays is steep—an immortal bond that chains her to a terrible fate for all eternity. And now, two centuries later, the key to her healing and her salvation lies with Dr. Luke Findley.

Part historical novel, part supernatural page-turner, The Taker is an unforgettable tale about the power of unrequited love not only to elevate and sustain, but also to blind and ultimately destroy, and how each of us is responsible for finding our own path to redemption. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1959
• Where—Alaska, USA
• Raised—near Concord, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Brandeis University; M.A, Johns
   Hopkins University
• Awards—American Library Association's Top Ten
   Debut Novel
• Currently—lives in Reston, Virginia

In her words
Many writers have certain genes in their DNA. We're the kids who always have their nose in a book, who live in the library (my first paying job was as a page—yes, a page in the library), are loners, and inordinately fond of fairy tales.

I grew up reading my oldest sister's gigantic Golden Book of Fairy Tales until it fell apart. I loved the book because it had fairy tales that I'd never read before, like "Bright, Deardeer and Kit" and Japanese fairy tales (growing up half-Japanese without seeing any references to Japanese stories, this seemed very enlightened to me). I also loved the slightly horrible things kept in those translations, like how frogs and snakes would fall from a villain's lips whenever she (the main characters were often female, another plus) told a lie. Once we'd all grown up, my oldest sister decided she wanted it back. I pined for it and thought I'd never find it again, but to my delight my husband had a copy from his childhood—in pristine condition! It's one of my prized possessions.

Although I was born in Alaska, I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts very near the famously historic town of Concord. I didn't think I was particularly susceptible to the colonial influence or was a history buff in general, but apparently it seeped into my subconscious. Everywhere you turn in that part of Massachusetts, there are historical landmarks (the Old Manse, the Old North Bridge, battlefields, cemeteries) and just plain old houses that people live in. It was part of our everyday; you couldn't get away from it. It also probably didn't hurt that I'm a fan of Nathaniel Hawthorne, either....

Katsu is Japanese. It's my husband's family name; he's half-Japanese. So am I, but on my mother's side. Because I don't look particularly Asian, I always felt that side of me was hidden, so it's nice to have my husband's name to point to, like having a card that shows I'm part of the club....

As I mentioned, my mother is Japanese and was raised Buddhist. She didn't raise us to be Buddhist, but we absorbed notions about her beliefs; it would've been impossible not to. The thing is, I went to a Catholic school. As a child, I wasn't one to question inconsistencies; I didn't even see the inconsistencies between Catholicism and Buddhism and, to their credit, the priests and nuns never tried to "correct" my thinking about, say, reincarnation (though they were probably mightily confused.)

So, while it might annoy some people that I've conflated alchemy, religion and magic, to me it seems perfectly natural. To draw hard distinctions between notional things is folly, in my mind; well, you can draw distinctions for yourself but it would be futile to try to get everyone else to adhere to your beliefs. One person's religion is another person's magical delusion. One person's science is another person's magic. And, of course, some people treat religion as a science as opposed to philosophy or, say, fiction. While I'm a fan of fantasy, I've never been a believer in delusion. (Which, by the way, is why you won't find specific details of the spells and elixirs in the novel. I don't want anyone ingesting newt's eye or mandrake root on my say so.)  (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Alchemy and love prove a volatile mix in Katsu's vividly imagined first novel, which toggles between the present and the past. While working the graveyard shift at a rural Maine hospital, Dr. Luke Findley discovers that patient Lanny McIlvrae has miraculous self-healing powers. Lanny then relates the incredible tale of her life: sent packing to Boston by her family in 1817 to give birth to her illegitimate child, she fell in with the entourage of Count Adair, a centuries-old alchemist who saved her life with an elixir of immortality. Decadent and domineering, Adair took Lanny as his mistress—a role she accepted until Adair's scheme to use her true love, Jonathan, to perpetuate his unnatural existence forced her to a desperate ruse to thwart his formidable magic powers. Katsu shows considerable skill in rendering a world where Adair's unspeakable evilness and Lanny's wild passion make the supernatural seem possible. The result is a novel full of surprises and a powerful evocation of the dark side of romantic love.
Publishers Weekly


On a cold winter night a young woman is brought into an emergency room in the small Maine town of St Andrew. Lanore McIlvrae is covered in blood and probably injured, but the sheriff also believes she murdered someone. When Lanore is alone with emergency physician Luke Findley, she tries desperately to convince him of her innocence, telling her story in mind-numbing detail. In the late 19th century, she met and fell in love with Jonathan, the man Lanore is now accused of killing. At one point, Lanore's family sent her from the town to avoid a terrible scandal. During this journey, she met the man who made her immortal and brought her back to Jonathan. Finally, the plot begins to move, although at times the pace is still slow. —Patricia Altner, Biblioinfo.com, Columbia, MD
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Readers won’t be able to tear their eyes away from Katsu’s mesmerizing tale.
Booklist


A backwoods Maine doctor falls under the spell of a confessed killer whose loves and sorrows go back two centuries.... Beneath the trappings of undead lore is a love story that's deeply old-fashioned, and not just because the principals were born 200 years ago.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why does Luke leave his home to follow Lanny? Is his willingness to leave his life behind a sign of strength or of weakness? What would you have done if you were in Luke's position?

2. Do you think it was fair of Jonathan to ask Lanore to end his suffering? Did Lanore owe it to him? Do her actions in Maine absolve her of her long life of transgressions?

3. What separated Lanore from the other immortal members of Adair's court? Consider Alejandro, Tilde, Dona, Uzra, and their various stories of origin.

4. Discuss the evolution of Lanny's character, from a coy, young girl from the backwoods of Maine to a world-traveled, immortal hedonist. Is Luke destined to be just another fling, or is there something deeper to their budding love?

5. Do you believe that Lanny ever loved Adair? Why do you think she was so drawn to a scheming madman?

6. How did you react to the violent tendencies of the members of Adair's household? Consider Lanny's first night in the mansion, the abductions of the local Bostonians, and the bizarre sexual proclivities of the immortal house-goers. Do you believe there might have been a secret society of hedonists living in Boston during this period?

7. The traveling priest, later revealed to be a member of Adair's flock, recognizes a spiritual unease and some inherent wildness deep within Lanore's soul. Do you think he was right? Was Lanny, to some extent, wicked? How do you explain her actions in the chambers in Boston, or her initial involvement in Sophia's death? Are her choices that of someone trying to take control of her life or someone losing control of herself?

8. On her return trip to St. Andrew, Lanore encounters Magda, the town whore. Magda warns Lanore, "…don't fall in love with your gentleman. We women make our worst decisions when we are in love." Do you believe this to be true? Could Lanore have been saved from her complicated fate if she wasn't so in love with Jonathan? Why do you think Lanore was drawn to Magda in the first place?

9. Do you think Luke made the right decision in leaving St. Andrew behind for a life with Lanny in Paris? What of his obligations to his family? Do you agree with his decision regarding the fabled vial?

10. Were you surprised by Adair's true identity? Do you believe Lanny's plan to trap the physic worked?

11. After everything Lanny had told Luke about the fantastical and magical, do you think there was some greater significance to the vision of his mother momentarily rising from the dead?

12. The story's narrative unfolds in three different time periods, following three distinct characters. Which of the three was your favorite to read, and why? Who did you feel the most sympathy for?

13. Why do you think the author chose to title this book, The Taker? Are there multiple "takers" in the story? If so, who are they? What does Lanny take from Adair, Jonathan, and Luke? What does she give them?

14. Did Jonathan ever truly love Lanore? Did he have such a capacity? How would you characterize Lanny's feelings for Jonathan? Is it love or obsession?

15. At the heart of The Taker is a fairytale about a woman coming into her own. As Lanny eventually explains, alchemy is an effort to transform the person into something more pure, self-assured, and strong. Compare Lanny's story to other well-known fables, like Pinocchio, Snow White, Cinderella, or any of Aesop's valued lessons. What similarities do you see? What sort of classic temptations are placed before Lanore, and what is it that she ultimately takes away from her endless trial of self?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki, 2013
Viking Adult
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143124870


Summary
Amid the garish neon glare of a district of Tokyo known as Akiba Electric Town, sixteen–year–old Naoko Yasutani pours out her thoughts into a diary.

She is drinking coffee in a cafe where the waitresses dress like French maids and a greasy–looking patron gazes at her with dubious intent. The setting is hardly ordinary, but Nao, as she is called, is not an ordinary girl.

Humbled by poverty since her father lost his high–income tech job in Silicon Valley and had to move the family back to Japan, Nao has been bullied mercilessly in school. Seemingly unmanned by his professional failure, her father, Haruki, has attempted suicide.

Nao herself regards her diary as a protracted suicide note—but one she will not finish until she has committed to its pages the life story of her 104-year-old great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun named Jiko.

Years later on the other side of the Pacific, shielded from damage by a freezer bag and a Hello Kitty lunchbox, Nao’s diary washes up on the shore of British Columbia and falls into the hands of a writer named Ruth, who becomes captivated by Nao’s revelations.

s Ruth’s fascination grows, however, so does her sense of dread: Has Nao followed through on her suicidal pledge? If not, is there still time to save her? Or has Nao survived her bout with adolescent angst, only to be swept away to her death by the cataclysmic tsunami of March 2011?

Moved to compassion by the young girl’s words, Ruth ransacks the Internet for a trace of Naoko Yasutani or her father. She finds almost nothing there, but the mystery deepens when she discovers a second document in the same packet: a collection of letters from Haruki’s uncle, Jiko’s son, who was conscripted against his will in 1943 to serve the Emperor as a kamikaze pilot. Slowly Ruth pulls the pieces of the mystery together, learning about the lives of an extraordinary family whose history is both inspirational and tragic.

Day by day, in her quest to save a girl she has never met, Ruth begins to acquire the wisdom that just might save herself. And above all the mystery and drama stands the presiding spirit of great–grandmother Jiko, an Eastern saint whose prayers and paradoxes point the way to a more settled sense of self.

Unflinching in its portrayal of the deep conflicts in Japanese culture, equally incisive in its assessments of the West, A Tale for the Time Being exposes a world on the edge of catastrophe. Simultaneously, with exquisite delicacy and an intimate sense of human motivation, it reveals its characters as kind, compassionate, and worthy of deliverance from the evils we do to ourselves and to one another.

Ever mindful of the small, A Tale for the Time Being also contemplates the large: quantum mechanics, Zen meditation, computer science, climate change, and the nature of being all pass beneath the author’s thoughtful gaze. A novel about both the near–impossibility and the necessity of communication, A Tale for the Time Being communicates a love of life in all its complex beauty. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 12, 1956
• Where—New Haven, Connecticut, USA
• Education—Smith College; Hara University
• Awards—Kiriyama Prize; American Book Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York, and British Columbia


Ruth Ozeki is a Canadian-American novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She worked in commercial television and media production for over a decade and made several independent films before turning to writing fiction.

She was born in New Haven, Connecticut of American father and a Japanese mother. She studied English and Asian Studies at Smith College and traveled extensively in Asia. She received a Japanese Ministry of Education Fellowship to do graduate work in classical Japanese literature at Nara University. During her years in Japan, she worked in Kyoto’s entertainment or “water” district as a bar hostess, studied flower arrangement as well as Noh drama and mask carving, founded a language school, and taught in the English Department at Kyoto Sangyo University.

Film and novels
Ozeki returned to New York in 1985 and began a film career as an art director, designing sets and props for low budget horror movies. She switched to television production, and after several years directing documentary-style programs for a Japanese company, she started making her own films. Body of Correspondence (1994) won the New Visions Award at the San Francisco Film Festival and was aired on PBS. Halving the Bones (1995), an award-winning autobiographical film, tells the story of Ozeki’s journey as she brings her grandmother’s remains home from Japan. It has been screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal World Film Festival, and the Margaret Mead Film Festival, among others. Ozeki’s films, now in educational distribution, are shown at universities, museums and arts venues around the world.

Ozeki’s two earlier novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), were both recognized as Notable Books by The New York Times.

Ozeki  currently divides her time between New York City and British Columbia, where she writes, knits socks, and raises ducks with her husband, artist Oliver Kellhammer. She practices Zen Buddhism with Zoketsu Norman Fischer, and is the editor of the Everyday Zen website. She was ordained as a priest in June, 2010. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
As contemporary as a Japanese teenager's slang but as ageless as a Zen koan, Ruth Ozeki's new novel combines great storytelling with a probing investigation into the purpose of existence. From the first page of A Tale for the Time Being, Ozeki plunges us into a tantalizing narration that brandishes mysteries to be solved and ideas to be explored…Ozeki's profound affection for her characters, which warmed her earlier novels…makes A Tale for the Time Being as emotionally engaging as it is intellectually provocative.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post


Masterfully woven.... Entwining Japanese language with WWII history, pop culture with Proust, Zen with quantum mechanics, Ozeki alternates between the voices of two women to produce a spellbinding tale.
O Magazine


Forget the proverbial message in a bottle: This Tale fractures clichés as it affirms the lifesaving power of words.... As Ozeki explores the ties between reader and writer, she offers a lesson in redemption that reinforces the pricelessness of the here and now.
Elle


A powerful yarn of fate and parallel lives.
Good Housekeeping


Ozeki weaves together Nao’s adolescent yearnings with Ruth’s contemplative digressions, adding bits of Zen wisdom, as well as questions about agency, creativity, life, death, and human connections along the way. A Tale for the Time Being is a dreamy, spiritual investigation of how to gracefully meet the waves of time, which, in the end, come for us all.”
Daily Beast


As we read Nao’s story and the story of Ozeki’s reading of it, as we go back and forth between the text and the notes, time expands for us. It opens up onto something resembling narrative eternity...page after page, slowly unfolding. And what a beautiful effect that is for a novel to create.”
Alan Cheuse - NPR


Ozeki’s absorbing third novel (after All Over Creation) is an extended meditation on writing, time, and people in time: “time beings.” Nao Yasutani is a Japanese schoolgirl who plans to “drop out of time”—to kill herself as a way of escaping her dreary life. First, though, she intends to write in her diary the life story of her great-grandmother Jiko, a Zen Buddhist nun.... [T]he diary eventually washes up on the shore of Canada’s Vancouver Island, where a novelist called Ruth lives.... Nao’s winsome voice contrasts with Ruth’s intellectual ponderings to make up a lyrical disquisition on writing’s power to transcend time and place. This tale from Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest, is sure to please anyone who values a good story broadened with intellectual vigor.
Publishers Weekly


In Tokyo, shy, bullied 16-year-old Nao determines to end it all—but not before chronicling the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun. After the 2011 tsunami, a novelist named Ruth opens a Hello Kitty lunchbox that's fetched up on a remote island off North America's coast and is immediately drawn into the story of Nao and her ancestor. Ozeki lives part-time in British Columbia and was recently ordained a Buddhist nun, so in some ways she's writing close to home. But here's betting that this award-winning novelist (My Year of Meats), also honored for her work in film, will take her narrative to the next level while remaining engagingly accessible; the best-selling Meats was translated into 11 languages and sold in 14 countries. Sales rep enthusiasm, too.
Library Journal


(Starred reviw.) An intriguing, even beautiful narrative remarkable for its unusual but attentively structured plot.... We go from one story line to the other, back and forth across the Pacific, but the reader never loses place or interest.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Ozeki's magnificent third novel (All Over Creation, 2003, etc.) brings together a Japanese girl's diary and a transplanted American novelist to meditate on everything from bullying to the nature of conscience and the meaning of life. On the beach of an island off British Columbia's coast, Ruth finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox containing a stack of letters and a red book. The book contains 16-year-old Nao's diary.... [Ruth] plunges into Nao's diary... [and] the book's extended climax...transcends bitter anguish to achieve heartbreaking poignancy as both Nao and Ruth discover what it truly means to be "a time being." ... The novel's seamless web of language, metaphor and meaning can't be disentangled from its powerful emotional impact: These are characters we care for deeply, imparting vital life lessons through the magic of storytelling. A masterpiece, pure and simple.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. A Tale for the Time Being begins with Ozeki’s first–person narrator expressing deep curiosity about the unknown person who might be reading her narrative. How did you respond to this opening and its unusual focus on the circumstances of the reader?

2. How does Ozeki seem to view the relationship between a writer and her reader? What do they owe each other? How must they combine in order to, in Nao’s phrase, “make magic”?

3. Though we may feel for her in her struggles and suffering, Nao is no angel. She is extremely harsh toward her father, and, given the opportunity, she tyrannizes over her hapless schoolmate Daisuke. Does Ozeki sacrifice some of the sympathy that we might otherwise feel for Nao? What does Ozeki’s novel gain by making Nao less appealing than she might be?

4. More than once in A Tale for the Time Being, a character’s dream appears to exert physical influence on actual life. Does this phenomenon weaken the novel by detracting from its realism, or does it strengthen the book by adding force to its spiritual or metaphysical dimension?

5. Is there a way in which Nao and Ruth form two halves of the same character?

6. A Tale for the Time Being expresses deep concern about the environment, whether the issue is global warming, nuclear power, or the massive accretions of garbage in the Pacific Ocean. How do Ozeki’s observations about the environment affect the mood of her novel, and how do her characters respond to life on a contaminated planet?

7. Suicide, whether in the form of Haruki #1’s kamikaze mission or the contemplated suicides of Haruki #2 and Nao, hangs heavily over A Tale for the Time Being. Nevertheless, Ozeki’s story manages to affirm life. How does Ozeki use suicide as a means to illustrate the value of life?

8. Jiko’s daily religious observances include prayers for even the most mundane activities, from washing one’s feet to visiting the toilet. How did you respond to all of these spiritual gestures? Do they seem merely absurd, or do they foster a deeper appreciation of the world? Have your own religious ideas or spiritual practices been influenced by readingA Tale for the Time Being?

9. Responding to the ill treatment that Nao reports in her diary, Ruth’s husband Oliver observes, “We live in a bully culture” (121). Is he right? What responses to society’s bullying does A Tale for the Time Being suggest? Are they likely to be effective?

10. Haruki #1 cites a Zen master for the idea that “a single moment is all we need to establish our human will and attain truth” (324). What kind of enlightenment is Ozeki calling for in A Tale for the Time Being? Is it really available to everyone? Would you try to achieve it if you could? Why or why not?

11. Imagine that you had a notebook like Nao’s diary and you wanted to communicate with an unknown reader as she does. What would you write about? Would you be as honest as Nao is with us? What are the benefits and risks of writing such a document?

12. Ozeki makes many references to scientific concepts like quantum mechanics and the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat. What role do these musings play in the novel? Do they add an important dimension, or are they mostly confusing?

13. What lessons does Jiko try to teach Nao to develop her “supapawa”? Are they the same that you would try to impart to a troubled teenaged girl? How else might you approach Nao’s depression and other problems?

14. Even after receiving these lessons, Nao does not change completely. Indeed, she gets in even worse trouble after the summer at her great–grandmother’s temple. What more does she need to learn before she can do something positive with her life?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens, 1859
400-500 pp. (varies by publisher)


Summary

A Tale of Two Cities begins on a muddy English road in an atmosphere charged with mystery and drama, and it ends in the Paris of the French Revolution with one of the most famous acts of self-sacrifice in literature. In between lies one of Charles Dickens’s most exciting books—a historical novel that, generation after generation, has given readers access to the profound human dramas that lie behind cataclysmic social and political events.

Famous for the character of Sydney Carton, who sacrifices himself upon the guillotine—“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done”—the novel is also a powerful study of crowd psychology and the dark emotions aroused by the Revolution, and is illuminated by Dickens’s lively comedy. (From Doubleday Knopf.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 7, 1812
• Where—Portsmouth, England, UK
• Education—Home and private schooling
• Died—June 9, 1870
• Where—Kent, England

Born on February 7, 1812, Charles Dickens was the second of eight children in a family burdened with financial troubles. Despite difficult early years, he became the most successful British writer of the Victorian age.

In 1824, young Charles was withdrawn from school and forced to work at a boot-blacking factory when his improvident father, accompanied by his mother and siblings, was sentenced to three months in a debtor's prison. Once they were released, Charles attended a private school for three years. The young man then became a solicitor's clerk, mastered shorthand, and before long was employed as a Parliamentary reporter. When he was in his early twenties, Dickens began to publish stories and sketches of London life in a variety of periodicals.

It was the publication of Pickwick Papers (1836-1837) that catapulted the twenty-five-year-old author to national renown. Dickens wrote with unequaled speed and often worked on several novels at a time, publishing them first in monthly installments and then as books. His early novels Oliver Twist (1837-1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), and A Christmas Carol (1843) solidified his enormous, ongoing popularity. As Dickens matured, his social criticism became increasingly biting, his humor dark, and his view of poverty darker still. David Copperfield (1849-1850), Bleak House (1852-1853), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) are the great works of his masterful and prolific period.

In 1858 Dickens's twenty-three-year marriage to Catherine Hogarth dissolved when he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, a young actress. The last years of his life were filled with intense activity: writing, managing amateur theatricals, and undertaking several reading tours that reinforced the public's favorable view of his work but took an enormous toll on his health. Working feverishly to the last, Dickens collapsed and died on June 8, 1870, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood uncompleted. (From Barnes & Noble Classics.)

Book Reviews
Classic works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews. 

Discussion Questions

1. A Tale of Two Cities opens with a passage that has become one of English literature's best known: "It was the best of times…" It is a passage well worth parsing. What does Dickens mean by setting the stage with such polarities? For whom was it the best and the worst of times? Dickens also mentions that the era about which he writes was very much "like the present period," which when he was writing meant the late 1850s. Why does this passage continue to be quoted today? In what ways does our own present period merit such an assessment?

2. The novel takes place, per its title, in two cities: London and Paris. What are some of the differences between these two cities? Between their denizens? What about characters who travel—or move residence—from one to another? What about each of the cities themselves: how are they divided in two?

3. Why does Dickens describe Madame Defarge, several times in her early scenes, as seeing nothing? Why does this depiction of her change?

4. Why was Charles Darnay able to see the unfairness of the class structure that privileged him and to extricate himself from it? Are there other characters as capable of seeing beyond their own circumstances?

5. Dickens seems to have great sympathy for the poor, the sick, the powerless, but not all such characters are portrayed sympathetically. What does that say about his sympathies? Where does he intend our—the readers'—sympathies to lie?

6. The news that Doctor Manette, while imprisoned, denounced all the descendents of the Evrémondes comes as a shock. Given that he saw young Charles and spoke with his beleaguered, compassionate mother—that he, in effect, had reason to have compassion toward them despite the evils of the family—why would he have made such a declaration? What can we make of his repeated claim in the letter read aloud during Darnay's retrial that he was in his right mind? How does he really feel about Darnay and his marriage to Lucie?

7. What is Defarge's motive in betraying Doctor Manette, endangering his daughter and grandchild, and framing Darnay? How might the relationship between Madame and Monsieur be described?

8. Carton's background is alluded to, though we never quite learn the source(s) of his disappointment and degeneracy. What might have happened in his past?

9. Late in the novel, Carton is described as showing both pity and pride. "Pride" is a word we have not heretofore seen associated with Carton, who is full of mostly suppressed regret and anguish over his wasted life. What is Carton proud of, and do others see it? Does Dickens intend to convey that others see his pride?

10. Carton has clearly misused his youthful promise and believes himself to be unredeemable. Does this view of himself actually change, and if so, how? Is Carton a man of faith? Does he become one?

11. Lucie finds "faith" in Carton, described as a "lost man," after he confides in her. Does Lucie come to understand Carton? How? Does she believe that he can be saved from himself?

12. Dickens prefaces the final paragraphs of the novel, which are in Carton's voice, by noting that "if he had given any utterance to his athoughts], and they were prophetic, they would have been these." How might we read the vision expressed in these words? Are we meant to take these thoughts as prophetic—that is, as a portrayal of what actually came after the end of the novel, in both France and in England? Among the beloved friends he has left behind?

13. The vision expressed in Carton's supposed final words includes one for the country and its people after the newest "oppressors" are themselves put to death. What would such a post-Revolution world be like, and how could it be achieved?

14. The French Revolution was of great interest to Americans in the early days of their own republic. Given today's polarities of extreme wealth and poverty and strongly expressed patriotism, as well as the interest in early America, what parallels might we draw between our own time in early twenty-first-century America and what happens in A Tale of Two Cities? What lessons?
(Questions issued by Penguin Group USA-Oprah's Book Club edition.)

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Talk Talk
T.C. Boyle, 2006
Penguin Group USA
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143112150

Summary
Over the past twenty-five years, T.C. Boyle has earned wide acclaim and an enthusiastic following with such adventurous, inimitable novels as The Tortilla Curtain, Drop City, and The Road to Wellville.

For his riveting eleventh novel, Boyle offers readers the closest thing to a thriller he has ever written, a tightly scripted page turner about the trials of Dana Halter, a thirty-three-year-old deaf woman whose identity has been stolen. Featuring a woman in the lead role (a Boyle first), Talk Talk is both a suspenseful chase across America and a moving story about language, love, and identity from one of America's most versatile and entertaining novelists. (From the publishers .)

More
Readers of T. C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain will recognize a familiar satiric target in his latest novel Talk Talk—the American dream. What better way to parody America’s ideology of self-reinvention, a vital component to the American dream, than with a story about identity theft? The subject also allows for Boyle to reexamine another bete noire, our culture’s crass consumerism, as well as address the anxieties of living in the information age, where one’s legal and financial identity is more vulnerable than ever before. But Talk Talk, while full of Boylesque humor, is not a satire at all. It is instead a book that reads with all the breathless, headlong pace of a thriller, while at the same time examining deeper questions of language and identity.

Talk Talk is centered on three main characters: Dana Halter, a deaf teacher of English literature; Bridger Martin, her boyfriend; and Peck Wilson, the career thief who steals Dana’s identity. The novel opens with Dana being pulled over for a routine traffic violation. A check on her driver’s license reveals Dana Halter to be a dangerous fugitive with a long rap sheet that includes auto theft and assault with a deadly weapon. Her identity has been stolen and, for the time being, she is powerless to prove it. After a weekend of incarceration, stripped of her rights, her clothes, and her dignity, Dana sees not only the idiocy of the justice system but also the fluid and fragile nature of identity. Prior to this episode her issues of selfhood dealt mainly with trying to pass for “normal” in a world of hearing. Now, viewed as “just another perp” by her jailors and cellmates, she is forced to restore her legal and financial identity, a process that will entail an intimate self-examination. Since the law enforcement agencies prove incapable or unwilling to apprehend the identity thief she decides to track him down herself.

Although aurally challenged, Dana has a mind for detective work. Her interest in the etymological roots of words (e.g. “disrespect” in the slang word “dis”) mirrors her search for the base identifier (in this case, the true name) of her assailant. Yet, at her journey’s end she discovers much more than the thief’s identity.

Bridger Martin, Dana’s boyfriend, joins her on this cross-country search for her criminal double. Issues of self-identity also plague Bridger. He spends most of his time working at a special-effects company under the alias of “Sharper.” His imagination and sense of reality is informed with the products of popular visual culture—film, TV, video games. When he learns of Dana’s incarceration he immediately conjures up stock scenes of prison films, such as slop being fed to prisoners out of a bucket. (Dana is actually fed bologna sandwiches.) Reality eventually confronts Bridger in the form of a real emotion—hate—upon seeing the face of Dana’s assailant for the first time. Suddenly, as Boyle suggestively phrases it, “the film has slipped off the reel.” The dangerous journey he takes also forces Bridger to confront real violence, not the celluloid kind to which he is accustomed. It is an experience that leaves him quite literally speechless.

Finally, there is William Peck Wilson, Dana’s assailant. Ever since he served a prison sentence for assaulting his ex-wife’s boyfriend, Peck has been a criminal, assuming so many identities it is hard for him to keep track of who he is at a given moment—Peck Wilson, Frank Calabrese, Dana Halter, Bridger Martin. His motto, taken from his prison mentor Sandman, is a corruption of the Army recruiting slogan (“Be anybody you can be”). As “Dana,” he resides in a lavish condo in Marin County with his sexy, if naïve, Russian girlfriend, Natalia, and her daughter, Madison. When he’s not devising new ways to pay for this lifestyle, he spends his time cultivating the refined tastes and sensibilities of the upper class. However, his California dream comes to an abrupt end when Dana and Bridger arrive at his home, forcing Peck to flee back east, where Sandman has secured him a stately house on the Hudson River, not far from the town he grew up in. His journey east mimics Dana’s as they both prepare to confront their mothers (Dana’s mother also lives in New York) and their past lives, with startlingly different results. For Dana, she learns to accept her deafness as her base identifier. For Peck, while recalling the life he had as a restaurant owner, husband, and father to his only daughter, Sukie, he painfully realizes the only identity he longs to (re)possess is that of fatherhood. Sadly, this identity has been irrevocably lost to him. ("More" from the publisher's Introduction.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1948
• Where—Peekskill, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York at Potsdam; Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—PEN/Faulkner Award, 1998
• Currently—lives near Santa Barbara, California


T. Coraghessan Boyle (kuh-RAGG-issun) received his doctorate in nineteenth-century English literature from the University of Iowa in 1977. Since 1977, Boyle has taught creative writing at the University of Southern California. While in college, Boyle exchanged his middle name, John, for the unusual Coraghessan (kuh-RAGG-issun), the name of one of his Irish ancestors.

Boyle is the author of Descent of Man (1979), Water Music (1982), Budding Prospects (1984), Greasy Lake (1985), World's End (1987, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction), If the River Was Whiskey (1989), East Is East (1990), The Road to Wellville (1993), which was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins, and Without a Hero (1994). His work has appeared in major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Paris Review, and Atlantic Monthly. Boyle lives with his wife, Karen, and their three children near Santa Barbara, California, in a house designed in 1909 by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

More
In the interest of time and space, it might be easier to note the writers that T. C. Boyle isn't compared to. But let's give the reverse a try: Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Evelyn Waugh, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis, Thomas Berger, Robert Coover, Lorrie Moore, Stanley Elkin, Tom Robbins, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Don DeLillo, Flannery O'Connor. Oh, let's not forget F. Lee Bailey. And Dr. Seuss.

Boyle, widely admired for his acrobatic verbal skill, wild narratives and quirky characters (in one short story, he imagines a love affair between Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev's wife), has dazzled critics since his first novel in 1981.

Consider this example, from Larry McCaffery in a 1985 article for the New York Times:

Beneath its surface play, erudition and sheer storytelling power, his fiction also presents a disturbing and convincing critique of an American society so jaded with sensationalized images and plasticized excess that nothing stirs its spirit anymore.... It is into this world that Mr. Boyle projects his heroes, who are typically lusty, exuberant dreamers whose wildly inflated ambitions lead them into a series of hilarious, often disastrous adventures.

But as much as critics will bow at his linguistic gifts, some also knock him for resting on them a bit too heavily, hinting that the impressive showmanship attempts to hide a shortage of depth and substance. Craig Seligman, writing in the New Republic in 1993, pointed out that...

Boyle loves a mess. He loves chaos. He loves marshes and jungles, and he loves the jungle of language: luxuriant sentences overgrown with lianas of lists, sesquipedalian words hanging down like rare fruits. For all its exoticism, though, his prose is lucid to the point of transparency. It doesn't require much deeper concentration than a good newspaper (though it does require a dictionary).

Reviewing The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, New York Times critic Scott Spencer scratched his head over why Boyle had invited readers along for this particular ride:

Mr. Boyle's fictional strategy is puzzling. Why are we being asked to follow the fates of characters for whom he clearly feels such contempt? Not surprisingly, this is ultimately off-putting. Perhaps Mr. Boyle has received too much praise for his zany sense of humor; in this book, that wit often seems merely a maddening volley of cheap shots. It's like living next door to a gun nut who spends all day and half the night shooting at beer bottles.

Growing up, Boyle had no aspirations to be a writer. It wasn't until his studies at State University of New York, where he as a music student, that he bumped into his muse. "I went there to be a music major but found I really couldn't hack that at the age of 17," he told The Writer in 1999. "I just started to read outside my classes—literature and history. I wound up being a history and English major; when I wandered into a creative writing class as a junior, I realized that writing was what I could do."

He then started teaching, in part to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam War, and later applied to the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.

After a collection of short stories in 1979, he released his first novel, Water Music, called "pitiless and brilliant" by the New Republic, and has shuttled back and forth between novels and short stories, all known for their explosions of character imagination. Mr. Boyle's literary sensibility...thrives on excess, profusion, pushing past the limits of good taste to comic extremes," McCaffery wrote in his 1985 New York Times piece. "He is a master of rendering the grotesque details of the rot, decay and sleaze of a society up to its ears in K Mart oil cans, Kitty Litter and the rusted skeletons of abandoned cars and refrigerators."

In his review of Drop City, the 2003 novel set in California commune that won Boyle a National Book Award nomination, Dwight Garner joins the chorus of critical acclaim over the years—"Boyle has always been a fiendishly talented writer"—but he also acknowledges some of the criticism that Boyle has faced in these same years:

The rap against Boyle's work has long been that he's a sort of madcap predator drone, raining down hard nuggets of contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor on the poor men and women in his books while rarely giving us characters we're actually persuaded to feel anything about. This is partly a bum rap—and I'd hate to knock contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor—but there's enough truth in it that it's a joy to find, in Drop City that Boyle gives us a lot more than simply a line of bong-addled innocents led to slaughter.

But perhaps the neatest summary of Boyle's work would be from Lorrie Moore, one of the novelists to which he has been compared. In a 1994 New York Times review of Boyle's short story collection Without a Hero, she praised Boyle's "astonishing and characteristic verve, his unaverted gaze, his fascination with everything lunatic and queasy."  She continues...

God knows, Mr. Boyle can write like an angel, if at times a caustic, gum-chewing one. And in this strong, varied collection maybe we have what we'd hope to find in heaven itself (by the time we begged our way there): no lessening of brilliance, plus a couple of laughs to mitigate all that high and distant sighing over what goes on below."

Extras
• Boyle changed his middle name from John to Coraghessan ( "kuh-RAGG-issun") when he was 17.

• He is known almost as much for his ego as his writing. "Each book I put out, I think, 'Goodbye, Updike and Mailer, forget it," the New Republic quoted him as saying. "I joke at Viking that I'm going to make them forget the name of Stephen King forever, I'm going to sell so many copies.

• Boyle's philosophy on reading and writing, as told to The Writer: "Good literature is a living, brilliant, great thing that speaks to you on an individual and personal level. You're the reader. I think the essence of it is telling a story. It's entertainment. It's not something to be taught in a classroom, necessarily. To be alive and be good, it has to be a good story that grabs you by the nose and doesn't let you go till The End." (From Barnes and Noble)

Book Reviews
Using his gift for manic invention and freewheeling, hyperventilated prose, Mr. Boyle does an antic job of recounting the cat-and-mouse-and-cat game played by Dana and Peck, wittily dancing around his theme of identity and identity theft, even as he orchestrates a sense of foreboding and suspense.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Considering Boyle's recent subjects—sex research (The Inner Circle), hippies (Drop City), environmental apocalypse (A Friend of the Earth)—it's remarkable that his most exciting novel yet should focus on the tedium of ruined credit scores and fraudulent drivers' licenses. But Talk Talk benefits from Boyle's highbrow/lowbrow style: He knows how to drill down through the surface of everyday life into our core anxieties, and he knows how to write constantly charging, heart-thumping chase scenes.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

Bestseller and PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Boyle recasts the battle of good and evil as an identity theft suspense story in his 11th novel (following The Inner Circle). Dana Halter, a "slim, graceful, dark-eyed deaf woman of thirty-three," runs a stop sign and is hauled off to jail when a routine police check turns up multiple pending felony charges. As Dana disappears into the criminal justice system, her earnest and willing boyfriend, Bridger (on deadline doing a sci-fi film's special effects), isn't much help. Meanwhile, William "Peck" Wilson-a social parasite whose lifestyle includes Armani, a house in Marin County and a shopaholic bombshell girlfriend imported from a former Soviet republic—is actually the man behind the charges against Dana. Finally out on bail and reunited with Bridger, Dana lacks the resources to clear her name, but in the best tradition of the good guy willing to sacrifice everything for justice, Bridger chucks his job, and the two set off on Peck's trail. Boyle, always a risk taker, neatly manages the challenge of a deaf protagonist and a bad guy who is a gourmet cook, genuinely loves his bombshell and has a soft spot for children. As Dana and Bridger hurtle across the country and the tension mounts, Boyle drops crumbs of wisdom in signature style, and readers will be hot on the trail.
Publishers Weekly

In his latest work, Boyle (of Drop City) explores the nightmare of identity theft as deaf teacher Dana Halter is pulled over for running a four-way stop sign and suddenly finds her life turned upside down. After days in a California jail, Dana is released when it is discovered that the "Dana Halter" who committed various crimes in various jurisdictions is a man. Dana and her digital filmmaker boyfriend, Bridger Martin, piece together information on the other Dana (n William "Peck" Wilson) and follow him across the country in order to exact retribution for what the justice system deems a "victimless crime." Dana's childhood insecurities resurface as others react to her as a deaf person in a hearing world, and she questions her ability to communicate who she really is. Even her relationship with Bridger, who learned to sign after they met, begins to fray as their odyssey turns into a vendetta and listening to each other takes a backseat to rage. Alternating chapters offer Peck's take on how easy it is (is this fact or fiction?) to reinvent oneself from a local outcast into a successful (fill in the blank) via the Internet and a bit of time on a library computer. The continuity errors distracted this reviewer, and missing details make the novel more frustrating than riveting. Still, Boyle's many fans will probably want to go along for the ride. —Bette-Lee Fox.
Library Journal

On the surface, this novel of identity theft delivers page-turning suspense, but it also delves deeper into the essence of identity. Having explored the past for perspective on the present in recent novels (the Kinsey sex report in The Inner Circle, 2004; the hippie commune of Drop City, 2003), the prolific Boyle addresses the contemporary concern of identity theft, showing how easy it is for a cyber-criminal to appropriate someone else's identity and how difficult it can be for the victim to untangle the credit and criminal implications. Stopped for a traffic violation, deaf schoolteacher Dana finds herself jailed on charges she can't understand, for crimes committed in states she has never visited. Her only ally in clearing herself is Bridger, the boyfriend she recently met at a dance club. From her Kafkaesque predicament, Dana develops a Moby-Dick-sized obsession (both literary references are evoked within the novel) to find the criminal and regain her identity. When she and Bridger stumble upon some contact information on the perpetrator, they make a big mistake that threatens the novel's plausibility: They call the crook, letting him know they're onto him, rather than passing the information along for police to investigate. What results is a cross-country chase, as Dana and Bridger pursue a quarry who has serial identities, is totally self-centered (whatever self he has assumed) and is convinced that he is society's victim. He's a younger, psychopathic Gatsby, using his purloined wealth to forge an identity that attracts beautiful women whom he treats as identity accessories. The quest costs Dana her job and threatens Bridger's, as he discovers how little he really knows Dana, while she realizes how much she has defined her own identity as a deaf woman, as a daughter (her mother knows her in a way that Bridger never will) and as a victim. By the riveting climax, characters and readers alike recognize that the very concept of a fixed, static identity is a delusion.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. There is a great deal of brand-name dropping in this novel (e.g. Mercedes, Jetta), especially in scenes involving Peck and Natalia. Discuss Boyle’s satiric portrait of our culture’s conspicuous consumption. What is the relationship of designer brands and personal identity established in the novel?

2. “Base identifier” is a wonderfully suggestive phrase that is repeated throughout the novel. What are the base identifiers, in all senses of this phrase, of the main characters? How do the characters understand selfhood? How does the novel dramatize the fragile nature of personal identity?

3. Dana is post-lingually deaf (i.e. she was not born deaf), who refused surgical attempts to restore her hearing. Discuss her condition and her reasons for maintaining it. How does she understand her condition? How does Bridger; her mother? How does it contribute thematically to the novel?

4. Often in literature, film, or television, a character who doesn’t necessarily have many redeeming qualities will evoke pathos nonetheless. Although Peck Wilson is a man capable of brutal, calculated violence, he certainly arouses our interest, and at points, our sympathy. What was your opinion of Peck?

5. At four different points in the novel, Dana recites favorite poems to herself: Wallace Stevens’s “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” What is the significance of each of these poems to the narrative?

6. While ostensibly a road novel, Talk Talk is really a bicoastal novel. Discuss Boyle’s juxtaposition of East Coast and West Coast culture. What are Peck’s attitudes toward each? Do they resonate with you?

7. Sandman’s corruption of an Army recruiting slogan into a motto for identity thieves (“Be anyone you can be”) is one example of how America’s obsession with self- reinvention is parodied. What other examples come to mind? What do you think the novel says about our capacity, or lack thereof, to reinvent ourselves?

8. The scene at Peck’s mother’s house is both humorous and deeply disturbing. The naïve Natalia, full of the expectations and anxieties of a future daughter-in-law, is finally going to meet the mother of the man she hopes to marry, the man whose name she doesn’t even know. Did Boyle intend for this to be a comic scene? Why do you think he chose to omit Peck’s mother entirely from the scene?

9. Discuss the confrontation at the end of the novel. Why did Peck suddenly lose his nerve, the only instance in the entire novel? How do you interpret Peck’s answer to Dana’s seemingly simple question: “What do you want?” What is it about the ending that surprised you the most?

10. Dana and Bridger’s relationship is unusual, but like most couples their problems are generally problems of communication. What makes them unique and typical as a couple? Why does Bridger decide to join Dana on this perilous journey to find her identity thief? What happens to their relationship along the way and why does it ultimately fail?

11. In some respects Talk Talk is a variant of the doppelganger novel, a long-established literary convention in which the protagonist is haunted by the apparition of his or her double. Compare Talk Talk with other classic examples of the genre, such as Dostoyevsky’s The Double, Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson.” Do you think Boyle has successfully updated this literary form for the twenty-first century?

12. Dana and Peck share a fascination with language, which isn’t matched by their respective partners. See for instance Peck’s recollection of the word “plebeian” and Dana’s interest in the etymology of “dis.” Besides this, do they have any other traits in common? At the end of the novel when they confront one another they are said to be “united, wedded.” What is it that unites them?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Tallgrass

This is Tallgrass as Rennie Stroud has never seen it before. She has just turned thirteen and, until this time, life has pretty much been what her father told her it should be: predictable and fair. But now the winds of change are coming and, with them, a shift in her perspective. And Rennie will discover secrets that can destroy even the most sacred things.

Part thriller, part historical novel, Tallgrass is a riveting exploration of the darkest—and best—parts of the human heart. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 11, 1939
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., University of Denver
• Awards—numerous, see below
• Currently—lives in Denver, Colorado, USA

Award-winning author Sandra Dallas was dubbed “a quintessential American voice” by Jane Smiley, in Vogue magazine.  Sandra’s novels with their themes of loyalty, friendship, and human dignity have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and have been optioned for films.

A journalism graduate of the University of Denver, Sandra began her writing career as a reporter with Business Week. A staff member for twenty-five years (and the magazine’s first female bureau chief,) she covered the Rocky Mountain region, writing about everything from penny-stock scandals to hard-rock mining, western energy development to contemporary polygamy. Many of her experiences have been incorporated into her novels.

While a reporter, she began writing the first of ten nonfiction books. They include Sacred Paint, which won the National Cowboy Hall of Fame Western Heritage Wrangler Award, and The Quilt That Walked to Golden, recipient of the Independent Publishers Assn. Benjamin Franklin Award.

Turning to fiction in 1990, Sandra has published eight novels. She is the recipient of the Women Writing the West Willa Award for New Mercies, and two-time winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award, for The Chili Queen and Tallgrass. In addition, she was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, the Mountain and Plains Booksellers Assn. Award, and a four-time finalist for the Women Writing the West Willa Award.

The mother of two daughters—Dana is an attorney in New Orleans and Povy is a photographer in Golden, Colorado— Sandra lives in Denver with her husband, Bob.

Her Own Words: 
• Because of my interest in the West—I wrote nine nonfiction books about the West before I turned to fiction—I’m a sucker for women’s journals of the westward movement. I wanted The Diary of Mattie Spenser to have the elements of a novel but to read as much like a 19th century journal as possible. Mattie is a woman of her time, not a current-day heroine dressed in a long skirt, and the language is faithful to the Civil War era.

• I added dialogue to keep the diary entries from being too stilted for contemporary readers. Making the diary believable has had an unforeseen consequence: Many readers believe it is an actual journal. They’ve asked where the diary is kept and what happened to the characters after the journal ended. One reader accused me of rewriting some of Mattie’s entries because she recognized my style. Another sent me a copy of an early Denver photograph, asking if the man in the picture was one of the characters in the book. (Author bio from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
An ugly murder is central to this compelling historical, but the focus is on one appealing family, the Strouds, in the backwater town of Ellis, Colo. Soon after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government rounded up all the Japanese residents of the West Coast and shipped them off to "internment camps" for the duration of the war. One of the camps is Tallgrass, based on an actual Colorado camp, as Dallas (The Chili Queen) explains in her acknowledgments. The major discomforts and petty indignities these (mostly) American citizens had to endure are viewed through the clear eyes of a young girl who lives on a nearby farm, Rennie Stroud. Rennie's obvious love of family slowly extends itself to the Japanese house and field helpers the Strouds receive permission to hire. The final surprise is the who and why of the murder itself. Dallas's terrific characters, unerring ear for regional dialects and ability to evoke the sights and sounds of the 1940s make this a special treat.
Publishers Weekly

Rennie Stroud looks back to 1942, when she was 13, to tell a powerful coming-of-age story. That year, the U.S. government opened a Japanese internment camp outside Ellis, CO, less than a mile from where Rennie and her family farmed sugar beets. Rennie observes the prejudice of some of the townspeople as well as her parents' strong moral code and their entanglement in the emotions of the time. Her father, Loyal, not only shows open support for the Japanese, whom he views as Americans, but offers to hire them to work on the farm. When a young girl is murdered, suspicion naturally turns to the camp, and the town is divided by fear. Dallas's strong, provocative novel is a moving examination of prejudice and fear that addresses issues of community discord, abuse, and rape. Her phrasing and language bring the 1940s to life, and she has created characters that will linger with the reader. As in her previous work, The Persian Pickle Club, Dallas emphasizes the need for women to form strong networks in order to survive emotionally. Highly recommended for book clubs and public libraries.
Lesa M. Holstine - Library Journal

(Adult/High School) Dallas has made a major contribution to a growing body of literature about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Based on the one camp in Colorado (named Amache, and renamed Tallgrass by the author), the story focuses on the impact it had on the local farmers and townspeople. It is told from the viewpoint of Rennie Stroud, 13, and poignantly portrays the emotional turmoil of both the internees and local residents. Suspicion, fear, anger, hatred, love, tenderness, pride, regret: Rennie adapts and readapts to all of these as her predictable life vanishes behind the reality of war, murder, and injustice. After a young local girl is killed, most of the town looks in one direction for the murderer. Rennie, blessed with wise and just parents, manages to rise above the prevailing rush to judgment. Part mystery, part historical fiction, part coming-of-age story, Tallgrass has all the elements of a tale well told: complex characters, intriguing plot, atmospheric detail, pathos, humor, and memorable turns of phrase. But most of all, the book offers a fresh look at a theme that can never be ignored: the interplay of good and evil within society and within people. —Robert Saunderson, Berkeley Public Library, CA
School Library Journal

(Starred review.) Dallas (New Mercies, 2005) based Tallgrass on Amache, a real-life World War II internment camp near Granada, Colorado. Here she renders a dramatic (and surprisingly droll) coming-of-age tale in which ignorance breeds malice, with brutal results. —Allison Block
Booklist

A Colorado beet farmer and his family are sorely tried by events of WWII. When the U.S. government establishes a Japanese-American relocation camp in Ellis, Colo., in 1942, Loyal Stroud takes a view apart from most other townsfolk. Having "the enemy in their midst" riles the locals, but Loyal believes the whole thing is plain wrong. Why not round up all the German-Americans, too, while they're at it? Aside from civic issues, Loyal has to figure out how to harvest his beets, what with Buddy, his son, enlisted, along with his farm hands. Against prevailing sentiment, Loyal hires three young men from the camp. And although Rennie, 14, the last child home, worries about her father's decision, she and her mother, Mary, come to love the boys, who are from California farm country. And when Mary's heart ailment finally gets bad enough for her to take the rest cure the doctor advised, the Strouds hire Daisy, the sister of one of the boys. Daisy works hard and speaks in a Hollywood tabloid lingo that charms the whole family. Their domestic harmony is rocked by news that Buddy is missing in action and-shockingly-that Rennie's school friend Sally is found raped and murdered. Everyone except the Strouds and the sheriff believes "the Japs" did it, and the tension in town builds to the point of near-anarchy, when the local bigots get liquored up and try to take the law into their own hands. Throughout all this drama, as in most of Dallas's work (Alice's Tulips, 2000, etc.), a community of quilters, known here as the Jolly Stitchers, come and go, bringing cakes, covered casseroles and gossip to the sick and grieving. The parallels of a country at war then and now give this story a layer of poignancy, but otherwise, as is obvious from the start, the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and Buddy comes marching home. A well-spun but familiar tale.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. Rennie’s parents caution her frequently not to lie. How well do they succeed in following their own advice? How akin is the way they keep large secrets (that Marthalice was pregnant, that Mary is very sick) to lying to their friends and daughter? Why do they draw the line against pretending Daisy was married before she got pregnant, but conspire with the sheriff to dupe the town later?

2. Tallgrass shows Rennie dealing with tough issues: rape, murder, prejudice, and danger to her family. How much of her opinions seem to come from her parents, and how much from her own observations? What did you think of her still being afraid of “the Japs,” even after she got to know and respect the Japanese her family had hired?

3. What is the importance of community to men and women in this book? Mary has the courage of her convictions and the love of her family, so why does she still care what other people think? Do you think she’s right to care?

4. Mary Stroud didn’t want the inmates of Tallgrass working on her farm. Why did she change her mind?

5. There are two funerals in Tallgrass: Susan Reddick’s and Harry Hirano. How are they similar? How are they different? How does each change Rennie’s view of the Japanese and her town?

6. In the 1940s, it was taken for granted that men acted and women talked. How much complicity do women have in the actions of their men: Mrs. Smith in her husband’s late-night raid on Tallgrass; Mrs. Snow in her husband’s descent into addiction and his treatment of her and Betty Joyce; Mrs. Reddick in her husband’s refusal to acknowledge Helen? Why do you think that Mary Stroud broke through the convention
to confront the men outside Tallgrass?

7. Why were Americans so frightened of Japanese- Americans during World War II—more than the German- and Italian-Americans? In her acknowledgments, Sandra Dallas mentions that she was inspired to write this book, in part, by the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay. What parallels do you see between them? What differences?

8. Did you recognize any characters from Sandra’s other books in Tallgrass?

(Questions issued by publisher. Do check out the complete reading guide with with historical background and maps. Very helpful.)

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The Taming of the Queen  (Tudor Court, 5)
Philippa Gregory, 2015
Touchstone
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476758817


Summary
Why would a woman marry a serial killer?

Because she cannot refuse...

Kateryn Parr, a thirty-year-old widow in a secret affair with a new lover, has no choice when a man old enough to be her father who has buried four wives—King Henry VIII—commands her to marry him.

Kateryn has no doubt about the danger she faces: the previous queen lasted sixteen months, the one before barely half a year. But Henry adores his new bride and Kateryn's trust in him grows as she unites the royal family, creates a radical study circle at the heart of the court, and rules the kingdom as Regent.

But is this enough to keep her safe? A leader of religious reform and the first woman to publish in English, Kateryn stands out as an independent woman with a mind of her own. But she cannot save the Protestants, under threat for their faith, and Henry's dangerous gaze turns on her. The traditional churchmen and rivals for power accuse her of heresy—the punishment is death by fire and the king's name is on the warrant...

From an author who has described all of Henry's queens comes a deeply intimate portrayal of the last: a woman who longed for passion, power, and education at the court of a medieval killer. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 9, 1954
• Where—Nairobi, Kenya
• Raised—Bristol, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Sussex University; Ph.D., Edinburgh University
• Currently—lives in the North York Moors, Yorkshire, England


Philippa Gregory is a British historical novelist, writing since 1987. The best known of her works is The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), which in 2002 won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists' Association.

Early life and academic career
Philippa Gregory was in Nairobi, Kenya, the second daughter of Elaine (Wedd) and Arthur Percy Gregory, a radio operator and navigator for East African Airways. When she was two years old, her family moved to Bristol, England.

She was a "rebel" at Colston's Girls' School where she obtained a B grade in English and two E grades in History and Geography at A-level. She then went to journalism college in Cardiff and spent a year as an apprentice with the Portsmouth News before she managed to gain a place on an English literature degree course at the University of Sussex, where she switched to a history course.

She worked in BBC radio for two years before attending the University of Edinburgh, where she earned her doctorate in 18th-century literature. Gregory has taught at the University of Durham, University of Teesside, and the Open University, and was made a Fellow of Kingston University in 1994.

Private life
Gregory wrote her first novel Wideacre while completing a PhD in 18th-century literature and living in a cottage on the Pennine Way with first husband Peter Chislett, editor of the Hartlepool Mail, and their baby daughter, Victoria. They divorced before the book was published.

Following the success of Wideacre and the publication of The Favoured Child, she moved south to near Midhurst, West Sussex, where the Wideacre trilogy was set. Here she married her second husband Paul Carter, with whom she has a son. She divorced for a second time and married Anthony Mason, whom she had first met during her time in Hartlepool.

Gregory now lives on a 100-acre (0.40 km2) farm in the North York Moors national park, with her husband, children and stepchildren (six in all). Her interests include riding, walking, skiing, and gardening.

Writing
She has written novels set in several different historical periods, though primarily the Tudor period and the 16th century. Reading a number of novels set in the 17th century led her to write the bestselling Lacey trilogy — Wideacre, which is a story about the love of land and incest, The Favoured Child and Meridon. This was followed by The Wise Woman. A Respectable Trade, a novel of the slave trade in England, set in 18th-century Bristol, was adapted by Gregory for a four-part drama series for BBC television. Gregory's script was nominated for a BAFTA, won an award from the Committee for Racial Equality, and the film was shown worldwide.

Two novels about a gardening family are set during the English Civil War: Earthly Joys and Virgin Earth. She has also written contemporary fiction—Perfectly Correct; Mrs Hartley And The Growth Centre; The Little House; and Zelda's Cut. She has also written for children.

Some of her novels have won awards and have been adapted into television dramas. The most successful of her novels has been The Other Boleyn Girl, published in 2002 and adapted for BBC television in 2003 with Natascha McElhone, Jodhi May and Jared Harris. In the year of its publication, The Other Boleyn Girl also won the Romantic Novel of the Year and has subsequently spawned sequels—The Queen's Fool, The Virgin's Lover, The Constant Princess, The Boleyn Inheritance, and The Other Queen. Miramax bought the film rights to The Other Boleyn Girl and produced a film of the same name starring Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn and co-starring Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn, Eric Bana as Henry Tudor, Juno Temple as Jane Parker, and Kristin Scott Thomas as Elizabeth Boleyn. It was filmed in England and generally released in 2008.

Gregory has also published a series of books about the Plantagenets, the ruling houses that preceded the Tudors, and the Wars of the Roses. Her first book The White Queen (2009), centres on the life of Elizabeth Woodville the wife of Edward IV. The Red Queen (2010) is about Margaret Beaufort the mother of Henry VII and grandmother to Henry VIII. The Lady of the Rivers (2011) is the life of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, mother of Elizabeth Woodville, first married to John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford, younger brother of Henry the Fifth. The Kingmaker's Daughter (2012) is the story of Anne Neville, the daughter of the Earl of Warwick, the wife of Richard III. The next book, The White Princess (2013), centres on the life of Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII and the mother of Henry VIII.

Controversy
In her novel The Other Boleyn Girl, her portrayal of Henry VIII's second wife Anne Boleyn drew criticism. The novel depicts Anne as cold and ruthless, as well as heavily implying that the accusations that she committed adultery and incest with her brother were true, despite it being widely accepted that she was innocent of the charges. Novelist Robin Maxwell refused on principle to write a blurb for this book, describing its characterisation of Anne as "vicious, unsupportable." Historian David Starkey, appearing alongside Gregory in a documentary about Anne Boleyn, described her work as "good Mills and Boon" (a publisher of romance novels), adding that: "We really should stop taking historical novelists seriously as historians. The idea that they have authority is ludicrous." Susan Bordo criticized Gregory's claims to historical accuracy as "self-deceptive and self-promoting chutzpah", and notes that it is not so much the many inaccuracies in her work as "Gregory’s insistence on her meticulous adherence to history that most aggravates the scholars."

Media
Gregory is a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers, with short stories, features and reviews. She is also a frequent broadcaster and a regular contestant on Round Britain Quiz for BBC Radio 4 and the Tudor expert for Channel 4's Time Team. She won the 29 December 2008 edition of Celebrity Mastermind on BBC1, taking Elizabeth Woodville as her specialist subject.

Charity work
Gregory also runs a small charity building wells in school gardens in The Gambia. Gardens for The Gambia was established in 1993 when Gregory was in The Gambia, researching for her book A Respectable Trade.

Since then the charity has dug almost 200 low technology, low budget and therefore easily maintained wells, which are on-stream and providing water to irrigate school and community gardens to provide meals for the poorest children and harvest a cash crop to buy school equipment, seeds and tools.

In addition to wells, the charity has piloted a successful bee-keeping scheme, funded feeding programmes and educational workshops in batik and pottery and is working with larger donors to install mechanical boreholes in some remote areas of the country where the water table is not accessible by digging alone. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/22/2013.)

Book Reviews
Having plucked almost all the low-hanging female fruit from the tree of English history, Philippa Gregory has had to stretch high into the branches for the subject of her latest novel. But she has come down with a peach.... If the dissection of the rights and wrongs of women sounds like familiar territory for Gregory, The Taming of the Queen is also a cleverly wrought political novel. In introducing Parr to a new audience, Gregory has done the first lady of English letters something of a favour.
Telegraph (UK)


Who’s ever heard of Kateryn Parr? Henry VIII’s sixth wife was smart, independent—and managed to outlive him. In historical-fiction-queen Gregory’s latest, she’s unforgettable.
People


Gregory manages to make history lively, fascinating and real, even as she puts her own twist on what readers believe they know. The impeccable research shows in every page, while her wonderfully realistic dialogue and remarkable characters come to life. Gregory is a historian with heart and wit who makes history accessible. Though purists may argue with her portrayal of Parr as either a faithful wife or unruly heretic, Gregory lets the reader decide.
RT Book Reviews


Gregory does her usual excellent job of ratcheting up the intrigue and suspense as another intelligent and strong-willed heroine fights for her life and her legacy.
Booklist


(Stared review.) Full of vivid details and fraught with the constant tension of a court run by a madman, this novel will appeal most to historical fiction readers and those who enjoyed Wolf Hall.... Gregory beautifully builds the suspense.
Library Journal


Gregory puts readers at the scene with visceral details like the annoying sounds Henry makes while gorging himself and the smell of his never-healing leg that seeps into Kateryn’s dreams. Although Kateryn’s studiousness makes for some dull reading, the pace picks up as her intellect becomes her greatest liability.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the novel’s title in relation Kateryn. Several at the Tudor court feel that she is in need of taming, including her husband. Why do they feel this way? Do you think they are right?

2. When Kateryn becomes queen, she must choose a motto. What is the significance of the queen’s mottoes? Do you agree with Kateryn that her motto, "To be Useful in All that I Do," is "'not very inspiring'"? Why or why not? Do the mottoes of Henry’s previous queens give you any insight into their personalities and reigns? If so, how?

3. Of her relationship with Henry, Kateryn tells Thomas Cranmer, “‘When we first married I feared him, but I have come to trust him.’” Do you think that Kateryn should trust Henry? Why or why not? How does their relationship evolve? Do you think that Kateryn is a good wife? Why or why not?

4. Kateryn thinks, “Sometimes I shock my sophisticated London-bred sister with my ignorance. I am a country lady—worse even than that—a lady from the North of England, far from all the gossip.” Compare and contrast Kateryn and Nan. Do you agree that Nan is more sophisticated? Why or why not? How has life at court affected Nan? How does she use her experiences to help Kateryn navigate her new role as queen?

5. Henry tells Kateryn, “‘It is not enough to be a queen, you have to look like one.’” What does he mean? Kateryn and her ladies-in-waiting choose her clothing with a great deal of care. Discuss Kateryn’s outfits, giving examples of how they help her accomplish her goals. Why are appearances so important in the Tudor court?

6. Edward Seymour praises Kateryn for being able to manage Henry, calling her “‘a formidable diplomat.’” How is Kateryn able to cope with Henry’s volatile temperament? What compromises, if any, is she forced to make? Is Kateryn a successful diplomat outside her marriage? Give examples.

7. Henry says, “This is the way to rule kingdom, Kateryn.... First you appoint one man, then you appoint another, his rival. You give one a task—you praise him to the skies, then you give an opposite task, a complete contradiction, to his greatest enemy.’” Why does Henry think this is an effective method of governing? What problems, if any, does this create?

8. Kateryn has great respect for Anne Askew, thinking her a woman who “has not been cut down to fit her circumstances.” How does meeting Anne affect Kateryn? Do you agree with Kateryn that Anne deserves admiration? If so, why? How are Anne’s views revolutionary—and even heretical—in Tudor England?

9. Although Will Somers says he is “‘just a fool,’” Kateryn believes him to be wiser than he appears. Do you agree? How has he managed to be “a long-term survivor of this knife-edge court”? What role does the Fool play?

10. Discuss the Nicholas de Vent portrait that Henry commissions. How does each member of the royal family react when they first see it? Do their reactions give you any insight into their personalities? Explain your answer. Why does the portrait upset Kateryn?

11. Nan tells Kateryn, “‘Sometimes, at court, a woman has to do anything to survive. Anything.’” Do you agree? Does Kateryn make any desperate choices in order to survive? Did you find any of the choices that others (for example, the Howards) made particularly shocking? Which ones and why?

12. Anne Askew complains that “‘the law does not recognize a woman except when she is alone in the world.’” Discuss the place of women in the Tudor court. When Lady Elizabeth observes Kateryn as Regent of England, she tells her, “‘I didn’t know that a woman could rule.’” Why is this so surprising to Elizabeth? In what ways is Kateryn’s reign instructive to Elizabeth?

13. Henry tells Kateryn that he “‘guard[s Edward] as my only treasure.’” Describe Henry’s relationship with his three children. Why do you think these relationships are so complicated? How is Kateryn able to help Henry appreciate his children? Do you think she is a good stepmother to them?

14. When Thomas Seymour tells Kateryn that her only chance of safety is “‘in [Henry’s] love for you,’” she replies that she does not know whether “‘he has ever loved anyone. I don’t know that he can.’” Do you think that Henry is capable of love? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Tangerine 
Christine Mangan, 2018
HarperCollins
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062686664


Summary
The last person Alice Shipley expected to see since arriving in Tangier with her new husband was Lucy Mason. After the accident at Bennington, the two friends—once inseparable roommates—haven’t spoken in over a year.

But there Lucy was, trying to make things right and return to their old rhythms.

Perhaps Alice should be happy. She has not adjusted to life in Morocco, too afraid to venture out into the bustling medinas and oppressive heat. Lucy—always fearless and independent—helps Alice emerge from her flat and explore the country.

But soon a familiar feeling starts to overtake Alice—she feels controlled and stifled by Lucy at every turn.

Then Alice’s husband, John, goes missing, and Alice starts to question everything around her: her relationship with her enigmatic friend, her decision to ever come to Tangier, and her very own state of mind.

Tangerine is a sharp dagger of a book—a debut so tightly wound, so replete with exotic imagery and charm, so full of precise details and extraordinary craftsmanship, it will leave you absolutely breathless. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Detroit, Michigan, USA
• Raised—Long Island, New York, and North Carolina
• Education—B.A., Columbia College Chicago; M.A., University of Southern Maine; Ph.D., University   College Dublin
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City


Christine Mangan has her PhD in English from University College Dublin, where her thesis focused on 18th-century Gothic literature, and an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Southern Maine. Tangerine is her first novel. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
It's as if Mangan couldn't decide whether to write a homage to Donna Tartt's The Secret History or a sun-drenched novel of dissolute Westerners abroad in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith and Paul Bowles, so she tried to do both. She mostly succeeds…[Mangan] knows all the notes to hit to create lush, sinister atmosphere and to prolong suspense…Tangerine [is]…a satisfying, juicy thriller.
Jennifer Reese - New York Times Book Review


The reader’s sympathy switches back and forth between Lucy and Alice as their Moroccan reunion moves inexorably toward another fatal crossroads. But caveat lector: Tangerine, like its namesake fruit, can be both bracing and bitter.
Wall Street Journal


The lying, the cunning, and the duplicity is so very mannered that it’s chilling. Rich in dread, the foreboding positively drips from every page.
Washington Post


Unbelievably tense, incredibly smart.… Mangan full-speeds up to her shocking finale, twisting the plot with reveals you never see coming.… [Her] writing is so accomplished, so full of surprises and beauty, that you’d swear she was a seasoned pro.
San Francisco Chronicle


A juicy melodrama cast against the sultry, stylish imagery of North Africa in the fifties.… [Tangerine is] endearing and even impressive in the force of its determination to conjure a life more exciting than most.… Just the ticket.
New Yorker


The amoral, manipulative presence of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley hovers over Tangerine.… An assured and atmospheric debut.
Guardian (UK)


The thriller that everyone will be talking about.… One of those sinuous, Hitchcockian tales that disorients in the best way.… Hypnotic.
Esquire


Promises to be one of the best debuts of the year.… Echoes of Gillian Flynn and Patricia Highsmith in this tightly wound, exotic story.
Entertainment Weekly


Although some of the plot developments are easy to predict, the novel is narrated persuasively in alternating chapters…, and Mangan’s portrayal of Tangier is electric.… [A] sharp novel.
Publishers Weekly


Atmospheric enough to be a movie? You bet; George Clooney's Smokehouse Pictures bought the film rights, with Scarlett Johansson set to star. No wonder this debut is getting a 200,000-copy first printing.
Library Journal


Hypnotic.… [A] deadly, Hitchcockian pas de deux plays out under an unrelenting, Camus-like African sun.… Sucks the reader in almost instantly.
Booklist


In 1956, a pair of college roommates meets again in Tangier, with terrifying results.… A vivid setting and a devious, deadly plot, though the first is a bit overdone and the second contains a few head-scratchers, including the evil-lesbian trope.
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 TANGERINE … then take off on your own:

1. How would you describe the two women at the heart of Tangerine? In what ways are they different from one another? Do they share any similarities? At first, were you drawn more to Alice or Lucy? Or neither?

2. What creates the bond between the two women? During the height of their friendship, each feels incomplete without the other. What does Lucy receive from Alice, and Alice from Lucy, that fulfills some part of themselves?

3. The chapters alternate between Alice's voice and Lucy's. How do their memories of Bennington diverge? In what way are both women untrustworthy or unreliable as narrators?

4. Trace the change in Alice and Lucy's relationship over the course of the novel, starting with their time at Bennington and "the incident"? When and why do the cracks first appear?

5. Follow-up to Question 4: What went through Alice's mind the day she found Lucy dressed up in her (Alice's) clothes? And the charm bracelet—care to tackle that one? Lucy appears to be "gaslighting" Alice, but to what purpose?

6. When Lucy turns up in Tangier, Alice recalls Shakespeare's line in The Tempest, "what's past is prologue." What does she mean?

7. Talk about Alice and John's marriage? In what way is Alice portrayed as a woman of the 1950s, educated but without a career, living at the behest of her husband and his job. And once Lucy meets John, she's on to him. What do you think? Is she right to insinuate herself into their marriage, to attempt to pull Alice away from her husband?

8. How do each of the women react to the city of Tangier, and what do their individual reactions say about who they are?

9. How does Christine Mangan depict Tangier. Youssef tells Lucy, “If you are looking for a place that makes sense, I feel I must provide this warning—you will be disappointed." In what way does the backdrop of the city, as well as the country's politics, reflect or enhance the mood and plot?

10. Talk about the dual meaning of the title, both as a juicy fruit and as a "woman of Tangiers," who disappears into the background.

11. Ultimately, what does Lucy want: to take over Alice's life or create a new one for herself?

12. The book is full of literary allusions (subtle and not so subtle) to other well-known novels. Can you pick a few out? Think Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith, Paul Bowles, even Hitchcock (see cover).

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

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Tapestry of Fortunes
Elizabeth Berg, 2013
Random House
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812993141


Summary
In this superb new novel by the beloved New York Times bestselling author of Open House, Home Safe, and The Last Time I Saw You, four women venture into their pasts in order to shape their futures, fates, and fortunes.
 
Cecilia Ross is a motivational speaker who encourages others to change their lives for the better. Why can’t she take her own advice? Still reeling from the death of her best friend, and freshly aware of the need to live more fully now, Cece realizes that she has to make a move—all the portentous signs seem to point in that direction.

She downsizes her life, sells her suburban Minnesota home and lets go of many of her possessions. She moves into a beautiful old house in Saint Paul, complete with a garden, chef’s kitchen, and three housemates: Lise, the home’s owner and a divorced mother at odds with her twenty-year-old daughter; Joni, a top-notch sous chef at a first-rate restaurant with a grade A jerk of a boss; and Renie, the youngest and most mercurial of the group, who is trying to rectify a teenage mistake. These women embark on a journey together in an attempt to connect with parts of themselves long denied. For Cece, that means finding Dennis Halsinger. Despite being “the one who got away,” Dennis has never been far from Cece’s thoughts.

In this beautifully written novel, leaving home brings revelations, reunions, and unexpected turns that affirm the inner truths of women’s lives. “Maybe Freud didn’t know the answer to what women want, but Elizabeth Berg certainly does,” said USA Today. Elizabeth Berg has crafted a novel rich in understanding of women’s longings, loves, and abiding friendships, which weave together into a tapestry of fortunes that connects us all. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1948
• Where—St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
• Education—A.A.S, St. Mary’s College
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois


Before she became a writer, Elizabeth Berg spent 10 years as a nurse. It's a field, as she says on her website, that helped her to become a writer:

Taking care of patients taught me a lot about human nature, about hope and fear and love and loss and regret and triumph and especially about relationships—all things that I tend to focus on in my work.

Her sensitivity to humanity is what Berg's writing is noted for. As Publishers Weekly wrote in reviewing The Dream Lover, her 2015 portrayal of George Sand, "Berg offers vivid, sensual detail and a sensitive portrayal of the yearning and vulnerability" behind her main character.

Background
Berg was born in St. Paul Minneapolis. When her father re-enlisted in the Army, she and her family were moved from base to base—in one single year, she went to three different schools. Her peripatetic childhood makes it hard for Berg to answer the usually simple question, "where did you grow up?"

Berg recalls that she loved to write at a young age. She was only nine when she submitted her first poem to American Girl magazine; sadly, it was rejected. It was another 25 years before she submitted anything again—to Parents Magazine—and that time she won.

In addition to nursing, Berg worked as a waitress, another field she claims is "good training for a writer." She also sang in a rock band.

Writing
Berg ended up writing for magazines for 10 years before she finally turned to novels. Since her 1993 debut with Durable Goods, her books have sold in large numbers and been translated into 27 languages. She writes nearly a book a year, a number of which have received awards and honors.

Recognition
Two of Berg's books, Durable Goods and Joy School, were listed as "Best Books of the Year" by the American Library Association. Open House became an Oprah Book Club Selection.

She won the New England Booksellers Award for her body of work, and Boston Public Library made her a "literary light." She has also been honored by the Chicago Public Library. An article on a cooking school in Italy, for National Geographic Traveler magazine, won an award from the North American Travel Journalists Association.

Personal
Now divorced, Berg was married for over twenty years and has two daughters and three grandchildren. She lives with her dogs and a cat in Chicago. (Author bio adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Craving change, Cecilia Ross takes time off, disposes of her home, and moves into a grand old house in St. Paul with three roommates. The four women decide to take a road trip, one to connect with the daughter she gave up, another with a former husband; a professional chef wants to check out other restaurants. As for Cecilia, that unexpected letter from former heartthrob Dennis Helsinger has her sailing on the wind. Who better to tell this story than quintessential women's author Berg?
Library Journal


A motivational speaker struggles to follow her own advice after a close friend dies. Cecilia, successful self-help author and woman of a certain age...travels the nation inspiring others to be their best selves. However, since her best friend Penny died after a short illness, Cecilia herself is now adrift.... [S]he sells her home...and moves in with three other women, who are also at loose ends. The witty repartee among the four, and their interaction with their pet, an aging yellow lab named Riley, is the most enjoyable aspect of this otherwise predictable pastiche of time-worn truisms on loss and aging.... [T]he characterization, particularly of Cecilia, is too sketchy: A deeper, more fully articulated back story might have lent needed depth to our understanding of how Cecilia arrived at this juncture in her life. Berg fails to play to her strengths here.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Cecelia is a motivational speaker who preaches that "getting lost is the only way to find what you didn't know you were looking for" (8). Do you think Cecelia is able to take her own advice? How does mov­ing in with Lise, Joni, and Renie help her explore this philosophy?

2. Throughout the novel, Cecelia and the other women often rely on her box of fortunes to help them search for answers to their big questions. How do these answers affect their decision-making? Do their fortunes make a difference, or is it something else that ultimately guides them to these answers?

3. "I, the motivational speaker, have not been able to motivate myself into making a new life without her," Cecelia says, referring to Penny's death (10). What eventually changes for Cecelia and enables her to start a new life? Does Penny play a part in this change, even after her death?

4. When Brice, Penny's husband, tells Cece that he is getting re­married, she is initially surprised, but also happy that he is moving on. "People with people, good. People alone, bad," Penny always used to say to Cece (35). Is it difficult for Cece to heed this advice? Why might it be easier for Brice?

5. Soon after Cece receives the postcard from Dennis, she decides to go visit him. What makes Cece so certain about seeing him again? Do you ever get over your first love? How might this relate to Lise's situation?

6. When Cece moves into the house, Renie is initially defensive and skeptical. Her career as a columnist, too, highlights her skeptical and sarcastic tendencies. Why do you think Renie shows only this side of herself for much of the novel? How are the other women eventually able to uncover the more sensitive side of Renie?

7. When Cece volunteers at the Arms and meets Michael, she opens up to him about Penny's death. She explains that it was "one of the most beautiful experiences" of her life (124). What does Cece mean about Penny's death being beautiful? How does that beauty continue to influence Cece's life?

8. Renie asks the women whether they believe in the truth of the saying "Be kind, for everyone is carrying a heavy burden'' (174). Wanda, the waitress they meet during the road trip, asserts that al­though not everyone carries a heavy burden, everyone does carry the burden of fear (175). How is this "burden of fear" a theme throughout the novel?

9. Mother-daughter relationships are central to the story: Renie struggles with meeting her estranged daughter; Lise's daughter urges
her not to reunite with her ex-husband after their divorce; Cece grows annoyed with her mother for acting more like a girlfriend than a parent (110). What makes a mother-daughter relationship so special? What makes it so fraught, and sometimes difficult?

10. After Michael dies, Cece remembers a conversation that she and Penny once had: Cece asked, "What's the point in loving anything when it will just change or be taken away?," and Penny replied, "The point in loving is only that. And when you lose something, you have to remember that then there is room for the next thing. And there is always a next thing." (213) How does this idea relate to the broader theme of the novel? What is the "next thing" that Cece, Phoebe, and the other characters manage to find?

11. Toward the end of the novel, Cece mentions something that Dennis said about photography, which she feels reverberates in her own life: "The greatest understanding of a thing is when you can't reduce it any further." (217) How does this statement relate to Cece's views on love and friendship? How might it relate to your own?

12. Lise, Joni, Renie, and Cecelia are all very different. What do you think makes their relationships with one another thrive, in spite of their differences? Consider how this relates to the quote at the end of the novel: "We are a convergence of fates, a tapestry of fortunes in colors both somber and bright, each contributing equally to the Whole." (218-19)
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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A Taste of Sage 
Yaffa S. Santos, 2020
HarperCollins
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062974846

Summary
From talented new writer, Yaffa S. Santos, comes this unforgettable, heartwarming, and hilarious rom-com about chefs, cooking, love, and self-discovery.

Lumi Santana is a chef with the gift of synesthesia—she can perceive a person’s emotions just by tasting their cooking.

Despite being raised by a single mother who taught her that dreams and true love were silly fairy tales, she decides to take a chance and puts her heart and savings into opening a fusion restaurant in Inwood, Manhattan. The restaurant offers a mix of the Dominican cuisine she grew up with and other world cuisines that have been a source of culinary inspiration to her.

When Lumi’s eclectic venture fails, she is forced to take a position as a sous chef at a staid, traditional French restaurant in midtown owned by Julien Dax, a celebrated chef known for his acid tongue as well as his brilliant smile.

Lumi and Julien don’t get along in the kitchen—to say Lumi is irritated by Julien’s smug attitude is an understatement, and she secretly vows never to taste his cooking. Little does she know that her resolve doesn’t stand a chance against Julien’s culinary prowess.

As Julien produces one delectable dish after another, each one tempting Lumi with its overwhelming aromas and gorgeous presentations, she can no longer resist and samples one of his creations.

She isn’t prepared for the feelings that follow as she’s overcome with intense emotions. She begins to crave his cooking throughout the day, which throws a curveball in her plan to save up enough money and move on as soon as possible.

Plus, there’s also the matter of Esme, Julien’s receptionist who seems to always be near and watching. As the attraction between Lumi and Julien simmers, Lumi experiences a tragedy that not only complicates her professional plans, but her love life as well…

Clever, witty, and romantic, A Taste of Sage is sure to delight and entertain readers until the very last page. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Yaffa S. Santos was born and raised in New Jersey. A solo trip to Dominican Republic in her teenage years changed her relationship to her Dominican heritage and sparked a passion for cooking and its singular ability to bring people together.

Yaffa is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied writing and visual art. She is a member of RWA. She has lived in New York, Philadelphia, Santo Domingo, and now lives in Florida with her family. (From publihsher.)

Book Reviews
[D]isappointingly bland.… Santos’s creativity and humor, however, shine through occasionally in the recipes that accompany many chapters…. Unfortunately, her recipe for romance is not equally inspired.
Publishers Weekly


Santos's debut blends the rare but real condition of synesthesia into a fast-paced if uneven romance. The recipes throughout make this a perfect recommendation to those checking out cookbooks with their romances. —Kellie Tilton, Univ. of Cincinnati Blue Ash
Library Journal


This sweet and spicy tale will bring out the romantic epicurean in all who pull it off the shelves.
Booklist


[A] thread of magical realism runs through the text in Lumi’s ability to taste emotions in food… and [when Santos] lushly describes Lumi’s culinary creations, the passages shine. But these brief moments are not enough to save the uneven writing and thin plot.
Kirkus Reviews

  Discussion Questions
1. Lumi is able to taste food and know what the cook was feeling when they cooked it. If you had this ability, would you want to pursue a career as a chef? Why or why not?

2. Lumi enjoys cooking traditional dishes paired with global elements. Why do you think Lumi does this? Do you have a favorite traditional dish you make with your own modern twist?

3. Julien’s personality was inspired by the larger-than-life short-tempered chef persona you might be familiar with from his various beloved cooking television shows. Did Julien’s personality make you uncomfortable? If so, why? Do you think other chefs also behave this way?

4. Julien is generally regarded as an attractive man, but Lumi is not open to being attracted to him until after tasting his cooking. Why do you think this is?

5. What was unique about the setting of the book? Did you feel it enhanced the story?

6. If you were in Lumi’s position after losing Caraluna, what would you do to make ends meet?

7. Passion can be both beautiful and ugly. How do you think this concept is reflected in Lumi and Julien’s relationship?

8. How did Julien’s character change after Lumi’s accident and during her recovery? Do you think he grew from this experience?

9. Lumi runs into Esme at the end of the book and they share a surprisingly sweet moment. Were you happy to see that there was moment of forgiveness between these two characters? Why or why not?

10. The book ends with Lumi fulfilling her dreams by opening a new restaurant. Were you surprised by her choices in creating the new restaurant? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Tattooist of Auschwitz 
Heather Morris, 2018
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062797155 


Summary
This beautiful, illuminating tale of hope and courage is based on interviews that were conducted with Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov—an unforgettable love story in the midst of atrocity.

In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tatowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners.

Imprisoned for over two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarism—but also incredible acts of bravery and compassion. Risking his own life, he uses his privileged position to exchange jewels and money from murdered Jews for food to keep his fellow prisoners alive.

One day in July 1942, Lale, prisoner 32407, comforts a trembling young woman waiting in line to have the number 34902 tattooed onto her arm. Her name is Gita, and in that first encounter, Lale vows to somehow survive the camp and marry her.

A vivid, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful re-creation of Lale Sokolov's experiences as the man who tattooed the arms of thousands of prisoners with what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is also a testament to the endurance of love and humanity under the darkest possible conditions. (From the publisher.)

Be sure to WATCH the 2004 video of the real Lale Sokolov.

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Te Awamutu, New Zealand
• Education—B.A., Monash University (Australia)
• Currently—lives in Melbourne, Australia


Heather Morris is a native of New Zealand, now resident in Australia. For several years, while working in a large public hospital in Melbourne, she studied and wrote screenplays, one of which was optioned by an Academy Award-winning screenwriter in the US.

In 2003, Heather was introduced to an elderly gentleman who "might just have a story worth telling." The day she met Lale Sokolov changed both their lives. Their friendship grew and Lale embarked on a journey of self-scrutiny, entrusting the innermost details of his life during the Holocaust to her.

Heather originally wrote Lale’s story as a screenplay—which ranked high in international competitions—before reshaping it into her debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Morris's second book, Cilka's Journey, came out in 2020. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
To many, this book will be most appreciated for its powerful evocation of the everyday horrors of …a concentration camp, while others will be heartened by the novel’s message of how true love can transcend even the most hellishly inhuman environments.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) [C]ompelling…. Readers will root for the two despite the many obstacles they face. Verdict: Historical fiction and memoir fans will be gripped by this unforgettable Holocaust story. —Laura Jones, Argos Community Schs., IN
Library Journal


Although one might suspect that there’s far more to his past than is revealed here, much of Lale’s story’s complexity makes it onto the page. And even though it’s clear that Lale will survive, Morris imbues the novel with remarkable suspense.
Booklist


[I]nside the day-to-day workings of the most notorious German death camp.… Morris interviewed Lale, teasing out his memories and weaving them into her heart-rending narrative of a Jew [who chose] to act with kindness and humanity in a place where both were nearly extinct.
BookPage

Discussion Questions
1. How did you feel about Lale when he was first introduced, as he arrived in Auschwitz? How did your understanding of him change throughout the novel?

2. What qualities did Lale have that influenced the way he was treated in the camp? Where did those qualities come from?

3. Survival in the camp depended on people doing deeds of questionable morality. Lale became the tattooist, but how did Gita’s choices affect her survival? What about her friend who befriended a Nazi?

4. Inmates in the concentration camp had to make life-or-death decisions every day. Why did some make the "right" decisions and survive while others did not?

5. Discuss some of the small acts of humanity carried out by individuals in The Tattooist of Auschwitz. How did these small acts of kindness have greater implications? Did it make you reconsider what you believe to be brave or heroic? Did this make you think differently about the impact of your own everyday actions?

6. The Tattooist of Auschwitz makes clear that there were also non-Jewish prisoners in the camp. How did the treatment of Jews differ from that of non-Jews? How did differences manifest themselves?

7. Had Gita and Lale met in a more conventional way, would they have developed the same kind of relationship? How did their circumstances change the course of their romance?

8. In what ways were the relationships between Gita and her friends different from the usual friendships between teenage girls? In what ways were they similar?

9. In what ways was Lale a hero? In what ways was he an ordinary man?

10. Lale faced danger even after the camp was liberated. How did his experiences immediately after liberation prepare him for the rest of his life?

11. How does The Tattooist of Auschwitz change your perceptions about the Holocaust in particular, and war in general? What implications does The Tattooist of Auschwitzs this book hold for our own time?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle

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Spanish Glossary The following glossary of Spanish-to-English words comes from one of our LitLovers Readers...Iwona from Cleveland, Ohio. Thanks, Iwona! A abrazos- hugs abrazote – big hug animo -enthusiasm antemano – before hand aquel tiempo – that time (long ago) apodo - nickname ayer - yesterday Ay, Dios mío - Oh my God B bendición - blessing bien hecho – good goin’, good job bien preguntón- very inquisitive, asks a lot of questions bola – gang bueno para nada – good for nothing C cabrón – dude, asshole, son of a b. (depends on context!) literally, male goat caldo de iguana –iguana broth or soup calientando – warming up cállete, cabrón - Shut up, dude camaradas - comrades campesino – peasant canción – song cantón – restaurant, bar cantón – house, slang like saying“the crib” cara de cachado –caught-in-the-act, guilty face cara santucha – face of a saint, pretending to look saintly cariño – affection carne asada – grilled meat carpas – tents chamuco - devil, mischievous person chaparrito, a – short or little guy, girl cheap codo- cheapskate (codo literally means “elbow”) chicle –gum chillones – cry-babies chingón - extremely awesome, great, a real badass chupetonazos - hickies cholo – homeboy, kid from the streets cinco sentidos – in right mind or lit. “five senses” colonos – inmates, lit. “settlers” Cómo que – how is it…or what do you mean… confreres – colleague, fellow member cumbias – type of dance, originated in Colombia cuete – gun cuñada – sister –in-law D delito - crime desafortunadamente - unfortunately desesperación - desperation desvelado - sleepless de uña y mugre –like the fingernail and the dirt under it De veras - Really? de volada – on the fly E échale - empty enemigos - enemies El padre ya viene – Father is coming el rostro de Dios – the face of God Es nuestro compromise – It’s what we’ve committed to do F felicidades – congratulations feria - money firme – could not be one bit better, fine, badass, cool, awesome, good Flaco – Skinny flicka - picture frajos - cigarettes G gabachos - White people. Similar to term Gringo gato - cat gritona – a woman who shouts a lot, talks loud Gracias por haber venido – Thanks for coming H huaraches- sandals Huele a patas - It smells like feet Huele a rosas – It smells like roses J jaina - girl jale- job jefito - dad (literally “boss”) jefita - mom (literally “boss”) L la neta – really seriously. truth. lo mataron – they killed him la misa - mass la muerte ya no tiene dominio – Death no longer has dominion limones - lemons M mal hablado – foul mouthed más o menos – more or less máscara – face , literally “mask” menos mal – It’s just as well mijo/mijito - my son (the “ito” or “ita” shows affection) mija/ mijita - my daughter mi vida – my life mi reina – my queen mi cielo- my heaven mi todo – my everything mojados - wetbacks morrito – little kid menso – dummy, someone who is stupid and/or annoying, a dumbass N No cabe – it doesn’t fit No, chale = A term to show disagreement or disapproval of something or some idea. Means the same thing as "hell no" or "hell na." or “yeah right” No me digas –no kidding O obra de arte – masterpiece oye – hey, listen oye,no cabe duda- hey, no doubt oye,que onda?- hey, what’s up? oye, que pasó,cabrón – hey dude, what happened? P Padrecito – Father, said with affection (priest) pandilla mugrosa = little gang of kids panickeada así – all panicky paro – favor paro cardiaco – heart attack (lit. cardiac arrest) pecadores - sinners pedo –trouble (lit. “fart”) peleonera – woman who gets in a lot of fights pelón – bald, hairless pero mijito- but my son Pero te digo una cosa, Dios no es así – But I’ll tell you one thing, God is not like that pidió palabra – asked for her turn to speak piedra – gravestone, lit. “ stone, or rock” pinta = prison placa – gang moniker planchado – ironed porque es lo que haría Jesús – because it is what Jesus would do primo,a - cousin premio – prize profundo - deep pulmones - lungs Q Qué estás haciendo aquí? – what are you doing here? Qué gacho – how mean quinceañera – celebration of 15 year old’s rite of passage into womanhood R ranfla - car ruca- woman, girlfriend, true love S Sabes qué,mijo – you know what, my son sala – living room serio - seriously ‘spensa, G – Sorry,G (comes from ‘dispensa’- to pardon or forgive) T tabique - brick Tatai – Father in quechua tecato – junkie Te digo una cosa – I am going to tell you something Tenemos una llamada de… - we have a call from… tía - aunt tío – lit. uncle, also means “guy” travieso - mischievous tienda - store tremendo,a – he/ she is something else Tú eres basura - You are garbage tú sabes – you know U-V unción de enfermos – anointing of the sick vato - dude ven,mija – come, my daughter venta de comida – bake sale or food sale vete a la casa – go home viejita- little old lady Y yardas – yards Y ese milagro- and this miracle y sabes que – and you know what y todo – and everything * * * * * Thanks to Iwona in Cleveland, Ohio.

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The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane 
Lisa See, 2017
Scribner
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501154829


Summary
A thrilling new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa See explores the lives of a Chinese mother and her daughter who has been adopted by an American couple.

Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations.

Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate—the first automobile any of them have seen—and a stranger arrives. In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people.

In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced the Yao people to her readers. Here she shares the customs of another Chinese ethnic minority, the Akha, whose world will soon change.

Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, translates for the stranger and is among the first to reject the rules that have shaped her existence. When she has a baby outside of wedlock, rather than stand by tradition, she wraps her daughter in a blanket, with a tea cake hidden in her swaddling, and abandons her in the nearest city.

After mother and daughter have gone their separate ways, Li-yan slowly emerges from the security and insularity of her village to encounter modern life while Haley grows up a privileged and well-loved California girl. Despite Haley’s happy home life, she wonders about her origins; and Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. They both search for and find answers in the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for generations.

A powerful story about a family, separated by circumstances, culture, and distance, Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane paints an unforgettable portrait of a little known region and its people and celebrates the bond that connects mothers and daughters. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 18, 1955
• Where—Paris, France
• Education—B.A., Loyola Marymount University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California


Lisa See is an American writer and novelist. Her Chinese-American family (See has one Chinese great-grandparent) has had a great impact on her life and work. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995) and the novels Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), Shanghai Girls (2009), which made it to the 2010 New York Times bestseller list, and China Dolls (2014).

Flower Net, The Interior, and Dragon Bones make up the Red Princess mystery series. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love focus on the lives of Chinese women in the 19th and 17th centuries respectively. Shanghai Girls chronicles the lives of two sisters who come to Los Angeles in arranged marriages and face, among other things, the pressures put on Chinese-Americans during the anti-Communist mania of the 1950s. See published a sequel titled Dreams of Joy.

Writing under the pen name Monica Highland, See, her mother Carolyn See, and John Espey, published three novels: Lotus Land (1983), 110 Shanghai Road (1986), and Greetings from Southern California (1988).

Biography
Lisa See was born in Paris but has spent many years in Los Angeles, especially Los Angeles Chinatown. Her mother, Carolyn See, is also a writer and novelist. Her autobiography provides insight into her daughter's life. Lisa See graduated with a B.A. from Loyola Marymount University in 1979.

See was West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly (1983–1996); has written articles for Vogue, Self, and More; has written the libretto for the opera based on On Gold Mountain, and has helped develop the Family Discovery Gallery for the Autry Museum, which depicts 1930s Los Angeles from the perspective of her father as a seven-year-old boy. Her exhibition On Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Experience was featured in the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, and the Smithsonian. See is also a public speaker.

She has written for and led in many cultural events emphasizing the importance of Los Angeles and Chinatown. Among her awards and recognitions are the Organization of Chinese Americans Women's 2001 award as National Woman of the Year and the 2003 History Makers Award presented by the Chinese American Museum. See has served as a Los Angeles City Commissioner. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/21/2014.)

Book Reviews
Everything about this book drew me in. As an adoptive mother, I sopped up See’s observations surrounding adoption with hungry interest. As a tea lover, I drank up the fascinating history of this industry. As a book lover, I cared deeply about the characters and outcome. Li-Yan does not blindly fall in line with practices and beliefs that go against her heart, but she preserves this truth from her village: "Every story, every dream, every waking minute of our lives is filled with one fateful coincidence after another." With The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Lisa See preserves her place as a master of historical fiction. My book club agreed.  READ MORE …
Abby Fabiaschi, AUTHOR - LitLovers

With vivid and precise details about tea and life in rural China, Li-Yan’s gripping journey to find her daughter comes alive.
Publishers Weekly


Coincidences abound in this illuminating novel that contributes historical and social insight into the Akhas.… With strong female characters, See deftly confronts the changing role of minority women, majority-minority relations, East-West adoption, and the economy of tea in modern China. —Suzanne Im, Los Angeles P.L.
Library Journal


Although representing exhaustive research on See's part, and certainly engrossing, the extensive elucidation of international adoption, tea arcana, and Akha lore threatens to overwhelm the human drama. Still, a riveting exercise in fictional anthropology.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the significance of the epigraph. The Book of Songs is the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, written between the seventh and eleventh centuries B.C. What kind of resonance does it have today?

2. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane begins with the Akha aphorism, "No coincidence, no story." What are the major coincidences in the story? Are they believable? How important are they in influencing your reaction to the novel as a whole?

3. Perhaps the most shocking moment in the novel comes with the birth of the twins and what happens to them. A-ma explains that "only animals, demons, and spirits give birth to litters. If a sow gives birth to one piglet, then both must be killed at once. If a dog gives birth to one puppy, then they too must be killed immediately" (pages 27–28). The traditions surrounding twins are very harsh, to say the least, but were you able to understand what happens to them within the context of Akha culture? How does this moment change Li-yan’s view of Akha Law, and what are the consequences? Are there any aspects of the Akha culture that you admire?

4. What is Li-yan’s first reaction when she sees her land? Why does A-ma believe the tea garden is so important? Why does A-ma believe that the trees are sacred? What is the significance of the mother tree?

5. San-pa and Li-yan’s relationship ends tragically and causes them both great pain. Is what happens between them fate, or is it bad luck? In your opinion, does their community’s negativity about their union shape the outcome of their marriage? Does his death change your feelings about him?

6. Can the experience Li-yan’s village has with selling Pu’er be thought of as a microcosm for globalization? Why or why not? Are all the changes to the village positive? Given all we hear about China being a global economic superpower, were you surprised that the novel starts in 1988?

7. As a midwife, A-ma occupies a position of relative power on the mountain, although as "first among women" (page 4), she still comes after every man. Can such a traditional role for women be truly empowering? In the context of their society, what are the limits and expanse of A-ma’s power?

8. This novel uses a number of devices to tell Haley’s story, including letters, a transcript of a therapy session, and homework assignments. It isn’t until the final chapter, however, that you hear Haley in her own pure voice and see the world entirely from her point of view. Did this style of storytelling enrich your experience of the narrative? Did it make you more curious about Haley?

9. In the chapter transcribing a group therapy session for Chinese American adoptees that Haley attends, many of the patients have mixed feelings about their adoptive and birth parents. Were you surprised by their anger? Did reading this novel affect your feelings about transnational adoption?

10. The three most significant mother-daughter relationships in the novel are those between A-ma and Li-yan, Constance and Haley, and Li-yan and Haley. The connection between Li-yan and Haley, although arguably the emotional center of the novel, exists despite the absence of a relationship: though the two women think a great deal about each other, they do not meet until the very end of the story. How does this relationship in absence compare to the real-life relationships between A-ma and Li-yan and Constance and Haley?

11. What are the formal and informal ways in which Li-yan is educated? How are they different from the ways other members of her family were educated? What role does Teacher Zhang play in Li-yan’s life and how does it change over the years? How important is education in Haley’s life?

12. Li-yan is much older and more experienced when she meets Jin than she was when she fell in love with San-pa. How are the two men different? What do you think Li-yan learns from her first marriage?

13. Almost everyone in the novel has a secret: Li-yan, A-ma, San-pa, Mr. Huang, Deh-ja, Ci-teh, Teacher Zhang, Mrs. Chang, and Jin. How do those secrets impact each character? How are those secrets revealed and what are the results, particularly for Li-yan and Ci-teh’s relationship? The only person who doesn’t have a secret of major significance is Haley. What does that say about her?

14. When Li-yan returns to her village to confront Ci-teh, the ruma tells the women that Li-yan is still Akha even though she has a new home and lifestyle. How do questions of identity, especially as they relate to Li-yan’s status as an ethnic minority, play into the events of the novel? How does Li-yan’s identity shift? Do her nicknames, especially her American nickname, inform this shift?

15. By the time Li-yan and Haley meet, each has been searching for the other for many years. However, Haley already has a family and an adoptive mother. Is there room for Haley to have two mothers? How do you think Li-yan and Haley will relate to each other—as mother and child, or will their roles be something slightly different? What do you suppose Haley and Li-yan will talk about first?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Tea Time for the Traditionally Built (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series #10)
Alexander McCall Smith, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307277473

Summary
In the 10th installment in the endlessly entertaining series, Precious Ramotswe faces problems both personal and professional.
 
The first is the potential demise of an old friend, her tiny white van. Recently, it has developed a rather troubling knock, but she dare not consult the estimable Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni for fear he may condemn the vehicle. Meanwhile, her talented assistant Mma Makutsi is plagued by the reappearance of her nemesis, Violet Sephotho, who has taken a job at the Double Comfort Furniture store whose proprietor is none other than Phuti Radiphuti, Mma Makutsi’s fiancé.

Finally, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency has been hired to explain the unexpected losing streak of a local football club, the Kalahari Swoopers. But with Mma Ramotswe on the case, it seems certain that everything will be resolved satisfactorily. (From the publisher.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Reviews
Once again, Precious Ramotswe uses her insights into human nature to unravel problems big and small in Smith's charming 10th novel to feature Botswana's No. 1 lady detective (after The Miracle at Speedy Motors). Leungo Molofololo, the owner of the Kalahari Swoopers, a local soccer team with a lot of athletic talent, suspects a traitor on the squad is deliberately sabotaging games for an unknown reason. Despite her complete ignorance of the sport, Mma Ramotswe agrees to look into the matter. She and her prickly assistant, Grace Makutsi, attend a match and begin interviewing the players in an effort to solve what amounts to the book's main mystery. The soccer inquiry, though, is secondary to a major event in Mma Ramotswe's life-the impending demise of the little white van she's used for many years that's much more than a machine to her.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) In stressful times, Botswana detective Precious Ramotswe always finds solace in a steaming pot of red bush tea. But it’s going to take many cups of the richly hued liquid to help her cope with current woes.... Scotsman McCall Smith’s rich regard for Botswana resonates in this warm, witty, and wise tenth installment in the internationally best-selling series. What fan can resist? —Allison Block
Booklist


Mma Precious Ramotswe wrestles with a timeless problem-to cling to the old or embrace the new-in her tenth adventure. Mr. Leungo Molofololo, the latest client of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, has a big problem. The soccer team he owns, the Kalahari Swoopers, has stopped winning. Someone on the team, he tells Mma Ramotswe, is throwing the matches, and he wants her to find out who. Despite her complete ignorance of the game and her client's failure to pay a retainer, Botswana's preeminent detective conscientiously begins interviewing Swoopers to find out who is the rotten link. As usual in this much-honored series (The Miracle at Speedy Motors, 2008, etc.), however, the real action lies elsewhere. Sharp-tongued assistant detective Grace Makutsi's engagement is imperiled when her fiance, Mr. Phuti Radiphuti, hires her old nemesis, mantrap Violet Sephotho, to sell beds at his furniture store. Struggling to keep her man, Mma Makutsi has to decide between buying food and indulging in a pair of faux-alligator shoes. Mma Ramotswe's beloved little white van seems to be "sick at heart." Should she report its condition to her husband, auto salesman Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, who'll surely want to replace it, or try to get one of his apprentices to fix it behind his back? Episodes in Smith's series, like those in a long-running sitcom, have stopped competing with each other as better or worse and instead have gelled into a self-contained world into which audiences enter with pleasure and gratitude. Here's more of the same.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Grace pokes fun at Fanwell’s name, and says that he and Charlie, apprentice mechanics in the garage, are lazy. What aspect of Grace’s character is revealed in this conversation [pp. 6–7]? How does Mma Ramotswe deal with temperamental differences between herself and her assistant?

2. As she said in The Miracle at Speedy Motors, “I am a lady first and then I am a detective. So I just do the things which we ladies know how to do—I talk to people and find out what has happened. Then I try to solve the problems in people's lives. That is all I do.” Why does the suspicion presented by Mr. Molofololo—that someone on his football team is throwing games—cause a real difficulty for Mma Ramotswe in solving the case?

3. How does visiting Fanwell’s home provoke Mma Ramotswe’s sympathy [pp. 63–72]? Why does she conclude, “until you dig deeper, and listen … you know only a tiny part of the goodness of the human heart” [p. 72]?

4. Mma Tafa’s ambition for her husband, Big Man, to be captain of the football team makes Mma Ramotswe wonder whether Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni nursed any hidden, unfulfilled desires. She thinks, “when we dismiss or deny the hopes of others … we forget that they, like us, have only one chance in this life” [p. 130]. If Mma Ramotswe’s compassionate insights were collected, would they comprise a dependable guide to an ethical life?

5. Mma Ramotswe has to laugh when she thinks of the tiny goalkeeper, Big Man Tafa, dancing with his wife [pp. 130–3]. What other moments cause laughter in the story? How would you describe Mma Ramotswe’s sense of humor?

6. Mma Makutsi’s purchase of new shoes gives her “that extraordinary feeling of renewal that an exciting purchase can bring,” but her old shoes silently make their resentment known [pp. 146–7]. If you have read Blue Shoes and Happiness, how does this moment recall an earlier episode where Grace buys a pair of new shoes?

7. What qualities make Precious Ramotswe such an unusual person? How would you describe the quality of her insight or wisdom? To her husband, she was the person “who stood for kindness and generosity and understanding; for a country of which he was so proud; who stood for Africa and all the love that Africa contained” [pp. 151-52]. Do you find her inspirational, and if so how can she been seen as a model for behavior in everyday life?

8. Why does Violet Sephotho make a direct play for Phuti Radiphuti? Does it appear that she holds a grudge against Grace? Does the conversation on pp. 45-47 suggest that Grace’s physical imperfections might present a serious cause for anxiety regarding Phuti’s commitment to her?

9. Why is Mma Ramotswe’s tiny white van so beloved? What does it signify for her? Having finally passed beyond the hope of repair, it was towed away by a man who bought it for spare parts [p. 172]. Do you see any hope for its revival in future episodes?

10. Mma Ramotswe often thinks of her father, Obed Ramotswe: “She would give anything—anything—to have her father back with her, just for a day, so that she could tell him about how her life had been and how she owed everything to him and to his goodness to her” [p. 183]. It is often said that gratitude is a spiritual emotion. Why is gratitude such an important emotion in these books?

11. Mma Ramotswe says to Mma Makutsi, “Most of all I am grateful to you for being my friend … That is the best thing that anybody can be to anybody else—a friend” [p. 185]. What provokes these feelings of gratitude? How is the “sense of dreadful imminence, [the] rawness” that Precious feels, resolved on page 186? Discuss how, with scenes like this one, the series addresses small but important moments of life.

12. Puso provides the insight that Mma Ramotswe was missing in her investigation of the football team’s troubles. What is the “sudden, blinding insight that Puso had triggered” [p. 207]? Does it seem likely that Mr. Molofololo will learn what he needs to learn about himself and about his players [pp. 208–09]?

13. In most detective fiction, readers seek the identity of the criminal or the resolution of a mystery. Who are the criminals, and what is the mystery, in Tea Time for the Traditionally Built? How does Mma Ramotswe differ from most fictional detectives? How do plot and pace differ, and what unique features distinguish The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series from conventional mystery novels?

14. What are Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi celebrating with their lunch at the end of the novel? How does the fact that rain is coming add to the sense of a happy ending?

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

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Tears of the Giraffe (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series #2)
Alexander McCall Smith, 2000
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400031351

Summary
Precious Ramotswe is the eminently sensible and cunning proprietor of the only ladies’ detective agency in Botswana.

In Tears of the Giraffe she tracks a wayward wife, uncovers an unscrupulous maid, and searches for an American man who disappeared into the plains many years ago. In the midst of resolving uncertainties, pondering her impending marriage to a good, kind man, Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, and the promotion of her talented secretary (a graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College, with a mark of 97 per cent), she also finds her family suddenly and unexpectedly increased by two. (From the publisher.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Reviews
There's a good deal of bustle in the series' first volume, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, but hardly any suspense. And by the time you've made your way through the second, Tears of the Giraffe, and landed in the third, Morality for Beautiful Girls, you've realized that all this activity is much less about whodunit than why. It's also very much about the variety and resilience of a nation to which Smith (who grew up in what is now Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana) seems utterly devoted. As, of course, is Mma Ramotswe, who recognizes the difficulties her country faces—poverty, disease and drought, to name just a few—but would never choose to live anywhere else. Not even America.
Alida Becker - New York Times Book Review


Smart and sassy...Precious’ progress is charted in passages that have the power to amuse or shock or touch the heart, sometimes all at once.
Los Angeles Times


Alexander McCall Smith (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) offers the second .... installment of his dignified, humorous Botswanan series. In Tears of the Giraffe, PI Precious Ramotswe tracks a missing American man whose widowed mother appeals to Ramotswe; meanwhile, the imperturbable detective is endangered at home by her fiance's resentful maidts.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. What distinguishes Tears of the Giraffe from most other mysteries? What qualities make it such a charming and affirmative book? In what ways does Mma Ramotswe differ from such archetypal detectives as Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, and Philip Marlowe?

2. Mrs. Curtain says that when she first came to Africa, she had 'the usual ideas about it—a hotchpotch of images of big game and savannah and Kilimanjaro rising out of the cloud ... famines and civil wars and potbellied, half-naked children staring at the camera, sunk in hopelessness' [p. 27]. How does her experience of Africa alter these ideas? Why does she feel that 'everything about my own country seemed so shoddy and superficial when held up against what I saw in Africa' [p. 29]? What deeper and truer understanding of Africa does the novel itself offer readers who might share Mrs. Curtain's preconceptions?

3. Mma Ramotswe knows that Mrs. Curtain's case—finding out what happened to her son ten years ago—is what is referred to in The Principles of Private Detection as 'a stale enquiry' [p. 61]. Why does she accept the case, in spite of that? What special empathy does she feel for Mrs. Curtain?

4. When Mr J.L.B. Matekoni wonders why his apprentice mechanics take everything for granted, a friend explains, 'Young people these days cannot show enthusiasm.... It's not considered smart to be enthusiastic' [pp. 80-81].Is this an accurate observation? Where else does the novel demonstrate this kind of understanding of human behavior?

5. Why does Mr J.L.B. Matekoni allow himself to be talked into adopting the orphans? What specific memory enables him to open his heart to them? What does this act say about his character?

6. Mma Ramotswe thinks that 'the Americans were very clever; they sent rockets into space and invented machines which could think more quickly than any human being alive, but all this cleverness could also make them blind' [p. 113]. What is it that she thinks Americans are blind to? Is she right? How do her own values differ from those of mainstream America?

7. Tears of the Giraffe poses some difficult moral dilemmas for Mma Ramotswe. Should one always tell the truth, or is lying sometimes the better choice? Does a moral end justify immoral means? Which cases raise these questions? How do Mma Ramotswe and her assistant Mma Makutsi answer them?

8. When Mma Ramotswe prepares her accounts for the end of the financial year, she finds that 'she had not made a lot of money, but she had not made a loss, and she had been happy and entertained. That counted for infinitely more than a vigorously healthy balance sheet. In fact, she thought, annual accounts should include an item specifically headed Happiness, alongside expenses and receipts and the like. That figure in her accounts would be a very large one, she thought' [p. 225]. What enables Mma Ramotswe to live happily? How would most American CEOs and CFOs respond to the accounting innovation she suggests in the above passage?

9. How is Mma Ramotswe able to solve the mystery of Mrs. Curtain's son's disappearance? What role does her intuition play in figuring out what happened to him? Why is this information so important for Mrs. Curtain?

10. When Mma Potokwane tells Mr J.L.B. Matekoni that their pump makes a noise, 'as if it is in pain,' he replies that 'engines do feel pain.... They tell us of their pain by making a noise' [p. 77]. Later, he tells his apprentice, 'you cannot force metal.... If you force metal, it fights back' [p. 198]. What do these statements reveal about Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's character? About his approach to being a mechanic? Are his assertions merely fanciful or do they reveal some deeper truth about the relationship between the human and the inanimate world?

11. One of Mma Makutsi's classmates at the Botswana Secretarial College tells her that 'men choose women for jobs on the basis of their looks. They choose the beautiful ones and give them jobs. To the others, they say: We are very sorry. All the jobs have gone' [p. 109]. In what ways does Tears of the Giraffe suggest ways around the stifling roles dictated by 'brute biology'? What examples does it provide of girls and women overcoming the restrictions placed on them and assuming traditionally male roles?

12. The housemother of the orphanage explains to Motholeli, 'We must look after other people.... Other people are our brothers and sisters. If they are unhappy, then we are unhappy. If they are hungry, then we are hungry' [p. 124]. In what ways does the novel demonstrate this ethic in action? How is this way of relating to other people different from the starker examples of American individualism?

13. In what ways are Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and Mma Ramotswe well-suited to each other? How do they treat each other in the novel? How do they complement each other?

14. In what ways is Tears of the Giraffe as much about family relationships as it is about solving crimes? How does the novel provide emotionally satisfying resolutions to the parental pain that both Mrs. Curtain and Mma Ramotswe have suffered?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea
Dina Nayeri, 2013
Penguing Group USA
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487040


Summary
Growing up in a small rice-farming village in 1980s Iran, eleven-year-old Saba Hafezi and her twin sister, Mahtab, are captivated by America. They keep lists of English words and collect illegal Life magazines, television shows, and rock music.

So when her mother and sister disappear, leaving Saba and her father alone in Iran, Saba is certain that they have moved to America without her. But her parents have taught her that “all fate is written in the blood,” and that twins will live the same life, even if separated by land and sea.

As she grows up in the warmth and community of her local village, falls in and out of love, and struggles with the limited possibilities in post-revolutionary Iran, Saba envisions that there is another way for her story to unfold. Somewhere, it must be that her sister is living the Western version of this life. And where Saba’s world has all the grit and brutality of real life under the new Islamic regime, her sister’s experience gives her a freedom and control that Saba can only dream of.

Filled with a colorful cast of characters and presented in a bewitching voice that mingles the rhythms of Eastern storytelling with modern Western prose, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea is a tale about memory and the importance of controlling one’s own fate. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979
• Where—Iran
• Raised—Oklahoma, USA
• Education—B.A. Princeton University; M.B.A., M.Ed.,
   Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Iowa City, Iowa (the Iowa Writers'
   Workshop)


Dina Nayeri was born in the middle of a revolution in Iran and moved to Oklahoma at ten-years-old. Her debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, was released in 2013 by Riverhead Books (Penguin), translated to 13 foreign languages, and selected as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers book. Her work is published or scheduled for publication in over 20 countries and has appeared in Granta New Voices, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salon, Glamour, and elsewhere. She holds an MBA and a Master of Education, both from Harvard, and a BA from Princeton. She has worked in high fashion, management consulting, university admissions, investment banking, and once as a grumpy lifeguard. Now Dina is at work on her second novel (also about an Iranian family) at the Iowa Writers Workshop where she is a Truman Capote Fellow and Teaching Writing Fellow  (Fom the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Lovely.
Vanity Fair

A feel-good family tale.
Cosmopolitan

This ambitious novel set in northern Iran in the decade after the 1979 revolution contains not a teaspoon but a ton of history, imagination, and longing. Beginning with the 1981 disappearance of 11-year-old Saba Hafezi’s twin sister, Mahtab, and their mother, Khanom, Nayeri interweaves Saba’s family trauma as seen through the eyes of the women of her seaside village, along with fantasies about Mahtab’s teenage fascination with everything American, shared by her friends Reza and Ponneh. Saba loves Reza, but allows herself to be married off to old Abbas Hossein Abbas, expecting to eventually gain freedom by becoming a rich widow. The characters’ dreams are shattered, however, amid rising violence, as beautiful Ponneh is beaten for wearing red high-heels, Saba is violently attacked by two chador-clad women working for her husband and the new regime, and another woman is hanged for defying the new Islamic norms. Saba’s first tentative protests give way to more drastic decisions as the realities of postrevolution Iran and the truth about her mother and sister sink in. Nayeri crams so much into her story, especially Saba’s distracting fiction of her sister’s life in the United States, that her lyrical evocation of a vanishing Iran gets lost in an irritating narrative tangle.
Publishers Weekly


Nayeri’s highly accomplished debut is a rich, multilayered reading experience. Structurally complex, the overriding theme is storytelling in all its forms, and the fine line between truth and lies. Each one of the large cast of characters is fully realized and sympathetic. Saba is a captivating heroine whose tragedies and triumphs will carry readers on a long but engrossing ride..
Library Journal


Elegant aspirational novel of life in post-revolutionary Iran.... Twin sisters Saba and Mahtab Hafezi live at the end of the universe--or, more specifically, in a tiny rice-farming village deep in the Iranian interior, having moved from Tehran to escape the eyes and hands of the mullahs and revolutionary guards.... [I]n Nayeri's (Another Jekyll, Another Hyde, 2012, etc.) richly imaginative chronicle, everyone dreams there, not least Saba, whose expectations crumble in the face of a reality for which she's not prepared.... It takes a village full of sometimes odd, sometimes ordinary people to afford Saba the wherewithal to realize her dreams, which take her far, far from there. Lyrical, humane and hopeful; a welcome view of the complexities of small-town life, in this case in a place that inspires fear instead of sympathy.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Saba invents a life for Mahtab that parallels her own. How or why does she choose these particular scenes or moments of Mahtab’s life to imagine? How do the stakes of Mahtab’s decisions change over the course of the book as Saba herself grows up and her own desires evolve?

2. “The beauty of being Mahtab is that you need no partner at all,” Saba tells Khanom Omidi in one of her descriptions of her sister’s American life. Why is this idea so beautiful to Saba? How does it foreshadow the decisions she will make later in her own life?

3. In what ways is A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea a story about storytelling? What are some important narratives that the characters create for one another, or for themselves? What are the effects of these stories in the novel as a whole?

4. The stories told by the characters do not necessarily have to be the truth in order to be honest. What kinds of untruths are told in this book? How are they positive? How are they negative?

5. Talk about the book’s four first-person narrators: Khanom Basir, Khanom Mansoori, Khanom Omidi, and Dr. Zohreh. How do these women’s perspectives change your understanding of Saba’s life story, especially the disappearance of her mother and sister? Why are their insights important?

6. Discuss the status of women in this book. In what ways are they oppressed and mistreated? In what ways are they revered and powerful? How do Saba and Ponneh deal with these tensions? In this society, how is it meaningful that Saba grew up with a father but no mother?

7. Khanom Basir constantly criticizes the way Saba’s mother raised her and Mahtab before her disappearance. From what you know of Maman, do you agree with Khanom Basir? Did Maman’s boldness make her a bad mother? Did she put her daughters in jeopardy, or did she teach them how to be independent women? Khanom Basir says, “God will never forgive Bahareh for her impractical ways, for teaching her daughter to search for meaning in illegal nothings.” Did this lesson in fact ruin Saba’s life, or did it save it?

8. “Good-byes are such luxuries,” Khanom Basir says. Which is worse for Saba: the loss of her family, or the uncertainty surrounding it?

9. How does Ponneh’s guilt about Farnaz’s execution resemble Saba’s guilt about Mahtab’s drowning?

10. After harboring so much hatred for him, why does Saba ultimately feel so bad letting Abbas die?

11. Saba wants her freedom, but what exactly is she longing to be free from? Her past? The inevitable consequences of a future in Iran? Longing itself? Discuss.
(Questions from the author's website.)

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Telegraph Avenue
Michael Chabon, 2012
HarperCollins
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061493348


Summary
As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland.

Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland.

When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise.

Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life.

An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all its own, Telegraph Avenue is the great American novel we've been waiting for. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 24, 1963
• Where—Washington, D.C.
• Education—B.A., University of Pittsburgh; M.F.A., University of California-Irvine
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in Berkeley, California


Michael Chabon (SHAY-bon) is an American novelist and short story writer. His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was published in 1988 when he was still a graduate student. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that New York Times's John Leonard, once referred to as Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. All told, Chabon has published nearly 10 novels, including a Young Adult novel, a children's book, two collection of short stories, and two collections of essays.

Early years
Michael Chabon was born in Washington, DC to Robert Chabon, a physician and lawyer, and Sharon Chabon, a lawyer. Chabon said he knew he wanted to be a writer when, at the age of ten, he wrote his first short story for a class assignment. When the story received an A, Chabon recalls, "I thought to myself, 'That's it. That's what I want to do.... And I never had any second thoughts or doubts."

His parents divorced when Chabon was 11, and he lived in Columbia, Maryland, with his mother nine months of the year and with his father in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during the summertime. He has written of his mother's marijuana use, recalling her "sometime around 1977 or so, sitting in the front seat of her friend Kathy's car, passing a little metal pipe back and forth before we went in to see a movie." He grew up hearing Yiddish spoken by his mother's parents and siblings.

Chabon attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied under Chuck Kinder and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1984. He then went to graduate school at the University of California-Irvine, where he received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing.

Initial success
While he was at UC, his Master's thesis was published as a novel. Unbeknownst to Chabon, his professor sent it to a literary agent—the result was a publishing contract for The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and an impressive $155,000 advance. Mysteries appeared in 1988, becoming a bestseller and catapulting Chabon to literary stardom.

Chabon was ambivalent about his new-found fame. He turned down offers to appear in a Gap ad and to be featured as one of People's "50 Most Beautiful People." Years later, he reflected on the success of his first novel:

The upside was that I was published and I got a readership.... [The] downside...was that, emotionally, this stuff started happening and I was still like, "Wait a minute, is my thesis done yet?" It took me a few years to catch up.

Personal
His success had other adverse affects: it caused an imbalance between his and his wife's careers. He was married at the time to poet Lollie Groth, and they ended up divorcing in 1991. Two years later he married the writer Ayelet Waldman; the couple lives in Berkeley, California, with their four children.

Chabon has said that the "creative free-flow" he has with Waldman inspired the relationship between Sammy Clay and Rosa Saks in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Entertainment Weekly declared the couple "a famous—and famously in love—writing pair, like Nick and Nora Charles with word processors and not so much booze."

In a 2012 NPR interview, Chabon told Guy Raz that he writes from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. each day, Sunday through Thursday. He attempts 1,000 words a day. Commenting on the rigidity of his routine, Chabon said,

There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they're big, and they have a lot of words in them.... The best environment, at least for me, is a very stable, structured kind of life.

Novels
1988 - The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
1995 - The Wonder Boys
2000 - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
2002 - Summerland (Young Adult)
2004 - The Final Solution
2007 - The Yiddish Policemen's Union
2007 - Gentlemen of the Road
2012 - Telegraph Avenue
2016 - Moonglow

(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/2/2016.)

Book Reviews
[A]n amazingly rich, emotionally detailed story that addresses [Chabon's] perennial themes—about fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and the consolations of art—while reaching outward to explore the relationship between time past and time present, the weight (or lightness, as the case may be) of history, and the possibility of redemption and forgiveness…Mr. Chabon can write about just about anything…And write about it not as an author regurgitating copious amounts of research, but with a real, lived-in sense of empathy and passion…for the most part he does such a graceful job of ventriloquism with his characters that the reader forgets they are fictional creations. [Chabon's] people become so real to us, their problems so palpably netted in the author's buoyant, expressionistic prose, that the novel gradually becomes a genuinely immersive experience—something increasingly rare in our ADD age.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


A genuinely moving story about race and class, parenting and marriage…Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time, powering out sentences that are the equivalent of executing a triple back flip on a bucking bull while juggling chain saws and making love to three women.
Esquire


 Chabon’s hugely likable characters all face crises of existential magnitude, rendered in an Electra Glide flow of Zen sentences and zinging metaphors that make us wish the needle would never arrive at the final groove.
Elle


A beautiful, prismatic maximalism of description and tone, a sly meditation on appropriation as the real engine of integration, and an excellent rationale for twelve-page sentences.
GQ


Virtuosity” is the word most commonly associated with Chabon, and if Telegraph Avenue, the latest from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is at first glance less conceptual than its predecessors, the sentences are no less remarkable. Set during the Bush/Kerry election, in Chabon’s home of Berkeley, Calif., it follows the flagging fortunes of Brokeland Records, a vintage record store on the titular block run by Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, currently threatened with closure by Pittsburgh Steeler’s quarterback-turned-entrepreneur Gibson “G Bad” Goode’s plans to “restore, at a stroke, the commercial heart of a black neighborhood” with one of his Dogpile “Thang” emporiums. The community mobilizes and confronts this challenge to the relative racial harmony enjoyed by the white Jaffe; his gay Tarantino-enthusiast son, Julie; and the African-American Archy, whose partner, Gwen Shanks, is not only pregnant but finds the midwife business she runs with Aviva, Jaffe’s wife, in legal trouble following a botched delivery. Making matters worse is Stallings’s father, Luther, a faded blaxploitation movie star with a Black Panther past, and the appearance of Titus, the son Archy didn’t know he had. All the elements of a socially progressive contemporary novel are in place, but Chabon’s preference for retro—the reader is seldom a page away from a reference to Marvel comics, kung fu movies, or a coveted piece of ’70s vinyl—quickly wears out its welcome. Worse, Chabon’s approach to race is surprisingly short on nuance and marred by a goofy cameo from a certain charismatic senator from Illinois.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) If any novelist can pack the entire American zeitgeist into 500 pages, it's Chabon (The Yiddish Policeman's Union). Here, he deftly treads race, class, gender, and generation lines, showing how they continue to define us even as they're crossed.... [A] prodigious novel. Ambitious, densely written, sometimes very funny, and fabulously over the top, here's a rare book that really could be the great American novel. Highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


(Starred review.) A magnificently crafted, exuberantly alive, emotionally lustrous, and socially intricate saga.... Bubbling with lovingly curated knowledge about everything from jazz to pregnancy.... Chabon’s rhapsodically detailed, buoyantly plotted, warmly intimate cross-cultural tale of metamorphoses is electric with suspense, humor, and bebop dialogue…. An embracing, radiant masterpiece.
Booklist


(Starred review.) An end-of-an-era epic celebrating the bygone glories of vinyl records, comic-book heroes and blaxploitation flicks in a world gone digital. The novelist, his characters and the readers who will most love this book all share a passion for popular culture and an obsession with period detail. Set on the grittier side in the Bay Area of the fairly recent past (when multimedia megastores such as Tower and Virgin were themselves predators rather than casualties to online commerce), the plot involves generational relationships between two families, with parallels that are more thematically resonant than realistic....Yet the warmth Chabon...feels toward his characters trumps the intricacies and implausibilities of the plot, as the novel straddles and blurs all sorts of borders: black and white, funk and jazz, Oakland and Berkeley, gay and straight....
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. There are many different variations on father-and-son relationships—both real and makeshift—explored in the novel. What might the author be trying to convey through these complicated liaisons?

2. The majority of the characters in the novel are members of some minority group—African American, Jewish, Asian. Would you say that Telegraph Avenue is fundamentally a novel about race?

3. Like her husband, Archy, Gwen is African American, but of a decidedly different social class, upbringing, and education. How do these differences affect her marriage, as well as her position in this close-knit Oakland community—both in her own view and in the view of others?

4. Telegraph Avenue, the real-life Bay Area street at the center of the story, is described as "the ragged fault where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted." How do the conflicting cultures of upper-middle-class Berkeley and working-class Oakland clash in the novel?

5. Why do Archy and Nat see the imminent arrival of ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode's mega-mall as a threat not only to their record shop, but to the community at large?

6. As the legendary Berkeley Birth Partners, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe have worked together for many years, and their husbands are business partners as well. Beyond their professional lives, what sense do you get of the friendship between these two women? How does the crisis that confronts their business bring out the best and/or worst in their pairing?

7. When a home birth goes awry, the midwife Gwen goes ballistic when faced with criticism from an obstetrician at the hospital. The emotional outburst severely jeopardizes her career. Do you think she is justified in her reaction, or should she have tempered her response?

8. Telegraph Avenue is set during the summer of 2004 in Oakland, California. Do this time and place have special bearing on the events of the novel, or could the story take place in a different or more ambiguous setting?

9. An intriguing "character" in the novel is Fifty-Eight, the African grey parrot that belongs to Cochise Jones. What does its name mean and what do you think the bird might symbolize or represent?

10. Some of the characters in the novel seem to be holding onto the past, as evidenced by their love of vinyl records and 1970s "Blaxploitation" martial arts films. How do you think this attachment to the past affects the characters' grasp on their present realities?

11. Archy Stallings makes some questionable choices in his dealings with his wife, Gwen, his son, Titus, his partner, Nat, and his business rival, Gibson Goode. Do you find him a sympathetic character?

12. How would you assess the relationship between Julius and Titus? Is it a genuine friendship for both of them?

13. To what extent are the characters in this novel in control of their own destinies, and how much does the inevitability of uncontrollable change come into play?

14. The novel is filled with colorful, eccentric characters. Which did you feel were the most arresting? The most real? Why?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Telex from Cuba
Rachel Kushner, 2008
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416561040

Summary
An astonishingly wise, ambitious, and riveting novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro's revolution—a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. The first novel to tell the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958, this is a masterful debut.

Young Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom—three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child's dream-world, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of grown-ups around them—the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence.

In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a caberet dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Maziere, whose seductive demeanor can't mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raúl Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane platation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of "yanqui" revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. If their parents manage to remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.

At the time, urgent news was conveyed by telex. Kushner's first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1968
• Where—Eugene, Oregon, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California, Berkeley; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Finalist, National Book Award
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Rachel Kushner a writer who lives in Los Angeles. She was born in Eugene, Oregon, and moved to San Francisco in 1979. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and earned her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University in 2000.

Kushner lived in New York City for 8 years, where she was an editor at Grand Street (magazine) and BOMB (magazine). She has written widely on contemporary art, including numerous features in Artforum. She is currently an editor of Soft Targets, praised by the New York Times as an "excellent, Brooklyn-based journal of art, fiction and poetry."

Her first novel, Telex from Cuba, was published in July 2008. It was the cover review of the July 6, 2008 issue of the New York Times Book Review, where it was described as a "multi-layered and absorbing" novel whose "sharp observations about human nature and colonialist bias provide a deep understanding of the revolution's causes." It was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. (From Wikipedia.)

Kuskner's second novel, The Flamethrowers, issued in 2013, also received extraordinary praise. James Wood of The New Yorker extolled: "the first twenty pages could make any writer's career," while Dwight Garner of The New York Times said, the book "unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember. Jonathan Franzen in his NY Times review called Kushner "a thrilling and prodigious novelist."

Book Reviews
The novel’s real draws are its complex relationships and well-researched cultural context, not the big telex-worthy events.... Kushner’s sharp observations about human nature and colonialist bias provide a deep understanding of the revolution’s causes.... Kushner herself evinces an intimate knowledge of her novel’s world and characters. Her style is sure and sharp, studded with illuminating images.... These potent moments...make the novel a dreamy, sweet-tart meditation on a vanished way of life and a failed attempt to make the world over in America’s image. Out of tropical rot, Kushner has fashioned a story that will linger like a whiff of decadent Colony perfume.
Susan Cokal - New York Times Book Review

Wonderful reviews have been coming thick and fast for Telex from Cuba, and they're more than well deserved. This first novel by Rachel Kushner is a pure treat from the cover to the very last page. It's the kind of thing you should stock up on to give sick friends as presents; they'll forget their arthritis and pneumonia, I promise, once they walk into a land that's gone now, but not yet quite forgotten: Cuba in the last few years before Fidel Castro took over…A world we'll never see again, any part of it. Rachel Kushner uses her considerable powers to bring it back for us, one last time.
Carolyn See - Washington Post

Kushner's colorful, character-driven debut succinctly captures the essence of life for a gilded circle of American expats in pre-Castro Cuba, chronicling a mélange of philandering spouses, privileged carousers and their rebellious children. K.C. Stites and Everly Lederer are raised among the American industrial strongholds of the United Fruit Company sugar plantation and the Nicaro nickel mines. As adolescents, they are confronted by the complexities of local warfare and backstabbing politics, while their parents remain ignorant of the impending revolution. Meanwhile, in Havana, burlesque dancer Rachel K and her former SS officer companion become entangled in Castro's revolution. Toward the end of 1957, K.C.'s brother, Del, joins the rebels, and within a month the United Fruit Company's cane fields are ablaze. Throughout the following year, the attacks on U.S.-operated businesses intensify; political and personal loyalties are shuffled and betrayed; and the violence between the rebels and Batista's forces escalate. The action, while slowed at times by Kushner's tendency to revisit plot points from multiple points of view, culminates in a riveting drama. Given the recent Cuba headlines, Kushner's tale, passionately told and intensively researched, couldn't have come at a more opportune time.
Publishers Weekly

Wonderful reviews have been coming thick and fast for Telex from Cuba, and they’re more than well deserved,” notes the Washington Post. Drawing.... While reviewers praise the cinematic period details, history lesson, and political intrigue, some disagree about the many third-person perspectives (philandering Americans, alcoholic wives, a burlesque dancer and mistress to Cuban politicians) that crowd the narrative. But overall, Kushner’s magnificent debut re-creates a lost world and era.
Bookmarks Magazine

Kushner bathes her story in period details that draw listeners into a lost world of Pullman cars, private servants, and expatriate parties. James possesses a jaded tone that is perfect for characters insulated by colonial society. His reading purposely lacks sentimentality and thereby reflects the detachment of people whose privilege renders them blind to a revolution. —Jerry Eberle
Booklist

Los Angeles resident Kushner's first novel follows the lives of American ex-pats and others in pre-revolutionary Cuba. In 1950s Cuba, employees of the vast, powerful United Fruit Company enjoy luxuries galore in their exclusive island communities while poverty and unrest stirs around them. Growing up on United Fruit property, Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites alternately share the stories of their strange, privileged lives. Through the children's eyes, the social morays, recklessness and fears of the adults are revealed. While the children relay their upbringing in the Oriente Province, an exotic dancer, Rachel K, casts a spell on politicians and rebels alike in a nightclub in Havana. The mysterious Rachel K and one of her patrons, a French traitor, become deeply involved in the growing revolution, which leads them down an accelerating path toward a new and different future. Castro's coup serves as a riveting backdrop and famous figures, like Fidel and his brother Raul, populate the narrative. When the revolution reaches the gates of the American community, Everly and K.C. glimpse the world outside their secluded utopia, even as their socialite parents hold fast to their ignorance. The danger and violence of revolution engross Rachel K and the Frenchman, both of whom lack for a homeland, and they seem to thrive off the conflict. For the Americans, this harsh new backlash eventually shatters their previously tranquil lives, and the home they never truly possessed is seized in a flurry of patrimony. Soundly researched and gorgeously written, the creative story also serves as a history lesson. An imaginative work that brings Cuban-American history to life.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Background
Cuba has long fascinated and compelled writers — from Ernest Hemingway and Graham Green to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Russell Banks. Most writers and readers know about the glamorous, renegade, romantic, often corrupt communities of expats and iconic locals in Havana. But there's another piece of the American experience. For half a century, the United States controlled the sugar and nickel operations in Cuba — the country's two main exports — centered in the lavish, expatriate "sister" enclaves of Preston and Nicaro, 600 miles east of Havana, but intimately connected.

The United Fruit Company owned 300,000 acres in northeast Oriente Province, an area long considered the cradle of Cuban revolutions. In the midst of UF Co's vast cane plantation were 100 acres the company did not own. Those 100 acres belonged to Fidel and Raul Castro's father. The sons, who grew up excluded from a privileged American world, started the revolution there. Telex from Cuba is the story of that world, told from the point of view of three narrators: a boy whose father runs United Fruit's sugar operation, a girl whose father runs the nickel operation, and a French agitator who helps train the rebels.

Like every great novel told through the eyes of a child, from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird to Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, Telex from Cuba seduces the reader into the drama of a family encountering unexpected conflict and the story of the gradual awakening of adolescents to issues of class, race, and social injustice. KC Stites and Everly Lederer are extraordinarily compelling narrators, and their parents and their parents' friends are portrayed witha combination of scrutiny and forgiveness that beguiles the reader. The book's multiple perspectives — including that of the more jaded La Maziere — round Telex into not just a coming-of-age tale but a story of political change. The revolution does come. The families are evacuated. The company town is expropriated. And it is all told in a novel that will put Rachel Kushner on the map of contemporary American literature.

_______________

1. KC Stites tells his story as an adult. Why do you think Rachel Kushner chose to write his story in first person (as opposed to the others told in third person) based on a grown man's memories? How might the story be different if a young KC was telling it?

2. Everly notes that "If her parents ever did get rich, their old selves would hate their new selves" (p. 42). Discuss the importance of social class in 1950s Cuba, both amongst the expatriates (the Stites, Lederers, Allains, etc.), their servants (Annie, Willy, etc.), and the locals, such as Mr. Gonzalez. Are there rigid laws, or can people maneuver between classes? Why are issues straightened out native to native (pg. 187)?

3. La Maziere believed Rachel K "gauzed her person in persona, but sensed the person slipping through, person and persona in an elaborate tangle" (pg. 55). Discuss the significance of identity in Telex from Cuba. Who is not what they seem? The Lederer daughters have a doll, Scribbles, whose face they can erase and then re-draw. Are other people capable of reinventing themselves?

4. Why do these families move to Cuba? Do they arrive seeking to escape their pasts, hoping for new business opportunities, or looking forward to a new adventure? When they leave, have they accomplished their goals? What do they take away?

5. Throughout the novel, many characters note the red haze of nickel oxide that floats from the company's mines and covers the whole area. What, if anything, does this red dust symbolize?

6. "A human trapped inside a monkey trapped inside a cage. But when she tried to put him down, he screeched like a vicious animal" (pg. 97). What role do animals play in this novel? Consider the shark Del insists on killing, Mrs. LaDue's caged monkey Poncho, and the pig Mr. Stites beats to death to teach KC a lesson.

7. In this novel, what is the significance of one's nationality? Rachel K claims to be French, people believe La Maziere is German, Mr. Carrington is actually Cuban, and Deke Havelin renounces his American citizenship to become Cuban. Is a person's nationality a matter of choice, where they're born, the family they're born into, or how they appear to others?

8. What drives La Mazière? Why is he in Cuba, and why does a Frenchman join an army of Cuban rebels? Does he have true political motivations, or is he simply an instigator? And will he always yearn for a "luminous bubble, for an impossible time of privilege and turmoil" (pg. 200)?

9. Do you believe the story Rachel K tells La Maziere about her past, or does she merely like to play games? Does she have true feelings for him? What is the significance of her painted on fishnets?

10. When Mr. Carrington returns home from being kidnapped, his wife never sees him on the lawn because the indoor lights are on: "she'd have to put herself in darkness in order to see" (pg. 253). When thinking about Rachel K preferring to sleep without blankets so she can freeze and then make herself warm, La Maziere ponders what the director said about Woodsie, that she "gives radiant joy, but then she takes it away" (pg. 229). What do these observations imply about the women? Can you think of other examples of dichotomy?

11. Why does KC give Everly the Pullman car's door handle? What does it represent to each of them? Does KC truly have feelings for her, or does he want to please his mother?

12. KC thinks Everly has a funny look, but "maybe everyone has that look, but they know to cover it" (pg. 267). Which characters are best at wearing masks?

13. As they're being evacuated, Everly looks over the island from the boat and realizes "It's so nice - without us" (pg. 277). How did the families of the United Fruit Company impact Cuba, for both the good and bad? Will anyone be sad to see them leave?

14. In the closing words of Telex from Cuba, KC states "You don't call the dead. The dead call you" (pg. 317). What does he mean by this? Who is calling KC and the other families who once lived in Cuba?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Tell the Wolves I'm Home
Carol Rifka Brunt, 2012
Random House
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679644194


Summary
In this striking literary debut, Carol Rifka Brunt unfolds a moving story of love, grief, and renewal as two lonely people become the unlikeliest of friends and find that sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost someone until you’ve found them.
 
1987. There’s only one person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus, and that’s her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn’s company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June’s world is turned upside down. But Finn’s death brings a surprise acquaintance into June’s life—someone who will help her to heal, and to question what she thinks she knows about Finn, her family, and even her own heart.
 
At Finn’s funeral, June notices a strange man lingering just beyond the crowd. A few days later, she receives a package in the mail. Inside is a beautiful teapot she recognizes from Finn’s apartment, and a note from Toby, the stranger, asking for an opportunity to meet. As the two begin to spend time together, June realizes she’s not the only one who misses Finn, and if she can bring herself to trust this unexpected friend, he just might be the one she needs the most.
 
An emotionally charged coming-of-age novel, Tell the Wolves I’m Home is a tender story of love lost and found, an unforgettable portrait of the way compassion can make us whole again. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Carol Rifka Brunt’s work has appeared in several literary journals, including North American Review and The Sun. In 2006, she was one of three fiction writers who received the New Writing Ventures award and, in 2007, she received a generous Arts Council grant to write Tell the Wolves I’m Home, her first novel. Originally from New York, she currently lives in England with her husband and three children. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Tremendously moving.... Brunt strikes a difficult balance, imbuing June with the disarming candor of a child and the melancholy wisdom of a heart-scarred adult.
The Wall Street Journal


With this debut novel that flawlessly encapsulates the fragile years during the mid-'80s when the specter of AIDS began to haunt society at large, Carol Rifka Brunt establishes herself as an emerging author to watch.... Tell the Wolves I'm HOme will undoubtedly be this summer's literary sleeper hit.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


In this lovely debut novel set in the 1980s, Carol Rifka Brunt takes us under the skin and inside the tumultuous heart of June Elbus.... Distracted parents, tussling adolescents, the awful ghost-world of the AIDS-afflicted before AZT—all of it springs to life in Brunt’s touching and ultimately hopeful book.
People Magazine


Fourteen-year-old June is a loner whose favorite activity is going to the woods in her lace-up boots and Gunne Sax dress and pretending she's a medieval falconer. It's the 1980s, and the only person who understands June is her gay uncle Finn, a famous artist dying of AIDS. June's visits with him in New York listening to Mozart and exploring the city have made her older sister Greta jealous. A popular girl with a starring role in the school musical, Greta treats June cruelly, hiding her devastation that they are no longer best friends. In the end, Finn's final creation, a portrait he painted of June and Greta, along with his secret lover, Toby, serve to unite the sisters. Verdict: Brunt's debut novel is both a painful reminder of the ill-informed responses to a once little-known disease and a delightful romp through an earlier decade. The relationship issues with parents and siblings should appeal to YA audiences, but adult readers will enjoy the suspenseful plot and quirky characters. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [A] transcendent debut.... Peopled by characters who will live in readers’ imaginations long after the final page is turned, Brunt’s novel is a beautifully bittersweet mix of heartbreak and hope.
Booklist


There is much to admire in this novel. The subtle insight on sibling rivalry and the examination of love make for a poignant debut.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Toby initiates a relationship with June that necessarily involves secrets kept from her parents. Can this ever be right? Is it ever okay for an adult to have a secret relationship with a child? Even if it's formed out of the best of intentions?

2. Every relationship in the book is tinged with jealousy and/or envy. How is this played out in each of the relationships? Can jealousy ever be a positive thing? Does loving someone too much always lead to jealousy?

3. “My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich”

Readers have said that they feel very negatively towards June's mother, Danni. How do you feel about her? How much is she to blame for the events in the book?

4. “The sun kept on with its slipping away, and I thought how many small good things in the world might be resting on the shoulders of something terrible.”

How does this speak to the events in Tell the Wolves I'm Home? Can terrible things like AIDS ever result in small good things?

5. "You get into habits with people. Ways of being with them..."

Toby says this to June when they're talking about her relationship with Greta. Many sisters (and brothers) have fractious relationships as teenagers then grow up to be friends. Do you think that will be the case with Greta and June? Have you had an experience like this with your own sibling(s)?

6. If you were around in the late 80s, do you remember anything about your perception of AIDS and the fear surrounding the disease?

7. How has society's reaction to homosexuality changed over the last 25 years? Could this story have taken place in 2012?

8. Greta is older, more savvy and knows more than June, but June sometimes seems wiser than her sister. How is this so? Does knowledge always equal wisdom?

9. Do you think June will ever show Greta the secret basement room and the stash of Finn's paintings or will she always keep this to herself?

10. Do you blame June for what happens to Toby towards the end of the book? Do you think June will ever forgive herself for what happened that night?

11. Do you think the portrait was more beautiful before or after it was restored to its original state. Can a work of art ever be improved on by external additions or is the artist's vision and intention the most important aspect of art?

12. June would like to escape to the Middle Ages. All her favorite places are escapist in nature. Would June actually be happy if her wish of time travel was granted? How does that wish change over the course of the story? Is escapism ever valuable? How do you escape?
(Questions from author's website.)

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The Tempest Tales
Walter Mosley, 2008
Simon & Schuster
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416599494

Summary
Mistaken for another man, wily Tempest is "accidentally" shot by police. Sent to receive the judgment of heaven he discovers that his sins, according to St. Peter, condemn him to hell. Tempest takes exception to the saint's definition of sin; he refuses to go to hell and explains that he, a poor Black man living in Harlem, did what he did for family, friends, and love.

St. Peter, whose judgment has never been challenged, understands the secret of damnation and heaven's celestial authority—mortals must willingly accept their sins.

Should Tempest continue his refusal, heaven will collapse, thereby allowing hell and its keeper, the fallen angel Satan, to reign supreme. The only solution: send this recalcitrant mortal back to earth with an accounting angel, whose all-important mission is to persuade Tempest to accept his sins and St. Peter's judgment.

In this episodic battle with heaven and hell for his ultimate destiny, Tempest also takes the reader on a philosophic and humorous journey where free will is pitted against class and race—and the music of heaven is pitted against the blues. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 12, 1952
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Johnson State College
• Awards—Mystery Writers Grand Master; Shamus Award, Private Eye Writers of America; Grammy Award for Best Album Notes
• Currently—lives in New York City

When President Bill Clinton announced that Walter Mosley was one of his favorite writers, Black Betty (1994), Mosley's third detective novel featuring African American P.I. Easy Rawlins, soared up the bestseller lists. It's little wonder Clinton is a fan: Mosley's writing, an edgy, atmospheric blend of literary and pulp fiction, is like nobody else's. Some of his books are detective fiction, some are sci-fi, and all defy easy categorization.

Mosley was born in Los Angeles, traveled east to college, and found his way into writing fiction by way of working as a computer programmer, caterer, and potter. His first "Easy Rawlins" book, Gone Fishin' didn't find a publisher, but the next, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) most certainly did—and the world was introduced to a startlingly different P.I.

More
Part of the success of the Easy Rawlins series is Mosley's gift for character development. Easy, who stumbles into detective work after being laid off by the aircraft industry, ages in real time in the novels, marries, and experiences believable financial troubles and successes. In addition, Mosley's ability to evoke atmosphere—the dangers and complexities of life in the toughest neighborhoods of Los Angeles—truly shines. His treatment of historic detail (the Rawlins books take place in Los Angeles from the 1940s to the mid-1960s) is impeccable, his dialogue fine-tuned and dead-on.

In 2002, Mosley introduced a new series featuring Fearless Jones, an Army vet with a rigid moral compass, and his friend, a used-bookstore owner named Paris Minton. The series is set in the black neighborhoods of 1950s L.A. and captures the racial climate of the times. Mosley himself summed up the first book, 2002's Fearless Jones, as "comic noir with a fringe of social realism."

Despite the success of his bestselling crime series, Mosley is a writer who resolutely resists pigeonholing. He regularly pens literary fiction, short stories, essays, and sci-fi novels, and he has made bold forays into erotica, YA fiction, and political polemic. "I didn't start off being a mystery writer," he said in an interview with NPR. "There's many things that I am." Fans of this talented, genre-bending author could not agree more!

Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:

• Mosley is an avid potter in his spare time.

• He was a computer programmer for 15 years before publishing his first book. He is an avid collector of comic books. And ahe believes that war is rarely the answer, especially not for its innocent victims.

• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, here is what he said:

The Stranger by Albert Camus probably had the greatest impact on me. I suppose that's because it was a novel about ideas in a very concrete and sensual world. This to me is the most difficult stretch for a writer—to talk about the mind and spirit while using the most pedestrian props. Also the hero is not an attractive personality. He's just a guy, a little removed, who comes to heroism without anyone really knowing it. This makes him more like an average Joe rather than someone beyond our reach or range.

(Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble .)

Book Reviews
Mosley, best known for his gritty Easy Rawlins mysteries, explores cosmic questions of justice and redemption in this odd tale of Tempest Landry, a black man shot dead by police when they thought he was pulling a gun. Landry throws the afterlife into turmoil by refusing to accept St. Peter's judgment that he must spend eternity in Hell. Three years after his death, Landry is returned to Manhattan, with a new face and an angel named Joshua to watch over him. As Landry sets up one morally complex situation after another, Joshua engages him in discussions of situational ethics, trying to get Landry to accept that he is a sinner and deserves damnation. Eventually, Landry recruits Satan himself in his cause. The interesting concept is not matched by its execution, but some readers may find Landry a humorous creation and appreciate his eventual solution to his dilemma.
Publishers Weekly

Tempest Landry, a quick-witted African American resident of Harlem, NY, is walking home when a case of mistaken identity leads to his being shot by police. He finds himself standing in line at the gates of heaven waiting to talk to Saint Peter, who reviews his past transgressions and finds him wanting. Tempest is denied entry into heaven and ordered to hell. Believing his "sins" justified and heaven refusing to see the full truth, Tempest refuses to go and challenges Saint Peter to prove to him that he is a sinner. And so begins Tempest's return to Earth with a denizen of heaven, Joshua Angel, to convince Tempest of Saint Peter's edict. Of course, the devil wants Tempest's soul and is scheming to use Tempest to destroy heaven. In a salute to Langston Hughes's Jesse B. Semple stories, Mosley, best-known for his Easy Rawlins mystery series, has written a humorous, thought-provoking, and accessible literary tale of the concept and treatment of sin and sinners in contemporary times. Recommended for popular fiction and African American fiction collections.
Joy St. John - Library Journal

Tempest Landry, a black man gunned down by white cops in Harlem, finds himself judged by St. Peter at heaven’s gate—and disputes the result.... Though the novel sometimes feels thrown together, Mosley is enough of a pro to make this talky allegory fun and even funny—it picks up steam with the arrival of a devilish white man named Basel Bob—but less message-specific fiction might have been more interesting, and pure nonfiction might have been meatier. Mosley is a big name, but his ever-increasing output means that even loyal fans must choose their favorite genres in his ever-growing oeuvre. —Keir Graff
Booklist

Versatile Mosley tells the story of a black man dead before his time who shakes up the divine order by refusing his condemnation to Hell. Tempest Landry is walking up Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in Harlem, minding his own business, when a police officer takes him for an armed robber he's pursuing and shoots him dead. According to St. Peter, Tempest deserves eternal damnation not because of the robbery-the heavenly recorder doesn't make such errors-but because he stabbed a schoolboy who was about to shoot him, stole church funds to buy his sick aunt groceries and told lies that sent an incorrigible rapist and killer to prison for a crime he didn't commit. When Tempest respectfully dissents, Peter sees no alternative to sending him back to earth, accompanied by a heavenly accountant who takes the name Joshua Angel, until he accepts the divine judgment. Back in Harlem, however, Tempest is no more pliable than he was at the gates of Heaven. In a series of brief chapters, he keeps remonstrating with Angel that although he may not be perfect, he hasn't done anything all that bad either. Each chapter is launched by a new narrative premise: Tempest finds that his wife has taken up with another man; Tempest attends the funeral of an ancient family friend; Angel finds himself falling for a woman Tempest has introduced him to; the Devil, in the form of someone named Bob, appears and demands Tempest's soul. But the core of the tale is the anti-catechism that emerges from the dialogues between man and angel. For all the audacity of his imagination, Mosley (Blonde Faith, 2007, etc.) is no theologian. He seems unaware of either the centuries of catechetical literature or the dozens of deal-with-the-devil stories that precede his own entry. A classic case of overreaching, though one that's often moving and provoking. 
Kirkus Reviews

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Tempest Tales:

1. Does Tempest deserve to be delivered to hell? Is St. Peter correct—is Tempest a sinner?

2. Mosley's book is about casuistry, or situational ethics—when is a sin not really a sin? Are there extenuating circumstances that erase, or mitigate, a sin? In each of the "tales" of this novel, Tempest faces temptation—what do you think of his decisions / actions? What other types of situations can you think of, in our own lives, that involve making decisions that are, on the surface, wrong but perhaps end up doing good...or doing less harm than otherwise?

3. What do you make of the two supernatural powers—Joshua Angel and Basel John?

4. Does The Tempest Tales challenge your understanding of sin and judgment according to Christian doctrine?

5. Are you satisfied with the ultimate ending of this book? Do characters get what they truly deserve—or not?

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

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The Temporary Gentleman 
Sebastian Barry, 2014
Viking Adult
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143127123


Summary
A stunning new novel from the two-time Man Booker shortlisted author of The Secret Scripture.
 
In this highly anticipated new novel, Irishman Jack McNulty is a “temporary gentleman”—an Irishman whose commission in the British army in World War II was never permanent. Sitting in his lodgings in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, he’s writing the story of his life with desperate urgency. He cannot take one step further without examining all the extraordinary events that he has seen.

A lifetime of war and world travel—as a soldier in World War II, an engineer, a UN observer—has brought him to this point. But the memory that weighs heaviest on his heart is that of the beautiful Mai Kirwan, and their tempestuous, heartbreaking marriage. Mai was once the great beauty of Sligo, a magnetic yet unstable woman who, after sharing a life with Jack, gradually slipped from his grasp.
 
Award-winning author Sebastian Barry’s The Temporary Gentleman is the sixth book in his cycle of separate yet interconnected plays and novels, which brilliantly reimagine characters from Barry’s own family. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 5, 1955
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—Catholic University School and Trinity College
• Awards—Costa Book of the Year; James Tait Black Memorial Prize;
   Cezam Prix Litteraire Inter CE (France); Walter Scott Prize
• Currently—lives in Wicklow, Ireland


Sebastian Barry, an Irish playwright, novelist and poet is considered one of his country's finest writers, noted for his dense literary writing style. Born in Dublin, his mother was the late Irish actress Joan O'Hara. He attended Catholic University School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he read English and Latin.

Barry's literary career began in poetry before he began writing plays and novels. In recent years his fiction writing has surpassed his work in the theatre in terms of success, having once been considered a playwright who wrote occasional novels.

He has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his novels A Long Long Way (2005) and The Secret Scripture (2008), the latter of which won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His 2011 novel On Canaan's Side (2011) was longlisted for the Booker, and his most recent novel was published in 2014, The Temporary Gentleman.

Novels and plays
Barry started his literary career with the novel Macker's Garden in 1982. This was followed by several books of poetry and a further novel The Engine of Owl-Light in 1987 before his career as a playwright began with his first play produced in 1988 at the Abbey theatre, Boss Grady's Boys.

Barry's maternal great-grandfather, James Dunne, provided the inspiration for the main character in his most internationally known play, The Steward of Christendom (1995). The main character, named Thomas Dunne in the play, was the chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police from 1913–1922. He oversaw the area surrounding Dublin Castle until the Irish Free State takeover on 16 January 1922. One of his grandfathers belonged to the British Army Corps of Royal Engineers.

Both the play The Steward of Christendom (1995) and the novel The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998) are about the dislocations (physical and otherwise) of loyalist Irish people during the political upheavals of the early 20th century. The title character of the latter work is a young man forced to leave Ireland by his former friends in the aftermath of the Anglo-Irish War.

He also wrote the satirical Hinterland (2002), based loosely on former Irish Taoiseach Charles Haughey, the performance of which caused a minor controversy in Dublin. The Sunday Times, called it "feeble, puerile, trite, shallow, exploitative and gratuitously offensive", while The Telegraph called it “as exciting as a lukewarm Spud-U-Like covered in rancid marge and greasy baked beans.”

Barry's work in fiction came to the fore during the 1990s. His novel A Long Long Way (2005) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was selected for Dublin's 2007 One city one book event. The novel tells the story of Willie Dunne, a young recruit to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers during the First World War. It brings to life the divided loyalties that many Irish soldiers felt at the time following the Easter Rising in 1916. (Willie Dunne, son of the fictional Thomas Dunne, first appears as a minor but important character in his 1995 play The Steward of Christendom.)

His novel The Secret Scripture (2008) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction (the oldest such award in the UK), the Costa Book of the Year; the French translation Le testament cache won the 2010 Cezam Prix Litteraire Inter CE. It was also a favourite to win the 2008 Man Booker Prize, narrowly losing out to Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.

Barry's most recent play is Andersen's English (2010), inspired by children's writer Hans Christian Andersen coming to stay with Charles Dickens and his family in the Kent marshes.

On Canaan's Side (2011), Barry's fifth novel, concerns Lily Bere, the sister of the character Willy Dunne from (the 2005 novel) A Long Long Way and the daughter of the character Thomas Dunne from (the 1995 play) The Steward of Christendom, who emigrates to the US. The novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the 2012 Walter Scott Prize.

His most recent novel, The Temporary Gentleman (2014), tells the story of Jack McNulty—an Irishman whose commission in the British army in WWII was never permanent. Sitting in his lodgings in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, he’s writing the story of his life with desperate urgency.

Academia
Barry's academic posts have included Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa (1984), Villanova University (2006) and Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin (1995–1996).

Personal
Barry lives in County Wicklow with his wife, actress Alison Deegan, and their three children. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retreived 5/8/2014.)

Book Reviews
[A] lyrical but ironic period story. Jack McNulty...is living in self-imposed exile in Ghana, recalling his days as a soldier and civil servant, and as a suitor, lover, and husband to the haunting and haunted Mai Kirwan.... Barry again proves himself a prose artist and a skilled navigator of the rocky shoals of modern morality and Irish heritage.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Expanding on characters and events in his preceding novels, Barry tells the story of Jack McNulty, a "temporary gentleman" because his commission in the British Army during World War II wasn't made permanent.... [A] bold lyricism, unforgettable characters, and epic historicism. —John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman
Library Journal


Barry’s prose has a dreamlike quality....The raw elegance of his storytelling has its own beauty.
Booklist


Pensive, quietly lyrical....  [T]he strongest part of Barry’s tale is in its visitation of the past, when McNulty falls deeply in love with Mai Kirwan, the rose of Sligo. There, Barry falls into Joycean reveries.... Grim, even cautionary, from first to last. But, for all that, a beautifully written story of a love lost, and inevitably so.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1.The Temporary Gentleman opens just before Jack is plunged into the sea. How does this scene set the stage for the rest of the novel?

2. Jack is considered a “temporary gentleman” because of his status as an Irishman with a temporary officer’s commission in the British army. Does your understanding of the phrase change over the course of the book?

3. If Mai adored her father as much as Jack believed, why did she ignore his pleas to end her relationship with Jack? What does Mai’s obsession with the cinema tell you about her character?

4. After Mai and Jack have their first child, Mai’s brother—also named Jack—signs Grattan House over to them. Could Jack McNulty have maintained the family home if he hadn’t been a gambler and a drinker?

5. Is it really possible that Jack could live with Mai and not realize she had begun to drink?

6. Discuss the way in which Jack’s red hair is used as a symbol for his relationship with Mai.

7. Jack’s parents provided a loving and supportive home for their children. Yet, each of their sons encounters mostly tragedy and heartbreak. Was their generation somehow damned by the era in which they lived?

8. One night on the battlefield, Jack McNulty meets the other Jack McNulty—his distant cousin from the Protestant branch of the McNultys. What is the significance of their encounter?

9. Why does Sebastian Barry make Tom Quaye the same age as Jack and give him the same name as Jack’s brother and an Irish accent?

10. Does Jack do all he can to protect Maggie and Ursula? Does he deserve their forgiveness?

11. After Mai’s death, Jack makes it his mission to solve the mystery of his mother’s parentage. And in Ghana, he works to reunite Tom Quaye with his estranged wife. Do these acts atone for the pain he inflicted on Mai?

12. Why does Jack plan to burn the memoir that he so painstakingly wrote?

13. Does Jack truly want to return to Ireland? Or does he invite his own death?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Tempting Fate 
Jane Green, 2014
St. Martin's Press
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312591847


Summary
An enthralling and emotional story about how much we really understand the temptations that can threaten even the most idyllic of relationships.

Gabby and Elliott have been happily married for eighteen years. They have two teenaged daughters. They have built a life together. Forty-three year old Gabby is the last person to have an affair. She can’t relate to the way her friends desperately try to cling to the beauty and allure of their younger years…And yet, she too knows her youth is quickly slipping away.

She could never imagine how good it would feel to have a handsome younger man show interest in her—until the night it happens. Matt makes Gabby feel sparkling, fascinating, alive—something she hasn't felt in years. What begins as a long-distance friendship soon develops into an emotional affair as Gabby discovers her limits and boundaries are not where she expects them to be.

Intoxicated, Gabby has no choice but to step ever deeper into the allure of attraction and attention, never foreseeing the life-changing consequences that lie ahead. If she makes one wrong move she could lose everything—and find out what really matters most.

A heartfelt and complex story, Tempting Fate will have readers gripped until they reach the very last page, and thinking about the characters long after they put the book down. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 31, 1968
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—University of Wales
• Currently—lives in Westport, Connecticut, USA


Jane Green is the pen name of Jane Green Warburg, an English author of women's novels. Together with Helen Fielding she is considered a founder of the genre known as chick lit.

Green was born in London, England. She attended the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and worked as a journalist throughout her twenties, writing women's features for the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Cosmopolitan and others. At 27 she published her first book, Straight Talking, which went straight on to the Bestseller lists, and launched her career as "the queen of chick lit".

Frequent themes in her most recent books, include cooking, class wars, children, infidelity, and female friendships. She says she does not write about her life, but is inspired by the themes of her life.

She is the author of more than 15 novels, several (The Beach House, Second Chance, and Dune Road) having been listed on the New York Times bestseller list. Her other novels Another Piece of My Heart (2012), Family Pictures (2013), and Tempting Fate (2014) received wide acclaim.

In addition to novels, she has taught at writers conferences, and writes for various publications including the Sunday Times, Parade magazine, Wowowow.com, and Huffington Post.

Green now lives in Connecticut with her second husband, Ian Warburg, six children, two dogs and three cats. Actively philanthropic, her foremost charities are The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp (Paul Newman's camp for children with life-threatening illnesses), Bethel Recovery Center, and various breast cancer charities. She is also a supporter of the Westport Public Library, and the Westport Country Playhouse. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/20/2014.)

Book Reviews
The author, one of the first ladies of chick lit, once again exemplifies the best qualities of the genre...her compelling tale reflects an understanding of contemporary women that's acute and compassionate, served up with style.
People


Complex and funny family drama
US Weekly


You'll have trouble putting it down.
Detroit Free Press


Green is one of the great entertainers in popular fiction, with 14 previous novels that large numbers of readers have taken to heart. Her work is what might be described as smart escapism, stories that deal with issues we all can relate to, but that serve up ideas in the context of wonderful stories that keep us turning pages. More often than not we see the world through the eyes of a charming, striving woman.
Connecticut Post


Gabby has prided herself on being surrounded with tranquility, one of the defining characteristics of her happy and long-standing marriage...[until] she encounters an intriguing younger man.... Green skillfully depicts a woman trapped between contentment and temptation, crafting an insightful look into married life and middle age.
Publishers Weekly


The course of [qa couple's] lives changes in one night when...meets Matt, who is much younger than she and very handsome. The two hit it off.... Green once more proves her skill at exploring the complexities of the human heart.... [W]ell-written women's fiction. —Kristen Stewart, Pearland Lib., Brazoria Cty. Lib. Syst., TX
Library Journal


An affair threatens a woman's marriage, yet it also forges unexpected bonds that transcend the narrow definition of family.... Gabby's transgression may detonate a bomb in her personal life, yet out of the wreckage emerges a love more flexible, more tolerant and more inclusive. A Scarlet Letter for the 21st century
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Let’s start with the title of this novel. What does it mean to, quote, tempt fate? What did fate have in store for Gabby? Do you "believe" in fate? You may choose to define the term as a group, both within and beyond the world of the novel.

2. When we first meet Gabby she is feeling self-conscious about going out with the "girls." She feels old, unattractive, irrelevant. Do you feel her "condition" is a cliché of middle age, or does her dissatisfaction go deeper? Do you like Gabby once you better understood her needs, her history, her struggles? Or are you judgmental?

3. And then there’s Matt. Were you surprised by his actions and, ultimately, the affair? Take a moment to discuss his attraction to Gabby. What was he looking for, really? How was he tempting fate by falling in love with an older, married woman?|

4. Take a moment to talk about love and romance in Tempting Fate. Do Gabby and Elliott have "true" love? What is true love, both in your personal opinion and/or experience and for each of the main characters in the novel? Do Claire and her husband have it? What about Trish and Elliott?

5. Is there such a thing as right or wrong with matters of the heart?

6. Gabby realizes the mistake she’s made once she assesses the damage she’s done to her family. Do you sympathize with her? How did you react to Elliott’s reaction, and her daughters’? Did you find Jane Green’s portrayal of this family realistic? Which episodes (or even words) were most meaningful, or recognizable, to you?

7. Tempting Fate employs a unique narrative in which Matt’s character comes to life in a series of texts or emails. Did you feel, in the end, that you knew him? Liked him? Does it matter, either way? Moreover, how do you envision his role in his son’s life? And—just for fun!—do you think that will he and Monroe will stand the test of time?
 
8. How we talk about books—in or outside of book clubs—is almost as engaging as reading the books themselves. What would you say about Tempting Fate to someone who has not yet read it? Is it a love story? A family drama? A cautionary tale? All or none of the above? Would you recommend it to a friend, fellow parent, or loved one? Why or why not?

9. Why do we feel the need to share our feelings about books with other readers? Also, who in the group recommended you read Tempting Fate in the first place? Take a moment to discuss what your expectations were in choosing this novel. Have you read Jane Green’s other novels? You may choose to talk about the themes that run through her work at this time as well.

10. Did you have a sixth sense about how Tempting Fate would end? Were you gratified or disappointed by how things turned out? Do you "believe" in happy endings, generally speaking? Feel free to suggest alternate endings, if you wish.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Ten Country Stories on Farms, Lakes, Ranches & Mountains 
Katie Marie Bille, 2016
Orange Tree Publications
75 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781537254197


Summary
Ten Country Stories on Farms, Lakes, Ranches & Mountains is a mix of fiction and non fiction.

It has enjoyable short stories that take place all across the beautiful United States.

Some stories even have facts  about apples, onions, delicious recipes, making smoothies, mountain music camps, horses, real places to visit and experience, making a violin, Nashville, New England in all of its four seasons. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 21, 1954
• Where—Oshkosh, Wisconsin, USA
• Education—B.S. (2); M.S., University of Wisconsin
• Currently—lives in Bradenton, Florida

Katie Marie Bille was born and lived in Oshkosh, Wisconsin during her early years. She has two BS degrees and a Masters Degree from UW-Oshkosh, UW-Whitewater and some courses at UW-Madison Extension. She has been a Speech Language Therapist for over 35 years, and lives in Bradenton, Florida now. You can reach Katie Marie Bille by email: katiemariebille at gmail.com. (From the author.)

Discussion Questions
1. What are the titles to the ten country short stories?

2. Where do the stories take place?

3.What are some of the apple and onion recipes in the book?

4. Have any of you ever been to some of the real places listed in the country short stories?

5. Which country story did you like best and why?

6. Which characters seemed like someone you know?

7. Would anyone want to start a dude ranch for guests?

8. How do you make a smoothie?

9. Has anyone in the group ever ridden a horse?

10. What do you think of the cover design?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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Ten Things I've Learnt About Love 
Sarah Butler, 2013
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594205330


Summary
About to turn thirty, Alice is the youngest of three daughters, and the black sheep of her family. Drawn to traveling in far-flung and often dangerous countries, she has never enjoyed the closeness with her father that her two older sisters have and has eschewed their more conventional career paths. 

She has left behind a failed relationship in London with the man she thought she might marry and is late to hear the news that her father is dying. She returns to the family home only just in time to say good-bye.

Daniel is called many things—"tramp," "bum," "lost." He hasn't had a roof over his head for almost thirty years, but he once had a steady job and a passionate love affair with a woman he’s never forgotten. To him, the city of London has come to be like home in a way that no bricks and mortar dwelling ever was.

He makes sculptures out of the objects he finds on his walks throughout the city—bits of string and scraps of paper, a child’s hair tie, and a lost earring—and experiences synesthesia, a neurological condition which causes him to see words and individual letters of the alphabet as colors. But as he approaches his sixties his health is faltering, and he is kept alive by the knowledge of one thing—that he has a daughter somewhere in the world whom he has never been able to find.

A searching and inventive debut, Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love is a story about finding love in unexpected places, about rootlessness and homecoming, and the power of the ties that bind. It announces Sarah Butler as a major new talent for telling stories that are heart-wrenching, page-turning, and unforgettable. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979
• Where—UK
• Education—B.A., M.A., Cambridge University; M.A., University of
   East Anglia; M.S., University of London (current student)
• Currently—lives in Manchester and London, England, UK


Sarah Butler, author of Ten Things I've Learnt About Love, also runs Urban Word, a UK consultancy to develop literature and arts projects which explore and question our relationship to place. She has been writer in residence on the Central Line, the Greenwich Peninsula, and at Great Ormond Street Hospital (all in the UK), and has taught creative writing for the British Council in Kuala Lumpur. Ten Things I've Learnt About Love, her first novel, is published in twelve languages around the world. (Adapted from the publisher and Urban Word. Retrieved 7/25/2013.)

Book Reviews
Butler's lists have a surprising emotional resonance. They represent her two narrators' anguished and perhaps futile efforts to organize the sad and turbulent parts of life in an intrinsically chaotic city called London, circa right about now. And they are only the surface layer of a carefully structured story that invites and even requires puzzle-solving. This is a novel deeply committed to unfinishedness—the characters speak in sentences that trail off, plot points are left to be guessed at or pieced together. As a literary technique, the elliptical style is enormously effective, keeping the narrative in a constant, trembling state of tension, which gives the lists a grounding effect. This and the charming, gritty and appropriately damp view of London nearly devoid of any Cool Britiannia elements make for a novel that often evokes strong feeling.
Maria Russo - New York Times Book Review


Graceful and subtle...love, in all its shape-shifting complexity, is at the core of this novel; that and the consequences—good and bad—of keeping secrets.... The shifting and intricate dynamics of family life, and the vertiginously painful feelings of loss induced by relationship breakdown and bereavement, are written with imaginative precision.  This is a thought- as well as emotion-provoking novel.... It also sparkles with hope.
Lisa Gee - Independent (UK)
 

It’s obvious from pretty early on where this is heading and Sarah Butler doesn’t try to disguise that, concentrating instead on the subtle and difficult interactions of family...life, before finding another increasingly suspenseful plot thread that has the reader racing towards the end. It all adds up to a moving and satisfying debut.
John Harding - Daily Mail (UK)
 

This poignant novel about fathers and daughters, homecoming and restlessness, is also a love letter to London…  Butler has viewed the city in all its weathers and moods, and this shines through on every page.  Equally elegant are her observations of the emotional turmoil of her main characters as they pace the capital’s highways and byways, united by a secret… A moving, life-affirming debut.
Marie Claire (UK)


Alice...sets out to travel the world, wandering from place to place until her sisters summon her home because their father is dying of pancreatic cancer. Alice is adrift and unsettled, unable to communicate her love to her father before he dies... [She] alternates narration with Daniel, a 60-year old homeless man whose heart troubles are causing him to revisit his past. The relationship they build is unusual, and Butler’s elegant prose...makes this a moving debut.
Publishers Weekly


Daniel and Alice, a father and daughter who have never met, tell their stories in alternating chapters, each beginning with a quirky list reflecting its narrator's current state of mind. Daniel lives on the street, having lost his way in life.... Alice, who knows nothing of Daniel, has been called home to...the bedside of the father who raised her and...sets Alice off on a reexamination of her relationship with her father and disapproving older sisters.... Butler's poignant first novel has a distinct sense of place and sympathetic characters who have much in common.  —Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Library Journal


Ten Things I've Learnt About Love explores the intricacies of familial relationships and what an individual is willing to sacrifice to preserve the relationships and the people in his or her life. Combining detailed storytelling with character-revealing lists of 10 things her protagonists have learned to treasure, Butler establishes herself as a talent to watch.
Carla Jean Whitley - Bookpage


Butler's graceful debut explores life's heartbreaks, unexpected family bonds, and the search for home.... [The] narrative's controlled suspense and unanswered questions make for a satisfying tale.
Booklist


The top 10 lists strewn throughout point to increasingly somber subjects: a mother's early death, infidelity, a father's death from cancer, and elder sisters who are both fervent and ambivalent in their affection for their much younger sibling, protagonist Alice.... [I]n alternating sections, Daniel, a homeless man, scours London for the daughter he fathered during a long-ago affair but has never met.... All he knows is that the woman he is searching for might have red hair, like her mother, and is named Alice.... Spare language and an atmosphere of foreboding will keep readers on tenterhooks. Whimsy and pathos, artfully melded.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What is the function of the lists Alice and Daniel make? How do they shape your reading of the chapters?

2. How does Daniel's understanding of the city differ from Alice's? What does it mean to each of them to be "at home" there?

3. What is the significance of the quote from John Clare that opens the novel?

4. How do you think Alice's personality has been formed by her relationships with Cee and Tilly?

5. How have the choices that Cee and Tilly made about starting their own families differed from Alice's?

6. Why do you think Daniel has not sought help to improve his situation?

7. Why does Daniel make sculptures out of found objects?

8. Discuss the dynamics of Kal and Alice's relationship. Why have they come to such an impasse?

9. What do you think of Daniel's decision not to reveal the truth of his past to Alice? Why does he decide against doing so?

What do you think Alice has learned about herself by the end of the novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Ten Thousand Doors of January 
Alix E. Harrow, 2019
Orbit
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316421997


Summary
In the early 1900s, a young woman embarks on a fantastical journey of self-discovery after finding a mysterious book in this captivating and lyrical debut.

In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself.

As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artifacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place.

Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger.

Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.

Lush and richly imagined, a tale of impossible journeys, unforgettable love, and the enduring power of stories awaits in Alix E. Harrow's spellbinding debut—step inside and discover its magic. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Alix E. Harrow is an ex-historian with lots of opinions and excessive library fines, currently living in Kentucky with her husband and their semi-feral children. She won a Hugo for her short fiction, and has been nominated for the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
One for the favorites shelf…. Here is a book to make you happy when you gently close it. Here you will find wonder and questions and an unceasingly gorgeous love of words which compasses even the shape a letter makes against a page.
NPR Books


Harrow quotes at excessive length from The Ten Thousand Doors, a book Julian owns, and January gradually discerns a connection between her own life and that of… a character in Doors. … [For] readers who enjoy portal fantasies featuring adventuresome women.
Publishers Weekly


Harrow’s expressive debut depicts humankind’s resistance to change, repression of the "other," and the desperation of the privileged when their prosperity is threatened. [A] magical coming-of-age tale and allegorical commentary on social justice. —K.L. Romo, Duncanville, TX
Library Journal


The Ten Thousand Doors of January is both whimsical and smart, using engaging writing and a unique plot to touch on serious topics. Harrow's debut reads like a love letter to the art of storytelling itself, and readers will be eager for more from her.
Booklist


Similes and vivid imagery adorn nearly every page like glittering garlands.… This portal fantasy doesn't shy away from racism, classism, and sexism, which helps it succeed as an interesting story. A love letter to imagination, adventure,… and the power of love.
Kirkus Reviews


A stunning debut novel with inventive worlds, sumptuous language and impeccably crafted details... Readers seeking a fresh fantasy with an enduring love story need look no further, and they'll be left wistfully hoping to stumble upon doors of their own.
BookPage

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 TEN THOUSAND DOORS OF JANUARY … then take off on your own:

1. How would you describe January Scaller—when we first meet her? In what way do events change her? Or, perhaps we should ask, how does her true personality emerge during the course of her adventures?

2. In what way does Cornelius Locke (good name, there*) treat January as one of his specimens?

3. January tells us early on about the power of the written word:

[T]here are ten thousand stories about ten thousand doors, and we know them as well as we know our own names. They lead to Faerie, to Valhalla, Atlantis and Lemuria, Heaven and Hell, to all the directions a compass could never take you, to elsewhere.

Talk about the meaning of her observation. In your own reading experience, does literature have the power to immerse you in its stories. What about this book in particular: has it pulled you into its world(s)? What other books have done so for you… or perhaps failed to do so? Is the measure of a book's worth to be judged by its immersive power?

4. Rather than crafting an action-packed thriller, Alix E. Harrow focuses instead on social issues. How does this book, for instance, address racism? What about sexism, including the way women are consigned to asylums for hysteria?

5. How does the book tackle the issue of class and the propensity of the wealthy to protect themselves in the face of threats to their position?

6. What parallels to life in the 21st century do you find in both the story and the story-within-the story?

7. In what way does this fantasy offer hope for change in the real world?

*8. Speaking of names (see Question 2), why the name "January": what does it connote metaphorically? Are there other names that possess symbolic significance?

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

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The Ten-Year Nap
Meg Wolitzer, 2009
Penguin Group USA
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594483547

Summary
For a group of four New York friends, the past decade has been defined largely by marriage and motherhood—but it wasn’t always that way.

Growing up, Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen were told by their mothers that their generation would be different. “You girls will be able to do just about anything you want, ”Amy’s mother had predicted. And for a while, this was true. Amy and her friends went to good colleges and began careers as lawyers, film producers, bankers, and artists. But after they got married and had babies, they decided for a variety of reasons to stay home, temporarily, to raise them.

Now, ten years later, at age forty, with their children older and no longer in need of their constant presence, and without professions through which to define themselves, the four friends wonder how they got here—in lives so different from the ones they were brought up to expect—and why they have chosen to stay so long.

As the women redefine their relationship to their children and husbands—and reevaluate their former selves—a lifetime’s worth of concerns opens up, both practical and existential, and questions begin to surface: Is simply being a mother enough? Does a lack of motivation for returning to work signal a weakness in character? Is it possible—or even desirable—to “have it all,” to be an attentive mother, a loving wife, and a successful professional? And if not, is the choice of motherhood over career a betrayal of the hard-fought victories of the women who came before?

A carefully observed character study set in the context of the evolution of the feminist ideal over the last several decades, Meg Wolitzer’s The Ten-Year Nap uses the lives of these four friends to explore the breadth and complexity of women’s experiences in the post-feminist era.

When Amy embarks on a relationship with Penny Ramsey, a woman on the other side of the work divide who is an object of both envy and derision to Amy and her friends, the balance of the women’s lives is shifted, and the four women are forced to confront the choices and compromises they have made over the last ten years. As counterpoint, Wolitzer interweaves glimpses into the lives of a previous generation of women, the choices they made and the limitations they faced.

Although for the four friends the possibilities may have expanded, each must still choose her own path, and through it, find the woman she has become. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 28. 1959 
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University
• Awards—National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1994; Best
   American Short Stories, 1999; Pushcart Prize; 1998
• Currently—New York, New York

Meg Wolitzer grew up around books. Her mother, Hilma Wolitzer, published two novels while Meg was still in school, and weekly trips to the library were a ritual the entire family looked forward to. Not surprisingly, Meg served as editor for her junior high and high school literary magazines. She graduated from Brown University in 1981. One year later, she published her debut novel, Sleepwalking, the story of three college girls bonded by an unhealthy fascination with suicidal women poets. It marked the beginning of a successful writing career that shows no sign of slacking.

Over the years, Wolitzer has proven herself a deft chronicler of intense, unconventional relationships, especially among women. She has explored with wit and sensitivity the dynamics of fractured families (This Is Your Life, The Position); the devastating effects of death (Surrender, Dorothy), the challenges of friendship (Friends for Life), and the prospective minefield of gender, identity, and dashed expectations (Hidden Pictures, The Wife, The Ten-Year Nap, The Interestings).

In addition to her bestselling novels, Wolitzer has written a number of screenplays. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and she has also taught writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and at Skidmore College.

Extras
From a Barnes & Noble interview:

• First of all, I am obsessed with playing Scrabble. It relaxes me between fits of writing, and I play online, in a bizarro world of anonymous, competitive players. It's my version of smoking or drinking—a guilty pleasure. The thing is, I love words, anagrams, wordplay, cryptic crossword puzzles, and anything to do with the language.

• I also love children's books, and feel a great deal of nostalgia for some of them from my own childhood (Harriet the Spy and The Phantom Tollbooth among others) as well as from my children's current lives. I have an idea for a kids' book that I might do someday, though right now my writing schedule is full up.

• Humor is very important to me in life and work. I take pleasure from laughing at movies, and crying at books, and sometimes vice versa. I also have recently learned that I like performing. I think that writers shouldn't get up at a reading and give a dull, chant-like reading from their book. They should perform; they should do what they need to do to keep readers really listening. I've lately had the opportunity to do some performing on public radio, as well as singing with a singer I admire, Suzzy Roche, formerly of the Roches, a great group that started in 1979. Being onstage provides a dose of gratification that most writers never get to experience.

• But mostly, writing a powerful novel—whether funny or serious, or of course both—is my primary goal. When I hear that readers have been affected by something I've written, it's a relief. I finally have come to no longer fear that I'm going to have to go to law school someday....

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

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell—this is the perfect modern novel. Short, concise, moving, and about a character you come to care about, despite her limitations. It reminds me of life. It takes place over a span of time, and it's hilarious, tragic, and always stirring.

(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
As in earlier novels like The Wife and This Is Your Life, Meg Wolitzer presents a taxonomy of the subspecies known as the urban female. Lavishly educated and ruefully self-aware, the women in The Ten-Year Nap are never quite at the top of their game, time and success having passed them by—because of their gender, weak ambition, middling talent or some combination thereof. Amy and her friends aren't total losers, they're just not big technicolor winners. Caught between the second and third waves of feminism, they've created lives—as daughters do—in opposition to those of their mothers. All this could make for a dreary soup, except that it's a Wolitzer novel, so it's very entertaining. The tartly funny Wolitzer is a miniaturist who can nail a contemporary type, scene or artifact with deadeye accuracy.
New York Times

If Wolitzer were content to people her book solely with women happily married and wealthy enough to afford the luxury of ambivalence, it would be a too-familiar read. But she weaves in vignettes of marginal South Dakotans and various iconoclastic mothers and muses, subtly showing how women's individual choices (or lack thereof) are inextricable from the history and future of feminism....The book occasionally reads like an overly earnest polemic or a chatty episode of "The View," but for the most part Wolitzer perfectly captures her women's resolve in the face of a dizzying array of conflicting loyalties.
Sheri Holmes - Washington Post

In her latest novel, Wolitzer takes a close look at the opt out generation: her cast of primary characters have all abandoned promising careers (in art, law and academia) in favor of full-time motherhood. When their children were babies, that decision was defensible to themselves and others; 10 years on, all of these women, whose interconnected stories merge during their regular breakfasts at a Manhattan restaurant, harbor hidden doubts. Do their mundane daily routines and ever-more tenuous connections to increasingly independent children compensate for all that lost promise? Wolitzer centers her narrative on comparisons between her smart but bored modern-day New York and suburban mommies and the women of the generation preceding them, who fought for women's liberation and equality. Contemporary chapters, most of which focus on a single character in this small circle of friends, alternate with vignettes from earlier eras, placing her characters' crises in the context of the women, famous and anonymous, who came before. Wolitzer's novel offers a hopeful, if not exactly optimistic, vision of women's (and men's) capacity for reinvention and the discovery of new purposes.
Publishers Weekly

Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Wife (2003) and The Position (2005), brings some much needed compassion and a rare wit to the contentious divide separating mothers who work from those who don’t.... It’s a rare novelist who can transform domestic fiction into a sustained, smart, and funny inquiry into the price of ambition, the value of work, issues of class, and the meaning of motherhood—Wolitzer is that novelist. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist

A wise, witty assessment of the contemporary dilemmas of middle-class mothers (in particular: to work or not to work), set in the competitive terrain of New York City parenting. Using the comfortable format of friendship between four women, Wolitzer's eighth novel  (after The Position, 2005, etc.) takes ironic stock of how far females have (and haven't) come since feminism tried to rearrange the work/life balance between the sexes. Lawyer Amy Lamb has still not gone back to her job after the birth of her son ten years ago. Her good friend Jill, a one-time prizewinner who recently left Manhattan for the suburbs with her family, is finding it hard to fit in. Their circle also includes ex-artist Roberta who, like Amy, feels happier without the pressures of a job, yet senses dissatisfactions and uncertainty about her identity; and mathematician Karen, whose Chinese parents take great satisfaction in her not needing to work. The women meet for coffee or yoga and mutual support. Aside from Jill's jealousy of Amy's new friendship with glamorous museum director Penny, unaware that the relationship is driven by a shared secret (Penny's extramarital affair), plot events are few. Instead, Wolitzer uses modern domesticity as a lens through which to scrutinize mixed feelings about ambition, marriage, aging, money and the peculiar results of the women's individual choices. Further telling comparisons arise from glimpses of women of their mothers' generation. Instead of conclusions, there are some gradual changes, sometimes for the better. A perceptive, highly pleasurable novel that serves as Wolitzer's up-to-date answer to the old question: "What do women want?"
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Though much of the story is told from the perspective of Amy, her friends, and their families, at times the perspective widens to include all women. What is the purpose of this technique? What is the author trying to convey through its use?

2. One of the main themes of the novel is the legacy of the feminist movement, with Amy’s mother representing the promise of its early years and Amy and her friends representing its practical result. What, overall, does the novel have to say about feminism? Is the idea of feminism still relevant in today’s society?

3. Although Roberta initially seeks to help Brandy Gillop with her art career, she ultimately abandons her. How did this affect your assessment of Roberta’s character? Were you surprised? What is your overall assessment of her?

4. Amy’s friendship with Penny begins when she learns of Penny’s affair with Ian, and ends when he is injured on Saint Doe’s. Discuss the relationship between Penny and Amy. Why does the affair create such an intense—though fleeting—bond between these women?

5. While most of the “flashback” chapters deal with the parents of the novel’s main characters, a few focus on real historical and contemporary figures: Margaret Thatcher, Georgette Magritte, Nadia Comaneci. Why do you think the author included these chapters? How do these glimpses of their lives tie into the larger themes of the novel?

6. Amy’s discovery of her Leo’s falsified “business expenses” causes her to question her belief in him and their marriage. Why does this discovery cause her so much distress? What does it say about her relationship with her husband and her expectations from life in general?

7. Though she rarely speaks of it explicitly, the suicide of Jill’s mother has clearly cast a shadow over Jill’s entire life. Discuss Jill’s life story—her early promise as a student at Pouncey, the humiliation of her failed doctoral thesis, her struggles with raising Nadia—in the context of this early trauma. How does her mother’s fate shape Jill’s reactions to events in adulthood? Are there ways in which it has made her stronger?

8. Unlike the rest of the book, which is told from the point of view of women, chapter fourteen is told from Amy’s father’s perspective. What is the significance of this chapter? What do you think the author is trying to convey through this character?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934
Scribner
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780684801544


Summary
In Tender Is The Night, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture.

First published in 1934, Fitzgerald's classic story of psychological disintegration was denounced by many as an unflattering portrayal of Sara and Gerald Murphy (in the guise of characters Dick and Nicole Diver), who had been generous hosts to many expatriates.

Only after Fitzgerald's death was Tender Is the Night recognized as a powerful and moving depiction of the human frailties that affect privileged and ordinary people alike. (From Scribner edition.)

More
In Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald distilled much of his tempestuous life with his wife Zelda, and the knowledge of the wrecked, fabulous Fitzgeralds adds poignancy and regret to this tender, supple and poetic portrait. To the just-fashionable French Riviera come Dick and Nicole Diver—handsome, rich, glamorous and enormous fun. Their dinners are legend, their atmosphere magnetic, their intelligence fine. But something is wrong. Nicole has a secret and Dick a weakness. Together they head towards the rocks on which their lives crash—and only one of them really survives. (From Penguin Essentials 2 Edition.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 24, 1896
• Where—St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
• Died—December 21, 1940
• Where—Hollywood, California
• Education—Princeton University


F. Scott Fitzgerald was named for his famous relative, Francis Scott Key, though he was always referred to as "Scott." Minnesota born and Princeton educated, Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920 to critical and popular acclaim.

That same year, He married Zelda Sayre, the queen of Montgomery, Alabama youth society, and the two lived a boisterous, decadent life in New York City. (See LitCourse 5 with Fitzgerald's story "Babylon Revisited" for an idea of their life.) To better afford their extravagant lifestyle, the couple moved to France, where Fitzgerald befriended Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, becoming part of the legendary group of expatriate writers and artists, which Stein labeled the "Lost Generation." In Paris he wrote his finest novel, The Great Gatsby (1925).

Zelda was eventually hospitalized in 1930 for the first of many breakdowns, and Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood (William Faulkner was there, too), where his heavy drinking ended his screen writing career. In 1934 he published Tender Is the Night. He died there of a heart attack six years later at the age of 44.

More
The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. The Great Gatsby, Scott's masterpiece, was published in 1925. Hemingway greatly admired The Great Gatsby and wrote in his A Moveable Feast "If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one" (153). Hemingway expressed his deep admiration for Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald's flawed, doomed character, when he prefaced his chapters concerning Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast with:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless. (129)

Much of what Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast helped to create the myth of Fitzgerald's eventual demise and Zelda's hand in that demise. Though much of Hemingway's text is factually correct, it is always tinged with his disappointment with Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s but was sidetracked by financial difficulties that necessitated his writing commercial short stories, and by the schizophrenia that struck Zelda in 1930. Her emotional health remained fragile for the rest of her life. In 1932, she was hospitalized in Baltimore, Maryland.

Scott rented an estate in the Baltimore suburb of Towson and began work on Tender Is the Night, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist who falls in love with and marries one of his patients. Some critics have seen the book as a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel recounting Fitzgerald's problems with his wife, the corrosive effects of wealth and a decadent lifestyle, his own egoism and self-confidence, and his continuing alcoholism. Indeed, Fitzgerald was extremely protective of his material (their life together). When Zelda published her own version of their lives in Europe, Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald was angry and succeeded in getting her doctors to keep her from writing any more.

Tender was finally published in 1934, and critics who had waited nine years for the follow up to The Great Gatsby had mixed opinions about it. The novel did not sell well upon publication, but the book's reputation has since risen significantly.

Although he reportedly found movie work degrading, Fitzgerald was once again in dire financial straits and spent the second half of the 1930s in Hollywood, working on commercial short stories, scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (including some unfilmed work on Gone with the Wind), and his fifth and final novel, posthumously published as The Last Tycoon (based on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg). Scott and Zelda became estranged; she continued living in mental institutions on the east coast, while he lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, a well-known gossip columnist, in Hollywood.

Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. According to Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, Scott claimed that he had contracted tuberculosis. Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940, and on December 21, while awaiting a visit from his doctor, Fitzgerald collapsed in Sheilah Graham's apartment and died. He was 44. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
(Older works have few mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

For Fitzgerald desolation is a precondition of the lyrical. Hence the most distinctive impression of Tender: A beautiful novel about failure.
Independent (UK)


In the wake of World War I, a community of expatriate American writers established itself in the salons and cafes of 1920s Paris. They congregated at Gertrude Stein's select soirees, drank too much, married none too wisely, and wrote volumes—about the war, about the Jazz Age, and often about each other. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were part of this gang of literary Young Turks, and it was while living in France that Fitzgerald began writing Tender Is the Night. Begun in 1925, the novel was not actually published until 1934. By then, Fitzgerald was back in the States and his marriage was on the rocks, destroyed by Zelda's mental illness and alcoholism.

Despite the modernist mandate to keep authors and their creations strictly segregated, it's difficult not to look for parallels between Fitzgerald's private life and the lives of his characters, psychiatrist Dick Diver and his former patient turned wife, Nicole. Certainly the hospital in Switzerland where Zelda was committed in 1929 provided the inspiration for the clinic where Diver meets, treats, and then marries the wealthy Nicole Warren. And Fitzgerald drew both the European locale and many of the characters from places and people he knew from abroad. In the novel, Dick is eventually ruined—professionally, emotionally, and spiritually—by his union with Nicole.

Fitzgerald's fate was not quite so novelistically neat: after Zelda was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and committed, Fitzgerald went to work as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1937 to pay her hospital bills. He died three years later—not melodramatically, like poor Jay Gatsby in his swimming pool, but prosaically, while eating a chocolate bar and reading a newspaper. Of all his novels, Tender Is the Night is arguably the one closest to his heart. As he himself wrote, "Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith.
Amazon Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. How would you describe the characters of Dick and Nicole Diver? What is the nature of their marriage? Do they love one another? Talk about how and why their marriage changes during the course of the novel?

2. Talk about Nicole's psychological state? Why did Dick marry her? As his patient, their relationship most likely would be viewed today as a violation of the the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) code of ethics. Why would marrying a patient concern the APA? How does Nicole's mental illness affect their marriage?

3. What do you make of Rosemary Hoyt? Is she a "provocateur" with regards to the Divers' marriage? Would you describe her as innocent, aggressive, duplicitous...or as a young, naive American out of her depth? Why is Dick Diver attracted to her? What, if anything, does she offer him? What does it say about Rosemary that she is also attracted to Brady right after professing her love for Dick?

4. Rosemary encounters two parties on the beach at the beginning of the book. What is the distinction she makes between the two—and what do two circles represent? What is your opinion of the two groups?

5. The book is concerned with the differences between Americans and Europeans. How does that difference present itself? Would you say that Dick is more European or more American?

6. The narrator refers to French Mediterranean Coast as a region in a state of flux. How so?

7. The book's narrator identifies with Rosemary in the first part of the novel. Thus we see the characters through her perspective. Starting in Book 2, however, the narrator is allied with Dick Diver...as we follow him into his decline. Why would Fitzgerald have used two perspectives?

8. Hollywood is, of course, the capital of acting. How does "acting" become a theme throughout the novel? Who besides Rosemary acts? What does Hollywood as "the city of thin partitions" mean? How might that descriptive phrase apply to the main characters?

9. How does McKisco change after the duel...and what inspires the change? Talk about the juxtaposition of his rise with Diver's fall.

10. What is the significance of the scene in the restaurant, where the Divers, Norths and Rosemary measure the "repose" of American diners? How does "repose" reflect on Americans' ability to maintain elegance and dignity? Are those qualities important?

11. In what ways can Dick be considered a father figure for women? Would you say he has a need to fulfill that role?

12. Does Nicole ruin Dick's potential to become a great psychiatrist? In other words, did she ruin his career...or is he the cause of his own downfall?

13. By the end of the novel, Nicole seems to have achieved a healthy mental state. Is Dick responsible for her cure?

14. Who loves whom in this book? Do Dick and Nicole love one another? Does Dick love Rosemary? Does Nicole love Tommy Barban?

15. Critics and scholars see Tender Is the Night as partially autobiographical, tracing F. Scott's and Zelda's marriage. Do a little research and discuss how the book parallels the Fitzgeralds' own lives.

16. Does Dick's disappearance in America resolve any problems raised in the novel? Why would Fitzgerald have ended his story in this way? Do you find the ending satisfying...or would you have preferred a different one?

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

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The Tenderness of Wolves 
Stef Penney, 2006
Simon and Schuster
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416571308


Summary 
Winner, Costa (Whitbread) Award

The year is 1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a tiny isolated settlement in the Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. Laurent Jammett had been a voyageur for the Hudson Bay Company before an accident lamed him four years earlier. The same accident afforded him the little parcel of land in Dove River, land that the locals called unlucky due to the untimely death of the previous owner.

A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime scene and sees the tracks leading from the dead man's cabin north toward the forest and the tundra beyond. It is Mrs. Ross's knock on the door of the largest house in Caulfield that launches the investigation. Within hours she will regret that knock with a mother's love—for soon she makes another discovery: her seventeen-year-old son Francis has disappeared and is now considered a prime suspect.

In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the crime and to the township—Andrew Knox, Dove River's elder statesman; Thomas Sturrock, a wily American itinerant trader; Donald Moody, the clumsy young Company representative; William Parker, a half-breed Native American and trapper who was briefly detained for Jammett's murder before becoming Mrs. Ross's guide. But the question remains: do these men want to solve the crime or exploit it?

One by one, the searchers set out from Dove River following the tracks across a desolate landscape—home to only wild animals, madmen, and fugitives—variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native American culture before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good.

In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation, and humor into an exhilarating thriller; a panoramic historical romance; a gripping murder mystery; and, ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, an epic for the ages. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—1969
• Where—Edinburg, Scotland, UK
• Education—Bristol University
• Awards—Costa (Whitbread) Award
• Currently—lives in London, England

Stef Penney was born and grew up in Edinburgh. After earning a degree in philosophy and theology from Bristol University, she turned to filmmaking, studying film and TV at Bournemouth College of Art. On graduation she was selected for the Carlton Television New Writers Scheme. She is a screenwriter.

Her debut novel, The Tenderness of Wolves, won the 2006 Costa Award. She published The Invisible Ones in 2012. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews 
The Tenderness of Wolves stood out from a very strong shortlist. We felt enveloped by the snowy landscape and gripped by the beautiful writing and effortless story-telling. It is a story of love, suspense and beauty. We couldn't put it down.
Costa Award Committee

An original and readable mixture of mystery and history, with a good dollop of old-fashioned adventure.
The Times (London)

In suitable Jack London style for a setting in Canada's snowy wastes, wolves wander in and out of this suspenseful 19th-century epic, offering a leitmotif of constant unease. So begins what masquerades as a traditional murder quiz but quickly broadens out to encompass other lines of inquiry—the mystery of two long-missing young sisters, the quest for a forgotten native American culture, the twists and turns of an unusual love story. Stef Penney is from Edinburgh and claims never to have visited Canada—impressive, then, that the land of her imagination convinces.
The Guardian  (UK)

An entertaining, well-constructed mystery.... sexy, suspenseful, densely plotted storytelling...a novel with far greater ambitions than your average thriller, combining as it does the themes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness with Atwood's Survival, and lashing them to a story that morphs Ian Rankin with The Mad Trapper of Rat River.
Globe and Mail (Canada)

The frigid isolation of European immigrants living on the 19th-century Canadian frontier is the setting for British author Penney's haunting debut. Seventeen-year-old Francis Ross disappears the same day his mother discovers the scalped body of his friend, fur trader Laurent Jammet, in a neighboring cabin. The murder brings newcomers to the small settlement, from inexperienced Hudson Bay Company representative Donald Moody to elderly eccentric Thomas Sturrock, who arrives searching for a mysterious archeological fragment once in Jammet's possession. Other than Francis, no real suspects emerge until half-Indian trapper William Parker is caught searching the dead man's house. Parker escapes and joins with Francis's mother to track Francis north, a journey that produces a deep if unlikely bond between them. Only when the pair reaches a distant Scandinavian settlement do both characters and reader begin to understand Francis, who arrived there days before them. Penney's absorbing, quietly convincing narrative illuminates the characters, each a kind of outcast, through whose complex viewpoints this dense, many-layered story is told.
Publishers Weekly

British filmmaker Penney sets her intriguing, well-wrought novel in a 19th-century Canadian farming community up-ended by the murder of a lone fur trapper. In the town of Dove River on the north shore of Georgian Bay, a middle-aged farmer's wife we know only as Mrs. Ross discovers the body of French trapper Laurent Jammet, scalped and with his throat cut. The leaders of the community and the all-important Hudson Bay Company men gather to make sense of the killing, which revives sore memories of teenage sisters Amy and Eve Seton, who set out on a picnic 15 years before and never returned. Mrs. Ross is particularly concerned about Jammet's murder because 17-year-old Francis, an Irish orphan she and her husband took in when he was five, has not come home from a fishing trip. Suspicion falls on the boy, who was known to frequent Jammet's cabin. Several other characters emerge with ties to the dead man, including Toronto lawyer Thomas Sturrock, who comes sniffing around for an ancient marked bone that might prove of invaluable archaeological consequence, and shady half-Indian intruder William Parker, who traded with Jammett. The first-person account of Mrs. Ross alternates with sections concerning Francis, who's being nursed by the kindly Norwegian inhabitants of Himmelvanger after collapsing with exhaustion while following the trail of Jammet's murderer. His determined mother has set out to find him; other search parties also track Francis, as well as Parker, runaways from Himmelvanger, people lost in the snow and the killer. Penney offers numerous strings to untangle, but moments of love amid the gelid wastes add some warmth to her teeming, multi-character tale. Winner of the U.K. Costa Bookof the Year award for 2006, a striking debut by a writer with tremendous command of language, setting and voice.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. The novel is divided into four parts: Disappearance, The Fields of Heaven, The Winter Partners, and The Sickness of Long Thinking. Characterize each of these parts by what occurs within them and discuss why you think the author chose this format.

2. The people of Dove River are mostly settlers from foreign countries who have a very particular worldview rooted in their own struggle for survival. In what ways are the children in this book reflections of their parents? In what ways have they broken from their parents' examples? Does this lead to joy or sorrow? Give examples.

3. Living so rustically in such a closed society has given rise to a very particular set of rules in Dove River, such as the expectation that neighbors will make return offerings in kind when they've borrowed something. What other rules of survival—either literally or socially—are presented in this novel?

4. Francis is introduced as a mystery from his first day in Dove River: He arrives dressed as a girl for unknown reasons. Did you suspect that his relationship with Jammet was more than a friendship? Why or why not?

5. The Tenderness of Wolves is a story told from the perspective of several different characters, but Mrs. Ross's sections are the only ones written in first person. What effect does this have on your reading experience? Why do you think the author does this?

6. Mrs. Ross is always referred to formally as "Mrs. Ross," even by the narrator. What is the significance of this choice?

7. On page 154, Parker explains what the "sickness of long thinking" is to Mrs. Ross. Who in this story is suffering from the sickness of long thinking? Support your opinion with examples from the novel.

8. The author has been applauded for her ability to build suspense. Identify some of the clues she subtly drops along the way and explain how they either misdirected you or gave you hints toward solving the various mysteries of the novel.

9. Donald tries to elicit sympathy from Elizabeth for her father on page 338 by telling her, "It's only human to want an answer." Do you think this explanation satisfies her? Would it satisfy you? Why or why not? Who else in this novel is searching for answers? Does anyone find what they are looking for?

10. In contrast to most of the other relationships in this novel, Line and Espen seem to have a deep passion for one another. Were you surprised that he abandons her? Why or why not?

11. The women in this novel find themselves in situations of varying frustration and sorrow. Compare and contrast these characters: Susannah and Maria, Mrs. Ross, Ann Pretty, Line, and Elizabeth Bird. What do they have in common, and how are they different? Do you feel sympathy for any of them? Why or why not?

12. Explore the symbolism of Donald's spectacles and his near-sightedness. What does this symbol tell you about his character? What is it that he sees most clearly just before his death?

13. Do you think that Mrs. Ross really loves William Parker, or is it something else? What did you expect would happen to Mrs. Ross when she left with Parker to track down Francis?

14. The backdrop of Canada, still largely unsettled in the mid- to late 1800s, provides a hauntingly beautiful and frighteningly dangerous setting for the lives of these very different people. How does the wilderness change the characters in this novel?

15. What is the significance of the title, The Tenderness of Wolves? Relate it to the story and give examples to support your interpretation.
(Questions provided by publisher. Also, see Author Q&A on publisher website.)

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The Tenth Circle
Jodi Picoult, 2006
Simon & Schuster
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743496711

Summary
Trixie Stone is fourteen years old and in love for the first time. She's also the light of her father's life—a straight-A student; a freshman in high school who is pretty and popular; a girl who's always looked up to Daniel Stone as a hero. Until, that is, her world is turned upside down with a single act of violence...and suddenly everything Trixie has believed about her family—and herself—seems to be a lie.

For fifteen years, Daniel Stone has been an even-tempered, mild-mannered man: a stay-at-home dad to Trixie and a husband who has put his own career as a comic book artist behind that of his wife, Laura, who teaches Dante's Inferno at a local college. But years ago, he was completely different: growing up as the only white boy in an Eskimo village, he was teased mercilessly for the color of his skin. He learned to fight back: stealing, drinking, robbing, and cheating his way out of the Alaskan bush. To become part of a family, he reinvented himself, channeling his rage onto the page and burying his past completely...until now. Could the young boy who once made Trixie's face fill with light when he came to the door have been the one to end her childhood forever? She says that he is, and that is all it takes to make Daniel, a man with a history he has hidden even from his family, venture to hell and back in order to protect his daughter.

The Tenth Circle looks at that delicate moment when a child learns that her parents don't know all of the answers and when being a good parent means letting go of your child. It asks whether you can reinvent yourself in the course of a lifetime or if your mistakes are carried forever—if life is, as in any good comic book, a struggle to control good and evil, or if good and evil control you. (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
As Picoult notes, one in six American women will be the victim of a rape or attempted rape during her lifetime. Those who have survived a sexual assault will recognize Trixie's subsequent dissociation, the cold horror of the emergency room and police interview, the sense of a life being irrevocably broken, as well as the rage and guilt of Trixie's parents. Trixie accuses Jason of rape, but when her name is leaked to local media, she's ostracized and tormented by her schoolmates, who accuse her of having been a willing participant.
Elizabeth Hand - The Washington Post

Some of Picoult's best storytelling distinguishes her twisting, metaphor-rich 13th novel (after Vanishing Acts) about parental vigilance gone haywire, inner demons and the emotional risks of relationships. Comic book artist Daniel Stone is like the character in his graphic novel with the same title as this book—once a violent youth and the only white boy in an Alaskan Inuit village, now a loving, stay-at-home dad in Bethel, Maine—traveling figuratively through Dante's circles of hell to save his 14-year-old teenage daughter, Trixie. After she accuses her ex-boyfriend of rape, Trixie—and Daniel, whose fierce father-love morphs to murderous rage toward her assailant—unravel in the aftermath of the allegation. At the same time, wife and mother Laura, a Dante scholar, tries to mend her and Daniel's marriage after ending her affair with one of her students. Picoult has collaborated with graphic artist Dustin Weaver to illustrate her deft, complex exploration of Daniel and his beast within, but the drawings, though well-done, distract from the powerful picture she has drawn with words. Laura and Daniel follow their runaway daughter to Alaska, at which point Picoult drives the story with the heavy-handed Dante metaphor—not the characters. Still, this story of a flawed family on the brink of destruction grips from start to finish.
Publishers Weekly

When a comic book artist married to a Dante scholar writes a graphic novel, what better title than The Tenth Circle? Of course, Daniel Stone feels he's descended into hell when his 14-year-old daughter, Trixie, is date raped by Jason Underhill. Despite his soft and gentle Maine demeanor, Daniel had a wild and violent past growing up in Alaska, and letting the police investigation proceed is setting off a rage he had long suppressed. The night of the attack, he also learns his wife, Laura, is having an affair. Hell would be preferable. Picoult's (Vanishing Acts) latest novel actually features Daniel's artwork in a tale that parallels his real life, and readers are drawn into the mystery surrounding the events of the rape and its subsequent effects on all concerned. What truths will be revealed? And who, ultimately, will find justice? Picoult had this reader up until the very end of this fast-paced tale. As with her previous novels (e.g., My Sister's Keeper), Picoult doesn't guarantee a happy ending, but something here just missed its mark. Still, this best-selling author is going to be in demand. Recommended for most public libraries. —Bette-Lee Fox
Library Journal

Picoult fumbles in this 13th novel of, predictably, a family in crisis. To all outward appearances, the family Stone seems a happy trio: Mother Laura teaches Dante at the local university; her 14-year-old Trixie is popular, dating the town's high school hockey hero Jason Underhill; and Daniel, a stay-at-home dad, has finally hit it big with the debut of his own comic book, The Tenth Circle. Inspired by his wife's work, Daniel's hero Duncan/Wildclaw descends into hell in search of his kidnapped daughter (sections of the comic book, illustrated by Dustin Weaver, appear at the end of each chapter). As his alter ego tours the circles of hell with Virgil, Daniel's family begins to unravel: On the night that Trixie is raped by her boyfriend, Daniel discovers Laura has been having an affair with a student. Picoult usually infuses a bit of suspense into her dramas, and this effort is no different as Trixie's testimony comes into question—is Trixie just out for revenge on the boyfriend who dumped her? As the DA and detective try to build a rape case, Trixie becomes ostracized at school, continues to self-mutilate and then finally attempts suicide. She's saved in time, but soon after her recovery, Jason is found dead, and it's beginning to look like Trixie killed him. Afraid she'll be charged with Jason's murder, Trixie runs away to the Alaskan Eskimo village where Daniel was raised (and tormented as the only white boy), forcing Daniel to confront his past, save his daughter, save his marriage and make everything okay in the universe, as every superhero should. As a third-act whodunit—the culprit is an easy guess—the story fails. Picoult, who is so often an inventive and compelling storyteller, relies here on convention and sentimentality.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Fourteen-year-old Trixie has been a ghost for fourteen days, seven hours, and thirty-six minutes now, not that she is officially counting. Trixie's protective father has been consumed with attempts to shield her from a new life, one that includes a boy with a proprietary hand around his daughter's waist. But Daniel Stone never for a moment suspected that the same boy might inflict upon his daughter the worst possible harm. Could the boy who once made Trixie's face fill with light when he came to the door have drugged and then raped her? She says that he did, and that is all it takes to make Daniel, a man with a past hidden even from his family, consider taking matters into his own hands in order to protect his daughter.

This is a novel about the unbreakable bond between parent and child, the temptation to play God, and its dangerous repercussions. Using her sensitive, wise touch, Jodi Picoult once again probes deeply into the love and anguish of a young girl and her family. This time, she has added the innovative element of embedding a graphic novel within her text. They are at once the professional work of her character, Daniel Stone, and a unique insight into his fractured and desperate heart.

_______________

1. In Chapter One, Laura says "God, according to Dante, was all about motion and energy, so the ultimate punishment for Lucifer is to not be able to move at all." (p. 16) How do you feel about this concept of hell as the inability to take action? What do you take from this? How does this theory translate into modern-day life?

2. Why does Daniel find villains interesting? Daniel describes Duncan as "a forty-something father who knew that getting old was hell. Who wanted to keep his family safe; whose powers controlled him, instead of the other way around." If "power always involved a loss of humanity," then how does this comic book character maintain his humanity? Compare and contrast Daniel with the character he creates in his comic strip.

3. Early on, Daniel and Trixie seem to have the ideal father-daughter relationship. During Trixie's examination, Daniel reflects that he and Trixie would play the alphabet game with superhero powers. What superhero powers did Daniel wish he had? Why do you think these were so important to him? What does that reveal about his character? Trixie's?

4. It is said that a rape victim is revictimized by the initial examination. Do you think this is true for Trixie? Why do you think the police detective doubts her accusation against Jason?

5. In popular culture, the husband is more often portrayed as the cheater, and the wife typically as the one who makes career sacrifices for the family. Does Daniel as a character seem emasculated by the way these roles are reversed in The Tenth Circle? Why are stay-at-home fathers seen differently by society than mothers who raise their children full time?

6. In Chapter Four, regarding trauma, Picoult writes, "It was a catch-22: If you didn't put the trauma behind you, you couldn't move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened." Which characters would agree with this statement and why?

7. Trixie is consistently revictimized at school, and her own best friend doesn't believe that she was raped. If Trixie's school was a kind of hell for her, then what would Dante say about her situation and the best way to get out of it?

8. Discuss reality versus perception, intention versus action. Why are Trixie's and Jason's versions of what happened so different? Whose do you believe is the truth? Do you think there IS a definitive truth?

9. After Laura and Daniel have a romantic episode, Daniel continues to express his resentment for her infidelity. In that moment his sexual urge is not to make love to her but to "take her back." How does his urge compare to Jason's urge in raping Trixie?

10. Throughout the story Trixie is struggling to get back to her life prior to the rape, and similarly Daniel and Laura are trying to return to a place in their marriage prior to Laura's infidelity. What does this story say about whether or not we can recapture our past? How does Daniel's childhood figure into this theme?

11. Does a victim get justice when the perpetrator takes his or her own life? When Daniel abuses Jason, is he helping or hurting Trixie? When Trixie runs away, did you believe that she killed Jason? What did you think about this surprise ending? How can you map the breakdown in trust between these relationships: Trixie and Jason, Laura and Daniel, Daniel and Trixie, Trixie and Zephyr. How has this breakdown contributed to the demise of all parties?

12. How did Daniel's artwork, embedded inside The Tenth Circle, affect your reading experience? In what ways does reading the graphic novel give you insight into Daniel's behavior during the narrative part of the novel?

13. In the story there is a thread of control—characters losing and gaining control over their lives and their environments. Discuss what control means to each character.

14. After Daniel takes his revenge, does he believe he is more of a superhero? Does he really think he has avenged Trixie? What is the story saying about retribution?

15. Why is snow symbolic in the story? What other symbols are there?

16. Trixie is haunted by Jason's ghost. Is this a figment of her imagination or a manifestation of guilt?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Tenth of December 
George Saunders, 2013
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 978081298425


Summary
One of the most important and blazingly original writers of his generation, George Saunders is an undisputed master of the short story, and Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet.
 
In the taut opener, "Victory Lap," a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act?

In "Home," a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned.

And in the title story, a stunning meditation on imagination, memory, and loss, a middle-aged cancer patient walks into the woods to commit suicide, only to encounter a troubled young boy who, over the course of a fateful morning, gives the dying man a final chance to recall who he really is.

A hapless, deluded owner of an antiques store; two mothers struggling to do the right thing; a teenage girl whose idealism is challenged by a brutal brush with reality; a man tormented by a series of pharmaceutical experiments that force him to lust, to love, to kill—the unforgettable characters that populate the pages of Tenth of December are vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.
 
Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1958
• Where—Amarillo, Texas, USA
• Raised—suburbs of Chicago, Illinois
• Education—B.S., Colorado School of Mines; M.A., Syracuse University
• Awards—4 National Magazine Awards; PEN/Malamud Award; World Fantasy Award; Story Prize;
   Folio Prize
• Currently—teaches at Syracuse University


George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children's books. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian until October 2008.

A professor at Syracuse University, Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), was a finalist for that year's PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006 Saunders received a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2006 he won the World Fantasy Award for his short story "CommComm". His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007. In 2013, he won the PEN/Malamud Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His Tenth of December: Stories (2013) won the 2013 Story Prize for short-story collections and the inaugural (2014) Folio Prize .

Early life
Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas. He grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago, graduating from Oak Forest High School in Oak Forest, Illinois. In 1981 Saunders received a B.S. in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. In 1988, he obtained an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University.

Of his scientific background, Saunders has said,

Any claim I might make to originality in my fiction is really just the result of this odd background: basically, just me working inefficiently, with flawed tools, in a mode I don't have sufficient background to really understand. Like if you put a welder to designing dresses.

Career
From 1989 to 1996, Saunders worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York. He also worked for a time with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra.

Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of Syracuse University, teaching creative writing in the school's MFA program while continuing to publish fiction and nonfiction. In 2006, Saunders was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship. In the same year he was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and Hope College in 2010. His nonfiction collection, The Braindead Megaphone, was published in 2007. While promoting The Braindead Megaphone, Saunders appeared on The Colbert Report and the Late Show with David Letterman.[citation needed]

Saunders's fiction often focuses on the absurdity of consumerism, corporate culture and the role of mass media. While many reviewers mention the satirical tone in Saunders's writing, his work also raises moral and philosophical questions. The tragicomic element in his writing has earned Saunders comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut, whose work inspired Saunders.

Saunders is a student of Nyingma Buddhism. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/27/14.)

Book Reviews
National Book Award finalist • a New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year; One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Magazine • NPR • People • Entertainment Weekly • New York • BuzzFeed • Kirkus Reviews • BookPage • Shelf Awareness


A visceral and moving act of storytelling.... No one writes more powerfully than George Saunders about the lost, the unlucky, the disenfranchised.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
 

It’s no exaggeration to say that short story master George Saunders helped change the trajectory of American fiction.
Wall Street Journal


Saunders captures the fragmented rhythms, disjointed sensory input, and wildly absurd realities of the twenty-first century experience like no other writer.
Boston Globe


Saunders’s startling, dreamlike stories leave you feeling newly awakened to the world.
People

 
An irresistible mix of humor and humanity...that will make you beam with unmitigated glee.
Entertainment Weekly

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

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

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

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Terms of Endearment
Larry McMurtry, 1975
Simon & Schuster
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780684853901

Summary
In this acclaimed novel that inspired the Academy Award-winning motion picture, Larry McMurtry created two unforgettable characters who won the hearts of readers and moviegoers everywhere: Aurora Greenway and her daughter Emma.

Aurora is the kind of woman who makes the whole world orbit around her, including a string of devoted suitors. Widowed and overprotective of her daughter, Aurora adapts at her own pace until life sends two enormous challenges her way: Emma's hasty marriage and subsequent battle with cancer.

Terms of Endearment is the story of a memorable mother and her feisty daughter and their struggle to find the courage and humor to live through life's hazards — and to love each other as never before. (From the publisher.)

The novel was adapted to film in 1983 and starred Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson, and Jeff Daniels.

In 1992 McMurtry followed up with The Evening Star, a sequel to Terms of Endearment. It, too, was adapted to film in 1996.

Author Bio
• Birth—June 3, 1936
• Where—Wichita Falls, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., North Texas State University; M.A., Rice
   University; studied at Stanford University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1986
• Currently—Archer City, Texas

Back in the late 60s, the fact that Larry McMurtry was not a household name was really a thorn in the side of the writer. To illustrate his dissatisfaction with his status, he would go around wearing a T-shirt that read "Minor Regional Novelist." Well, more than thirty books, two Oscar-winning screenplays, and a Pulitzer Prize later, McMurtry is anything but a minor regional novelist.

Having worked on his father's Texas cattle ranch for a great deal of his early life, McMurtry had an inborn fascination with the West, both its fabled history and current state. However, he never saw himself as a life-long rancher and aspired to a more creative career. He achieved this at the age of 25 when he published his first novel. Horseman, Pass By was a wholly original take on the classic western. Humorous, heartbreaking, and utterly human, this story of a hedonistic cowboy in contemporary Texas was a huge hit for the young author and even spawned a major motion picture starring Paul Newman called Hud just two years after its 1961 publication. Extraordinarily, McMurtry was even allowed to write the script, a rare honor for such a novice.

With such an auspicious debut, it is hard to believe that McMurtry ever felt as though he'd been slighted by the public or marginalized as a minor talent. While all of his books may not have received equal attention, he did have a number of astounding successes early in his career. His third novel The Last Picture Show, a coming-of-age-in-the-southwest story, became a genuine classic, drawing comparisons to J. D. Salinger and James Jones. In 1971, Peter Bogdonovich's screen adaptation of the novel would score McMurtry his first Academy award for his screenplay. Three years later, he published Terms of Endearment, a critically lauded urban family drama that would become a hit movie starring Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine in 1985. A sequel, Evening Star, was published in 1992 and adapted to film in 1996.

McMurtry published what many believe to be his definitive novel. An expansive epic sweeping through all the legends and characters that inhabited the old west, Lonesome Dove was a masterpiece. All of the elements that made McMurtry's writing so distinguished—his skillful dialogue, richly drawn characters, and uncanny ability to establish a fully-realized setting—convened in this Pulitzer winning story of two retired Texas rangers who venture from Texas to Montana. The novel was a tremendous critical and commercial favorite, and became a popular miniseries in 1989.

Following the massive success of Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry's prolificacy grew. He would publish at least one book nearly every year for the next twenty years, including Texasville, a gut-wrenching yet hilarious sequel to The Last Picture Show, Buffalo Girls, a fictionalized account of the later days of Calamity Jane, and several non-fiction titles, such as Crazy Horse.

Interestingly, McMurtry would receive his greatest notoriety in his late 60s as the co-screenwriter of Ang Lee's controversial film Brokeback Mountain. The movie would score the writer another Oscar and become one of the most critically heralded films of 2005. The following year he published his latest novel. Telegraph Days is a freewheeling comedic run-through of western folklore and surely one of McMurtry's most inventive stories and enjoyable reads. Not bad for a "minor regional novelist."

Extras
McMurtry comes from a long line of ranchers and farmers. His father and eight of his uncles were all in the profession.

The first printing of McMurtry's novel In a Narrow Grave is one of his most obscure for a rather obscure reason. The book was withdrawn because the word "skyscrapers" was misspelled as "skycrappers" on page 105. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
There is something very winning about Larry McMurtry's latest novel, Terms of Endearment something that makes one keep reading along despite the book's many obvious faults. Partly, I suppose, it's simply trust in Mr. McMurtry...[who] has never been less than winning. Partly, it's the star of the story, Aurora Greenway.... The novel can't seem to make up its mind what it wants to be....It starts off a drawing-room farce.... At other times it veers into pure sensibility.... and concludes with the slightly lugubrious story of [Aurora's] daughter's marital misadventures and eventual death from cancer.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times

McMurtry [is] trying his hand at what seems, for most of the book's length, to be a kind of comedy of manners centered upon a well-to-do widow of forty-nine.... Respecting McMurtry's earlier achievements, one would like to think that the author is taking large risks.... But the evidence does not support such a wish. Terms of Endearment remains an odd, misshapen, surprisingly amateurish novel composed of disparate parts that never cohere.
Robert Towers - New York Times Book Review

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Terms of Endearment:

1. Aurora Greenway claims "only a saint could live with me, and I can't live with a saint." How would you describe Aurora? Is she a sympathetic character. Is she fully-drawn with emotional and psychological complexity...or is she one-dimensional and cartoonish?

2. What kind of mother is Aurora...what is her relationship with her daughter, Emma? How might Aurora's nurturing skills (or lack of) have shaped Emma's personality and her approach to life?

3. Of Aurora's many suitors (first of all...are 5 suitors even realistic for a woman entering her 50's?) is there one in particular you were rooting for? Why does she treat them with such disdain...and why do they keep coming back?

4. Mr. McMurtry is a very funny writer—known for his snappy, humorous dialogue and near slap-stick plot points. Which parts of this story do you find particularly funny?

5. What do you think of Flap Horton, Emma's husband? Why do the two stay together as a couple?

6. Because the first part of the book is comedic, reviewers and readers have commented that the last part, which revolves around Emma, feels "tacked on." In other words, it doesn't mesh well with what comes before—almost as if the novel is two separate books. Do you agree...did you have difficulty switching gears? Or do you think the story moves smoothly into the Emma section and onto its final pages?

7. What are "terms of endearment" and what—thematically— does the expression mean in the context of this book?

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

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Terrifying Freedom 
Linda Anne Smith, 2015
Mountain Horizon Publications
500 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780994929501


Summary
Truth can be illusive, choices disconcerting; the promise of moral certitude, irresistible.

In the Midwestern offices of Secure Star Insurance, Rebecca, efficient and distant, seeks only to survive another day. Sally, earnest and devout, views the workplace as a fertile mission field.

Into the agency comes a new employee, Gladys, gregarious, unorthodox and twice divorced. When an intuitive HR manager arrives, veneers begin to crack.

Back track four years. Rebecca’s mysterious past is explored in a convent replete with younger members and garnering the support of an increasing number of bishops and conservative Catholics. When an older nun has a heart attack, Rebecca is abruptly sent to a backwater mission in Appalachia.

Distanced from the enclave of the motherhouse and embedded in social realities of the missionary outpost, Rebecca is thrust into uncharted waters.

Author Bio
Linda Smith lives near Calgary, Alberta enjoying the beauty of Rocky Mountains. For 30 years, she was a member of a community of religious sisters. She currently works in an organization that is dedicated to assisting and advocating for traumatized and neglected children and their families. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow Linda Anne on Twitter.

Book Reviews
Book reviews can be found at terrifying freedom.com, Amazon, Indigo and Goodreads. What follows are excerpts.

"Terrifying Freedom takes you on a journey that you will not soon forget."

"Quite compelling and revealing."

"Your characters are so real and believable, and their struggles palpable."

"The story takes the reader into the secluded world of women religious who create a counterculture by living the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in community while devoting themselves to educating children. The reader admires the exemplary commitment embodied in a spectrum of characters. Smith's sympathetic depiction of these figures accounts for the poignancy of the shadows that emerge from within the best of people. The narrative illustrates how a benevolent community can become a web in which no one speaks her own mind with the result that everyone is diminished. In a perfect world, freedom is terrifying indeed….
Michael Duggan, St. Mary's University, Calgary

Discussion Questions
1. Rebecca moves through her workday efficient but distant in all her relationships. However, the other characters approach Rebecca quite uniquely. What accounts for this?

2. Rebecca, Sally and Gladys eventually form an unlikely alliance. What holds it together?

3. What is it that heightens Andrew’s intuition regarding Rebecca?

4. Sr. Rebecca Marise wholeheartedly embraces the culture and beliefs of the Sisters of Christ the Redeemer. Why is her initial acceptance unquestioning?

5. By and large, the sisters in Appalachia follow the same traditions as the Motherhouse. So why is Sr. Rebecca Marise challenged by them?

6. Is there a defining moment in Sr. Rebecca Marise’s journey in Appalachia?

7. How do you interpret the ending?

8. What would you consider to be the underlying themes of the novel?

9. Was there any particular character for whom you felt more empathy? More distaste?

10. Is there a quote or scene that holds a special significance for you?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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The Testament of Mary
Colm Toibin, 2012
Scribner
386 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451692389


Summary
Colm Toibin’s portrait of Mary presents her as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity.

In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son’s crucifixion. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel. They are her keepers, providing her with food and shelter and visiting her regularly. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was “worth it”; nor that the “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” were holy disciples.

Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the Cross until her son died—she fled, to save herself), and her judgment of others is equally harsh. This woman whom we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone. Toibin’s tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 30, 1955
• Where—Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland, UK
• Education—B.A. University College, Dublin
• Awards—Costa Award
• Currently—lives in Dublin, Ireland


Colm Toibin is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic, and, most recently, poet.

Toibin is currently Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. He was hailed as a champion of minorities as he collected the 2011 Irish PEN Award. In 2011, he was named one of Britain's Top 300 Intellectuals by The Observer, despite being Irish.

Early Life
Toibin's parents were Bríd and Michael Toibin. He was born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland. He is the second youngest of five children. His grandfather, Patrick Tobin, was a member of the IRA, as was his grand-uncle Michael Tobin. Patrick Tobin took part in the 1916 Rebellion in Enniscorthy and was subsequently interned in Frongoch in Wales. Colm's father was a teacher who was involved in the Fianna Fail party in Enniscorthy. He received his secondary education at St Peter's College, Wexford, where he was a boarder between 1970 and 1972. He later spoke of finding some of the priests attractive.

In July 1972, aged 17, he had a summer job as a barman in the Grand Hotel in Tramore, County Waterford, working from six in the evening to two in the morning. He spent his days on the beach, reading The Essential Hemingway, the copy of which he still professes to have, "pages stained with seawater." It developed in him a fascination with Spain, led to a wish to visit that country, gave him "an idea of prose as something glamorous, smart and shaped, and the idea of character in fiction as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive. And more than anything, the sheer pleasure of the sentences and their rhythms, and the amount of emotion living in what was not said, what was between the words and the sentences."

He progressed to University College Dublin, graduating in 1975. Immediately after graduation, he left for Barcelona. His first novel, 1990's The South, was partly inspired by his time in Barcelona; as was, more directly, his non-fiction Homage to Barcelona (1990). Having returned to Ireland in 1978, he began to study for a masters degree. However, he did not submit his thesis and left academia, at least partly, for a career in journalism.

The early 1980s were an especially bright period in Irish journalism, and the heyday for the monthly news magazine Magill. He became the magazine's editor in 1982, and remained in the position until 1985. He left due to a dispute with Vincent Browne, Magill's managing director.

Toibin is a member of Aosdana and has been visiting professor at Stanford University, The University of Texas at Austin and Princeton University. He has also lectured at several other universities, including Boston College, New York University, Loyola University Maryland, and The College of the Holy Cross. He is professor of creative writing at The University of Manchester succeeding Martin Amis and currently teaches at Columbia University.

Work

The Heather Blazing (1992), his second novel, was followed by The Story of the Night (1996) and The Blackwater Lightship (1999). His fifth novel, The Master (2004), is a fictional account of portions in the life of author Henry James. He is the author of other non-fiction books: Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1994), (reprinted from the 1987 original edition) and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994).

Toibin has written two short story collections. His first Mothers and Sons which, as the name suggests, explores the relationship between mothers and their sons, was published in 2006 and was reviewed favourably (including by Pico Iyer in The New York Times). His second, broader collection The Empty Family was published in 2010.

Toibin wrote a play, titled Beauty in a Broken Place: this was staged in Dublin in August 2004. He has continued to work as a journalist, both in Ireland and abroad, writing for the London Review of Books among others. He has also achieved a reputation as a literary critic: he has edited a book on Paul Durcan, The Kilfenora Teaboy (1997); The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999); and has written The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950 (1999), with Carmen Callil; a collection of essays, Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar (2002); and a study on Lady Gregory, Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (2002).

He sent a photograph of Borges to Don DeLillo who described it as "the face of Borges against a dark background—Borges fierce, blind, his nostrils gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth looks painted; he’s like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a kind of steely rapture." DeLillo often seeks inspiration from it.

During Desmond Hogan's sexual assault case he defended him in court as "a writer of immense power and importance who dealt with human isolation."

In 2011, The Times Literary Supplement published his poem "Cush Gap, 2007".

Toibín works in the most extreme, severe, austere conditions. He sits on a hard, uncomfortable chair which causes him pain. When working on a first draft he covers the right-hand side only of the page; later he carries out some rewriting on the left-hand side of the page. He keeps a word processor in another room on which to transfer writing at a later time.

Themes
Toibin's work explores several main lines: the depiction of Irish society, living abroad, the process of creativity and the preservation of a personal identity, focusing especially on homosexual identities — Toibín is openly gay — but also on identity when confronted with loss. The "Wexford" novels, The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, use Enniscorthy, the town of Toibín's birth, as narrative material, together with the history of Ireland and the death of his father. An autobiographical account and reflection on this episode can be found in the non-fiction book, The Sign of the Cross. In 2009, he published Brooklyn, a tale of a woman emigrating to Brooklyn from Enniscorthy.

Two other novels, The Story of the Night and The Master revolve around characters who have to deal with a homosexual identity and take place outside Ireland for the most part, with a character having to cope with living abroad. His first novel, The South, seems to have ingredients of both lines of work. It can be read together with The Heather Blazing as a diptych of Protestant and Catholic heritages in County Wexford, or it can be grouped with the "living abroad" novels. A third topic that links The South and The Heather Blazing is that of creation. Of painting in the first case and of the careful wording of a judge's verdict in the second. This third thematic line culminated in The Master, a study on identity, preceded by a non-fiction book in the same subject, Love in a Dark Time. The book of short stories "Mothers and Sons" deal with family themes, both in Ireland and Catalonia, and homosexuality.

Toibín has written about gay sex in several novels, though Brooklyn contains a heterosexual sex scene in which the heroine loses her virginity. In his 2012 essay collection New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families he studies the biographies of James Baldwin, J. M. Synge and W. B. Yeats, among others.

His personal notes and work books reside at the National Library of Ireland. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Unlike other writers who, in rendering the historical past, leave their poetic and image-making gifts at the door, Toibin is at his lyrical best in The Testament of Mary.... A beautiful and daring work. Originally performed as a one-woman show in Dublin, it takes its power from the surprises of its language, its almost shocking characterization, its austere refusal of consolation. The source of this mother's grief is as much the nature of humankind as the cruel fate of her own son.
Mary Gordon - New York Times Book Review


This novel is the Virgin's version of the life of Christ. After a lifetime listening to everyone else's versions of that life, she is angry and frustrated because they are all questionable.
John Spain - Irish Independent


The Testament of Mary is an important and persuasive book: Toibin's weary Mary, sceptical and grudging, reads as far more true and real than the saintly perpetual virgin of legend. And Toibin is a wonderful writer: as ever, his lyrical and moving prose is the real miracle.”
Naomi Alderman - Observer


With this masterly novella, Toibin has finally tackled the subject of Christianity—and he has done so with a vengeance.... Nowhere in this beguiling and deeply intelligent, moving work is Mary’s attention to detail more instrumental (and more like a novelist’s) than in her account of her son’s death.... In a single passage—and in a rendition, furthermore, of one of the most famous passages of western literature—Toibin shows how the telling and the details are all-important.
Robert Collins - Sunday Times (UK)


Toibin (Brooklyn) has chosen Jesus’ mother as the narrator of his poignant reimagining of the last days of Christ. Mary doesn’t think her son is the son of God; in fact, she’s convinced that he’s simply running with the wrong crowd, “Something about the earnestness of those young men repelled me... the sense that there was something missing in each one of them.” But when she recounts the story of Lazarus’s return from the grave, she presents no other explanation than that of his sisters, that Jesus was the one who brought him back. At the wedding at Cana, she sees Lazarus for herself and finds that “he was in possession of a knowledge that seemed to me to have unnerved him; he had tasted something or seen or heard something which had filled him with the purest pain....” This beautiful novella turns on who or what Mary should believe about her son’s life and death—and on a mother’s grief: “I saw that once again he was trying to remove the thorns that were cutting into his forehead and the back of his head and, failing to do anything to help himself, he lifted his head for a moment and his eyes caught mine.” .
Publishers Weekly


Toibin's Mary is nothing like you'd expect, especially if your religious views run to the traditional. She doesn't think Jesus was the Son of God, that his death had any significance, and that the motley men surrounding him (her "keepers" now) are holy disciples. She also blames herself for abandoning her son on the Cross to save her own life. Tóibín is one of the few authors I can imagine shaking Mary loose of two millennia of prayer, chant, and painting so that we can see her afresh
Library Journal


A stunning interpretation that is as beautiful in its presentation as it is provocative in its intention.
Booklist


A novella that builds to a provocative climax, one that is as spiritually profound as its prose is plainspoken. At the outset, the latest from the esteemed Irish author (Brooklyn, 2009, etc.) seems like a "high concept" breather from his longer, more complex fiction.... What follows the crucifixion gives a whole new dimension to the testament, for Mary and the reader alike. A work suffused with mystery and wonder.
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 Testaments 
Margaret Atwood, 2019
Knopf Doubleday
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385543781


Summary
The Testaments is a modern masterpiece, a powerful novel that can be read on its own or as a companion to Margaret Atwood’s classic, The Handmaid’s Tale.

More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within.

At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.
 
Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third: Aunt Lydia. Her complex past and uncertain future unfold in surprising and pivotal ways.
 
With The Testaments, Margaret Atwood opens up the innermost workings of Gilead, as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.
 (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 18, 1939
• Where—Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto; M.A. Radcliffe; Ph.D., Harvard University
• Awards—Booker Prize (more below)
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Canada


Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels.

In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; The Heart Goes Last; and Hag-Seed.

She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[A] compelling sequel…. It’s a contrived and heavily stage-managed premise—but… Atwood’s sheer assurance as a storyteller makes for a fast, immersive narrative that’s as propulsive as it is melodramatic.… The Testaments… is less an expose of the hellscape [of] Gilead than a young girl’s chronicle…. Atwood seems to be suggesting [that rebels] do not require a heroine with the visionary gifts of Joan of Arc, or the ninja skills of a Katniss Everdeen or Lisbeth Salander—there are other ways of defying tyranny… or helping ensure the truth of the historical record.
Michiko Kakutani -  New York Times
 

[A]an entirely different novel in form and tone. Inevitably, the details are less shocking… [and] not nearly the devastating satire of political and theological misogyny that The Handmaid’s Tale is. In this new novel, Atwood is far more focused on creating a brisk thriller than she is on exploring the perversity of systemic repression.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


[Atwood} is interested not in how people become degraded, as objects…, but how they became morally compromised…. The first book was good on the envy between women, when they have no power; The Testaments looks at collaboration—another vice of the oppressed…. The Testaments is Atwood at her best, in its mixture of generosity, insight and control. The prose is adroit, direct, beautifully turned.
Anne Engright - Guardian (UK)
 

Margaret Atwood’s powers are on full display…. Illicit sex, of course, in this republic founded on sexual control, leads to the complicated, fascinating plot of The Testaments…. Atwood’s braided storyline leads to the best parts of the novel, the conversations between girls and women…. Everyone should read The Testaments and consider the true desires of human nature.
Los Angeles Times


orthy of the literary classic it continues. That’s thanks in part to Atwood’s capacity to surprise, even writing in a universe we think we know so well.
USA Today


[A] plot-driven page turner… [though] this Gilead isn't—and can't possibly be—as fresh and mind-blowing as it was to readers in 1985, but… [it] continue[s] to surprise us…. Testaments is more than 400 pages, but [it is] fast and even thrilling…. The joy of the book isn't in the plot twists but in seeing these women hammer away at the foundations of Gilead
NPR


(Starred review) Atwood's confident, magnetic sequel to The Handmaid's Tale… does not dwell on the franchise or current politics. Instead, she explores favorite themes of sisterhood, options for the disempowered, and freedom's irresistible draw. [E]minently rewarding sequel.
Publishers Weekly


Whatever happened to Offred after the close of Atwood's iconic The Handmaid's Tale? In this talk-of-the-town sequel, we find out. Taking place 15 years later, the narrative is shaped by the testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.
Library Journal


[W]hat Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can.… It's hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid's Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Clothes play a dual role in the novel. They signal life stages as well as status and class: the pink, white, and plum dresses worn by "special girls"; the drab prison-like stripes of the Econofamilies; and the green dresses of the betrothed girls. Did this aspect of the novel strike you as odd? Or is it actually not very different from our own obsession with brands and logos that convey a certain level of wealth and status?

2. Aunt Lydia tells us that Gilead actually has "an embarrassingly high emigration rate." Can those who manage to leave Gilead ever truly "escape"?

3. Daisy/Jade is, to say the least, a reluctant revolutionary. But if you were her age and were asked to absorb all of the shocking information she has to process in a very short period of time, would you have reacted any differently?

4. After Agnes is assaulted, she recalls other girls who reported such incidents having been told that "nice girls did not notice the minor antics of men, they simply looked the other way," which is a troubling parallel between Gilead and reality. Do you think there will ever come a time when women will feel unashamed to speak out when they are sexually assaulted? Or has this time already arrived in the age of #MeToo?

5. When Aunt Lydia dons the garb of the female stadium shooters, she says, "I felt a chill. I put it on. What else should I have done?" What would you have done?

6. Agnes’s interpretation of "Dick and Jane" showcases Margaret Atwood’s trademark wit, but there is more to it than that. Discuss the ways in which the author cleverly builds the sense of suspicion and fear that informs the way Agnes processes the events in her life at Ardua Hall.

7. Several references are made to shortages of basic necessities such as food and electricity. Birth defects and juvenile cancer also seem to plague Gilead. What do you think has caused this? Possibly environmental issues? Or the ongoing war?

8. Agnes considers her admittance to Hildegard Library to be a "golden key" that will reveal "the riches that lay within." But it is here that she learns the truth about the Concubine Cut into Twelve Pieces, as well as the truth about her half-sister. Is there any book that provided you with a similar pivotal and eye-opening experience?

9. When Aunt Lydia relays the Aesop’s Fables story of Fox and Cat, she reveals much about her survival skills. Which are you—Fox or Cat?

10. Did the book inspire you to take action so that Gilead remains fiction? Did you perhaps become more active in local politics or make a charitable donation to an organization that supports women’s rights?

11. The conclusion of The Handmaid’s Tale left readers with many tantalizing questions. Which of your questions were answered by The Testaments? Which were not?

• 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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Testimony 
Anita Shreve, 2008
Little, Brown & Co.
308 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316067348


Summary
At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break. Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape.

A Pandora's box of revelations, the tape triggers a chorus of voices—those of the men, women, teenagers, and parents involved in the scandal—that details the ways in which lives can be derailed or destroyed in one foolish moment.

Writing with a pace and intensity surpassing even her own greatest work, Anita Shreve delivers in Testimony a gripping emotional drama with the impact of a thriller. No one more compellingly explores the dark impulses that sway the lives of seeming innocents, the needs and fears that drive ordinary men and women into intolerable dilemmas, and the ways in which our best intentions can lead to our worst transgressions (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 
Shreve, consummate craftsman and frequent provocateur, is on fire in her latest novel, a mesmerizing read centering on a sex scandal at a prestigious Vermont prep school....Shreve views all of the characters, even the most flawed, with a good deal of compassion, revealing the heartbreaking consequences of a single reckless act.
Bette-Lee Fox - Booklist

Shreve's novels (Body Surfing; The Weight of Water) benefit from propulsive plots, and her mixed latest, with its timely theme of debauchery among children of privilege, does not lack in this regard. The first paragraph foreshadows a tragedy in which three marriages are destroyed, the lives of three students at a private school in Vermont are ruined, and death claims an innocent victim. The precipitating event is a sex tape involving three members of the boys' basketball team and a freshman girl. Beginning with an account of the debacle by the Avery School's then headmaster, and segueing to the voices of the participants in the orgy, plus their parents and others touched by the scandal, the narrative explores the widening consequences of a single event. Shreve's character delineation is astute, and the novel's moral questions—ranging from the boys' behavior to the headmaster's breach of legal ethics to the guilt of those involved in the death—are salient if heavy-handed, while the female characters are "wicked" in the way women have always been stereotypically portrayed. The novel is clever, but the revolving cast of narrators often feels predictable and forced, keeping the novel on the near side of credible.
Publishers Weekly

Recounting a student sex scandal at a prestigious Vermont private academy, this explosive novel from Shreve (Body Surfing) is more transfixing than a multicar pileup on the interstate. Told from the perspectives of the students involved, the school administrator, the parents, and numerous bystanders, the story keeps unraveling as it slingshots back and forth in time. At each revelation, readers keep hoping that things will turn out differently, that there will be survivors, despite the carnage before their eyes. Yet that one night can never be undone: "A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go." Shreve arrows in on many targets—underage drinking, instant exposure via the Internet, familial expectations, youthful insecurities, and peer pressure, among them—as she flawlessly weaves a tale that is mesmerizing, hypnotic, and compulsive. No one walks away unscathed, and that includes the reader. Highly recommended.
Library Journal

A sex scandal at a Massachusetts prep school seen through the eyes of students, teachers, parents and anyone else of even peripheral relevance. Shreve (Body Surfing, 2007, etc.) offers snapshot sketches within a framing device involving a researcher's interviews. Although the scandal—three of the school's basketball stars caught on tape being sexually serviced by a freshman girl—is almost tame by current real-life scandal standards, it is understandably life-shaking to those involved. Headmaster Mike Bordwin's attempts to contain the situation backfire when the girl's outraged parents call the police. His hard-won career disintegrates, as does his already shaky marriage. Those losses are nothing compared to his private sense of guilt; Bordwin knows Silas, a gifted scholarship student, was part of the filmed party only because he was very drunk, and he was drunk because he'd caught his mother in bed with Bordwin that morning. A sensitive moral innocent, Silas is horrified at his own behavior. Unable to face his girlfriend, he spends a cold New England night outside writing an apology and freezes to death. Naturally his mother, a devout Catholic, blames herself and her adulterous affair for the loss of her beloved only child. The other boys' mothers have their own guilt. Ellen sent Rob to boarding school to protect him from the very temptations to which he succumbed. Expelled, Rob now loses his early admission to Brown. Michelle, who has long sensed dark tendencies in James, now wishes she had been a stronger parent. James, who calls himself J.Dot, is a shallow unrepentant party animal. He blames the girl. As does Shreve, who paints "Sienna" as a 14-year-old vixen with no qualms about pretending she's the victim, although she purposefully set out to seduce the boys, particularly J.Dot. Afterward she moves on to a new school and, one suspects, new victims. Thoughtful Rob is the only one with a genuinely positive outlook on his future. Slick but lacking depth.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The story in Testimony is told from many different perspectives. Why do you think Anita Shreve chose this narrative style for the novel? Can you see any connection between this style and some of the novel’s themes

2. Some characters in Testimony—for example, the students—narrate from the first person point of view. For other characters, such as Mike and Owen, the author always uses the third person. Rob’s mother, Ellen, speaks in the second person. What do these different points of view tell you about the roles of various characters in the story? Did you find yourself empathizing most with any character in particular?

3. Several characters comment that if the sexual incident at Avery had occurred at a local public school, it would have drawn little or no attention. Do you agree with this assessment? Is it fair that this elite institution be held to a different standard?

4. When Mike initially brings J.Dot into his office and accuses him of taking advantage of the girl in the video, J.Dot replies that “She knew better” (123). Do you think that Sienna knew better? Setting aside the letter of the law, how responsible do you think Sienna is for what happened?

5. When Sienna calls her mother on Wednesday morning (129), she cries hysterically.  Her roommate, Laura, implies that Sienna may have been acting.  Do you think that Sienna is acting or are her emotions genuine? Is it possible for both to be true at the same time?

6. When Silas first reflects on what he did on the videotape, he repeats the phrase “I wanted” (43) many times. When Anna recounts her affair with Mike, she too uses this refrain, “I wanted” (210). What do Silas and Anna each want? Are these purely sexual wants or are they more complicated? Why do you think mother and son use the same language of desire to condemn themselves? How much do you think desire is to blame for what happened.

7. Discuss the evolution of Anna and Owen’s marriage over the course of the novel. Are you surprised that they do not separate after all that has happened? Do you believe that by the end of the book Owen has forgiven Anna?

8. To describe her relationship with Silas, Noelle often uses the metaphor of walking through doors together. Did you feel this was an apt metaphor? How does the significance of this image change as the novel progresses?

9. Some of the parents of the boys feel a keen sense of responsibility for their sons’ behavior. Ellen in particularly says, “And, of course, you are. You are responsible” (189). Do you believe the parents of J.Dot, Silas, and Rob made decisions that in some way led to this event How culpable should parents of teenagers feel for the behavior of their children?

10. As Silas writes in his journal, all his entries are addressed to Noelle. How does the tenor of the letters change over the course of the novel? Do you believe Noelle is capable of forgiving him? Should she forgive him?

11. Were you surprised when you learned who filmed the incident? All of the students involved seem to have made an unspoken agreement to protect this person’s identity. Do you agree with their reasons for doing so

12. One of the big questions driving Testimony is “Why did these students do what they did?” In his letter to Ms. Barnard, Rob writes that “It was an act without a why” (303). What does Rob mean by this Do you think the other three would agree with his assessment? If not, how might their answers be different?

13. What do you think will happen to the students in the future? What course can you see their lives taking in the months and years following the close of the novel?  How will they be affected by the incident and its aftermath?

14. At the end of the novel, Rob suggests that, in an unexpected way, his life may turn out better because of what happened at Avery (304). Do you agree with his logic?  Can you see any redemptive effects the scandal may have for other characters?
(Questions issued by publishers.)

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Tevye, the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories
Sholem Aleichem, 1894
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780805210699


Summary
Twenty two stories about Tevye, the best loved character in modern Jewish fiction.

Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the compassionate, irrepressible, Bible-quoting dairyman from Anatevka, who has been immortalized in the writings of Sholem Aleichem and in acclaimed and award-winning theatrical and film adaptations of Fiddler on the Roof.

And no Yiddish writer was more beloved than Tevye’s creator, Sholem Rabinovich (1859–1916), the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote under the pen name of Sholem Aleichem. Beautifully translated by Hillel Halkin, here is Sholem Aleichem’s heartwarming and poignant account of Tevye and his daughters, together with the “Railroad Stories,” twenty-one tales that examine human nature and modernity as they are perceived by men and women riding the trains from shtetl to shtetl. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Real name—Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich
• Birth—February (or March?), 1859
• Where—present-day Ukraine, Imperial Russia
• Death—May 13, 1916
• Where—New York City, USA
• Education—local schooling in Ukraine

Sholem Aleichem was the pen name of Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich, the popular humorist and Russian Jewish author of Yiddish literature. His works include novels, short stories, and plays. He did much to promote Yiddish writers, and was the first to pen children's literature in Yiddish.

His work has been widely translated. The 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof, loosely based on Sholem Aleichem's stories about his character Tevye, the Dairyman, was the first commercially successful English-language play about Eastern European Jewish life.

He was born to a poor Jewish family in the Poltava region, east of Kiev in 1859. At the age of fifteen, inspired by Robinson Crusoe, he composed his own, Jewish version of the famous novel and decided to dedicate himself to writing. He adopted the comic pseudonym Sholem Aleichem, derived from a common greeting meaning "peace be with you", or colloquially, "hi, how are you".

After completing local school with excellent grades in 1876, he left home in search for work. For three years, Sholem Aleichem taught a wealthy landowner's daughter Olga (Golde) Loev, who against the wishes of her father became his wife in 1883. Over the years, they had six children, including painter Norman Raeben—whose teaching Bob Dylan credits as an important influence on Blood on the Tracks—and Yiddish writer, Lyalya (Lili) Kaufman. Lyalya's daughter Bel Kaufman wrote the novel, Up the Down Staircase, which was made into a successful film.

At first, Sholem Aleichem wrote in Russian and Hebrew. But from 1883 on, he produced over forty volumes in Yiddish which was accessible to nearly all literate East European Jews. Most writing for Russian Jews at the time was in Hebrew, the liturgical language used largely by learned Jews.

Sholem Aleichem also used his personal fortune to encourage other Yiddish writers. In 1888-1889, he put out two issues of an almanac, Di Yidishe Folksbibliotek ("The Yiddish Popular Library") which gave important exposure to many young Yiddish writers. In 1890, Sholem Aleichem lost his entire fortune in a stock speculation and could not afford to print the almanac's third issue. It was during this time he contracted tuberculosis.

In 1905, he left Russia, forced by waves of pogroms that swept through southern Russia, settling eventually in Geneva, Switzerland. Despite his great popularity, many of Sholem Aleichem's works had not generated much revenue for the author, and he was forced to take up an exhausting schedule of travelling and touring in order to make money to support himself and his family. In July, 1908, while on a reading tour in Russia, he collapsed on a train going through Baranowicz. He was diagnosed with a relapse of acute hemorrhagic tuberculosis and spent the next four years living as a semi-invalid; only eventually becoming healthy enough to return to a regular writing schedule. During this period the family was largely supported by donations from friends and admirers.

In 1914, Sholem Aleichem and most his family emmigrated to the United States, where they made their home in New York City. Sholem Aleichem died in New York in 1916, aged 57, while still working on his last novel, Motl the Cantor's son, and was laid to rest at Mount Carmel cemetery in Queens.

At the time, his funeral was one of the largest in New York City history, with an estimated 100,000 mourners. The next day, his will was printed in the New York Times and was read into the Congressional Record of the United States.

He told his friends and family to gather, "read my will, and also select one of my stories, one of the very merry ones, and recite it in whatever language is most intelligible to you." "Let my name be recalled with laughter," he added, "or not at all."

In 1997, a monument dedicated to Sholem Aleichem was erected in Kiev; another was erected in 2001 in Moscow. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
With his supple, intelligent translation, Halkin makes accessible the poignant short stories by the legendary Yiddish humorist Sholem Rabinovich (18591916), who wrote under the nom de plume "Sholem Aleichem," a Yiddish salutation. As Halkin elucidates in his introduction, Tevye's self-mocking but deeply affecting monologues (which inspired the play and film Fiddler on the Roof satisfy on several levels: as a psychological analysis of a father's love for his daughters, despite the disappointments they bring him; as a paradigm of the tribulations and resilience of Russian Jewry and the disintegration of shtetl life at the twilight of the Czarist Empire; and as a Job-like theological debate with God. The 20 Railroad Stories, the monologues of a traveling salesman and his fellow Jewish travelers, depict Jewish thieves and arsonists, feuding spouses, draft evaders, grieving parents and assimilationists. Like the eight Tevye tales, these unprettified stories of simple people and their harsh realities summon a bygone era, but their appeal and application are timeless. Bringing both groups of tales together for the first time in English, this first volume in Schocken's Library of Yiddish Classics series is an auspicious event.
Publishers Weekly

(Audio version.) These three cassettes contain six Sholem Aleichem stories (one per side) about Tevye, the irrepressible character made familiar by Fiddler on the Roof. If listeners absorb them in order, the story of Tevye and his family unfolds chronologically, covering a period of several years. The author's use of language paints pictures which enable listeners to see rural Russia at the turn of the century. They also get a taste for what it meant to be a Jew in that time and place. Even though many of the anecdotes are humorous in nature, the issues are serious and include courting and marriage customs, dress and food, and persecution of Jews (pogroms and expulsions). Theodore Bikel is the perfect choice as storyteller, and not only because he has portrayed Tevye on the stage. His resonant voice and acting ability add to the portrayal of Tevye and other characters. By slight changes in inflection, Bikel brings every character to life, male or female. His reading includes the explanation of all Hebrew and Yiddish phrases, so even listeners unfamiliar with Jewish culture and history can follow the story. Libraries with audiobooks in their collections will want to add this abridgment of the Sholem Aleichem stories. —Shelley Glantz, Arlington bHigh School, MA
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. Tevye often contradicts himself. For example, he says, "...it happened early one summer, around Shavuos time. But why should I lie to you? It might have been a week or two before Shavuos too, unless it was several weeks after...." (P 3). How does this affect his credibility as a narrator? This admission of doubt comes at the beginning of the novel. How would it change your feelings about Tevye if it came at the end?

2. In "Tevye Blows a Small Fortune," the reader is told the outcome at the beginning of the story, indeed in the title. Given this, what provides that tension in the story; what makes you keep reading it?

3. Tevye talks a lot about undergoing personal change. In "Tevye Strikes it Rich" he says "I was the same man then that I am now, only not at all like me; that is, I was Tevye then too, but not the Tevye you're looking at." (P. 4), and in "Today's Children" he says, "I'm no longer the Tevye I once was." (P. 35). Is this simply a literary device intended to capture Tevye's voice, or does it have significance in the story? If significant, what does it tell us about Tevye?

4. These stories are told from Tevye's point of view, as if he were relating episodes of his life to Sholem Aleichem. How does this narrative structure shape our perceptions of Tevye? Sholem Aleichem wanted to create a new voice in Yiddish fiction; in what ways does he succeed?

5. Unlike in Fiddler on the Roof, the film/play based on this novel, Tevye does not live in Anatevka, or any sort of insular Jewish community. How does this affect any notions of shtetl life that we might have received from watching the film or play? Why do you think Sholem Aleichem decided to place Tevye where he does in the world?

6. Tevye disowns Chava for marrying Chvedka, a Christian. Intermarriage is common today, but it is oft sited as one cause of the decline of American Judaism. Tevye asks, "What did being a Jew or not a Jew matter." (P. 81). Perhaps intermarriage is not the end of the world, but is it something we should worry about? What do you think Tevye would say about this?

7. Bielke is Tevye's one daughter who marries for money, yet Tevye actually counsels her against it. Has Tevye changed his mind about how good it is to be rich? If so, what causes this change? What does Bielke's condition tell us about Sholem Aleichem's opinion of the rich?

8. How would you characterize the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in this novel?

9. Hillel Halkin, the translator, claims that the Jewish humor of this period and especially the humor in Tevye the Dairyman served the purpose of "...neutraliz(ing) the hostility of the outside world, first by internalizing it ('Why should I care what the world thinks of me, when I think even less of myself?') and then by detonating it through a joke ('Nevertheless, the world doesn't know what it's talking about, because in fact I am much cleverer that it is—the proof being that it has no idea how funny I am and I do!')..." (P. xvi). What do you think about this theory? Is this why Tevye is funny? (Is Tevye funny?) Do you think that this sort of humor is a useful psychological tool for a people facing oppression?

10. The stories that comprise Tevye the Dairyman were written over the course of several decades with little or no overall plan for their structure. Do they comprise a novel, or are they simply a collection of short stories featuring the same main character? What is the evidence in favor of and against each possibility?

11. With the exception of the first episode, Tevye suffers nothing but one misfortune after another. Do you consider him to be a tragic hero? Why or why not? In what ways does Tevye bring his suffering on himself?

12. Consider both Tevye's Jewish observance and his relationship with God. Is Tevye a good Jew?

13. Several of the episodes in the novel are not included in the play/film version. Why do you think these particular scenes were cut from the story? How do you think Sholem Aleichem's conception of his novel and characters might differ from that of the filmmaker's?

(Questions, prepared by Laura Sheppard-Brick for The National Yiddish Center.)

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That Month in Tuscany
Inglath Cooper, 2018
Fence Free Entertainment
340 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780692084694 


Summary
Ren Sawyer and Lizzy Harper live completely different lives. He’s a rock star with a secret he can no longer live with. She’s a regular person whose husband stood her up for a long planned anniversary trip.

On a flight across the Atlantic headed for Italy, a drunken pity party and untimely turbulence literally drop Lizzy into Ren’s lap. It is the last thing she can imagine ever happening to someone like her.

But despite their surface differences, they discover an undeniable pull between them. A pull that leads them both to remember who they had once been before letting themselves be changed by a life they had each chosen.

Exploring the streets of Florence and the hills of Tuscany together—two people with seemingly nothing in common—changes them both forever. And what they find in each other is something that might just heal them both. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1962-63
• Raised—Callaway, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., Virginia Tech
• Awards—RITA Award
• Currently—lives in Franklin County, Virginia


Inglath Cooper is the author of more than 20 romance novels. She grew up in the small community of Callaway, Virginia, where she fell in love with reading as a child. As a teen she began dreaming of becoming a writer.

It was while she was a college student in the 1980s that Cooper began writing although it took six manuscripts before she sold her first book, Truths and Roses, in 1994. A community college course in creative writing in the 1990s helped boost her confidence.

Having published under the Harlequin label for years, in 2011 Cooper decided to start her own imprint, Fence Free Entertainment. Doing so, she says, allows her to maintain a closer connection to her readers.

Cooper married her high school sweetheart, Mac Cooper, settling in Franklin County, Virginia, near Smith Mountain Lake. In addition to their four daughters, Cooper shares the family home with a succession of rescue animals. She is actively involved with the Franklin County Humane Society, serving on the board of directors, fundraising, and photographing dozens of dogs and cats up for adoption. (Adapted from online sources, including The Roanoke Times .)

Book Reviews
  …if this sounds like an ordinary, stereotypical romance, trust me, it is not. Why? The characters are nicely drawn, subtle and complete. The scenery is gorgeous. And there are enough plot twists to keep the reader turning pages, not to mention rooting for Lizzy and Ren.
Barbara Delinsky.com


I loved this book. All of the characters felt very real to me.… Parts of the novel read like a travel journal, and I mean that in a really good way. I loved the sights, sounds, and tastes of Tuscany. But the best part of this book was the emotion. It oozed.
kristystories.blogspot.com

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 THAT MONTH IN TUSCANY … then take off on your own:

1. How would you describe Lizzy Harper? What does the following observation suggest about how she views her life: "a day is normally sectioned off by appointments… and meetings… all of those things that manage to steal most of the best parts of our waking hours." (By the way, does that have complaint have a familiar ring to you and your own life?)

2. If someone bowed out of a trip that you had planned together, would you have the temerity to take off on your own as Lizzy does? (Perhaps that's actually happened to you.)

3. How does Ty, Lizzy's husband come across, both in his own chapters and in what Lizzy has to say about him? Why does Lizzy stay in the marriage? Also, Ty's chapters use the unusual 2nd person point-of-view. Why might the author have made that choice?

4. Talk about Ren Sawyer and the impact his brother's death has had on him. Why does he seem to struggle with his fame?

5. What draws Ren and Lizzy together? What do they see in one another? What are each seeking? Ultimately, what do the two learn from (or through) one another—how does their relationship change their lives?

6. What is Lizzy's relationship with her daughter? Why is Kylie so surprised when Lizzy takes off to Tuscany on her own? How does Kylie's understanding of her mother—and her father—change by the end of the novel?

7. Do you feel the subplot involving Kylie's kidnapping is well-integrated into the storyline, adding a good dose of suspense to the novel? Or do you feel it's a distraction from the main story? Perhaps, it's merely an awkward plot device used to get Lizzy to return home? Any thoughts?

8. Kylie's story is told in the 3rd person: does the narrator have an identity? If not, why might the author have chosen this perspective for Lizzy's daughter?

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

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That Night 
Chevy Stevens, 2014
St. Martin's Press
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250066831


Summary
As a teenager, Toni Murphy had a life full of typical adolescent complications: a boyfriend she adored, a younger sister she couldn't relate to, a strained relationship with her parents, and classmates who seemed hell-bent on making her life miserable.

Things weren't easy, but Toni could never have predicted how horrific they would become until her younger sister was brutally murdered one summer night.

Toni and her boyfriend, Ryan, were convicted of the murder and sent to prison.

Now thirty-four, Toni, is out on parole and back in her hometown, struggling to adjust to a new life on the outside. Prison changed her, hardened her, and she's doing everything in her power to avoid violating her parole and going back. This means having absolutely no contact with Ryan, avoiding fellow parolees looking to pick fights, and steering clear of trouble in all its forms.

But nothing is making that easy—not Ryan, who is convinced he can figure out the truth; not her mother, who doubts Toni's innocence; and certainly not the group of women who made Toni's life hell in high school and may have darker secrets than anyone realizes.

No matter how hard she tries, ignoring her old life to start a new one is impossible. Before Toni can truly move on, she must risk everything to find out what really happened that night.

But in That Night by Chevy Stevens, the truth might be the most terrifying thing of all. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—N/A
• Awards—International Thriller Writers Award
• Currently—lives on Vancouver Island, B.E.


Chevy Stevens grew up on a ranch on Vancouver Island and still calls the island home. For most of her adult life she worked in sales, first as a rep for a giftware company and then as a Realtor. At open houses, waiting between potential buyers, she spent hours scaring herself with thoughts of horrible things that could happen to her. Her most terrifying scenario, which began with being abducted, was the inspiration for Still Missing. After six months Chevy sold her house and left real estate so she could finish the book.

Chevy enjoys writing thrillers that allow her to blend her interest in family dynamics with her love of the west coast lifestyle. When she’s not working on her next book, she’s hiking with her husband and dog in the local mountains. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
In this riveting, if overly ambitious thriller, Stevens raises significant themes—bullying, troubled families, the difficulties ex-cons face—but doesn’t do them all justice.... Despite some wooden secondary characters, this is an exciting page-turner with an incisive twist.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [A] suspenseful thriller with [a] tale of heartbreak, the cruelties of fate, and redemption.... The reader follows Toni on a journey marked by cruel classmates and a hateful mother as she eventually discovers the shattering truth behind her sister's untimely death.... A compelling, exceptional read. —Mariel Pachucki, Maple Valley, WA
Library Journal


Toni Murphy...[is] about to be paroled from a Canadian penitentiary. When she was 18, she and her boyfriend, Ryan, were convicted of killing Toni’s younger sister. Flashbacks to the months before her sister was killed and the years she spent in prison help the reader understand the woman Toni is today.... [A] suspenseful tale. —Karen Keefe
Booklist


Stevens draws a dark crime drama from the beautiful blue-green of Canada’s Vancouver Island.... Stevens has woven a warped psychological drama, a melancholy tale that comes to an existential and yet hopeful conclusion.... Stevens' dark psychological thriller...[features] damaged people and distinctive senses of place.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. One of the biggest issues this book raises is that of the justice system. It's supposed to be "innocent until proven guilty," but that doesn't seem to be the case for Toni and Ryan. After reading this book, how do you feel about prisons and the way we go about convicting accused criminals? Do you feel differently than you did before?

2. This book brings up high school bullying. When asked if Shauna's clique is based on reality or whether it's purely fictional, Chevy Stevens has said that she discovered through her research how particularly vicious teenaged girls can be, and how sad it is that the parents of these children are often unaware of what is going on. What do you think of this serious topic?

3. We get a lot of different views of Frank McKinney throughout the course of the novel. Our first image of him is as a sad, lonely widower, and our last is as a murderer. What do you think about his character?

4. Near the end of the book, Nicole's old friend Darlene says, "Everyone thought Nicole was so perfect, but she was just good at pretending to be." How did you feel about Nicole?

5. Comment on the nature of Toni's relationship with her mother. Was it healthy? What do you think about the disparity in the way Mrs. Murphy treated her two daughters?

6. Toni finds a surrogate mother in Margaret, who is then suddenly taken away at the end of the novel. Discuss what you think about Margaret's sudden decision to fight Helen. How do you feel about her subsequent death?

7. Toni refers to the friends she makes in prison as "the girls" and feels an especially strong bond with them. On the other hand, the animosity in prison also feels especially intense. Do you think there's something about the prison system that makes people develop powerful feelings, whether negative or positive, towards each other?

8. Shauna gets away with a lot in the novel. When talking about their days of friendship, Toni implies that a lot of this was because of a lack of adults taking an active interest in Shauna's life. Then again, Toni also feels that her own mother takes too much of an interest in her life. Which girl do you think had it better—the one with the mother who was always on her case, or the one with the absent father?

9. At one point, Ryan says to Toni, "Haven't you heard? No one grow up in prison." Yet people comment thoughout the novel that prison changes a person. Is this incongruous—are growing up and changing the same thing? Do you think Toni and Ryan are changed by, or grow up during, their time in prison?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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That Old Cape Magic 
Richard Russo, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400030910
 

Summary 
Following Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo gives us the story of a marriage, and of all the other ties that bind, from parents and in-laws to children and the promises of youth.

Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father's ashes in the trunk of his car, but his mother is very much alive and not shy about calling him on his cell phone.

She does so as he drives down to Cape Cod, where he and his wife, Joy, will celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura's best friend. For Griffin this is akin to driving into the past, since he took his childhood summer vacations here, his parents' respite from the hated Midwest.

And the Cape is where he and Joy honeymooned, in the course of which they drafted the Great Truro Accord, a plan for their lives together that's now thirty years old and has largely come true. He'd left screenwriting and Los Angeles behind for the sort of New England college his snobby academic parents had always aspired to in vain, they'd moved into an old house full of character, and they'd started a family. Check, check, and check.

But be careful what you pray for—especially if you manage to achieve it. By the end of this perfectly lovely weekend, the past has so thoroughly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance. And when, a year later, a far more important wedding takes place, that of their beloved Laura, on the coast of Maine, Griffin is chauffeuring two urns of ashes as he contends once more with Joy and her large unruly family, and both he and she have brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened?

That Old Cape Magic is a novel of deep introspection and every family feeling imaginable, with a middle-aged man confronting his parents and their failed marriage, his own troubled one, his daughter's new life, and, finally, what it was he thought he wanted and what in fact he has.

The storytelling is flawless throughout, scenes of great comedy, even hilarity, alternating with moments of understanding and heart-stopping sadness, and the ending is at once surprising, uplifting, and unlike anything this Pulitzer Prize winner has ever written. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—July 15, 1949
• Where—Johnstown, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F. A. and Ph.D., University of Arizona
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in Camden, Maine


Prizewinning author Richard Russo is regarded by many critics as the best writer about small-town America since Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. "He doesn't over-sentimentalize [small towns]," said Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for NPR's "Fresh Air." Nor does he belittle the dreams and hardships of his working-class characters. "I come from a blue-collar family myself and I think he gets the class interactions; he just really nails class in his novels," said Corrigan.

When Russo left his own native small town in upstate New York, it was with hopes of becoming a college professor. But during his graduate studies, he began to have second thoughts about the academic life. While finishing up his doctorate, he took a creative writing class; and a new career path opened in front of him.

Russo's first novel set the tone for much of his later work. The story of an ailing industrial town and the interwoven lives of its inhabitants, Mohawk won critical praise for its witty, engaging style. In subsequent books, he has brought us a dazzling cast of characters, mostly working-class men and women who are struggling with the problems of everyday life (poor health, unemployment, mounting bills, failed marriages) in dilapidated, claustrophobic burghs that have—like their denizens—seen better days. In 2001, Russo received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, a brilliant, tragicomic set-piece that explores past and present relationships in a once-thriving Maine town whose textile mill and shirt factory have gone bust.

Russo's vision of America would be bleak, except for the wit and optimism he infuses into his stories. Even when his characters are less than lovable, they are funny, rueful, and unfailingly human. "There's a version of myself that I still see in a kind of alternative universe and it's some small town in upstate New York or someplace like that," Russo said in an interview. That ability to envision himself in the bars and diners of small-town America has served him well. "After the last sentence is read, the reader continues to see Russo's tender, messed-up people coming out of doorways, lurching through life," said the fiction writer Annie Proulx. "And keeps on seeing them because they are as real as we are."

Extras
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:

• In 1994, Russo's book Nobody's Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman and Bruce Willis. Newman also starred in the 1998 movie Twilight, for which Russo wrote the screenplay. Russo now divides his time between writing fiction and writing for the movies.

• When he wrote his first books, Russo was employed full-time as a college teacher and would stop at the local diner between classes to work on his novels. After the success of Nobody's Food (the book and movie), he was able to quit teaching—but he still likes to write in tight spots, such as the Camden Deli. It's "a less lonely way to write," he told USA Today. "I'm less self-conscious when it's not so quiet."

• When asked what his favorite books are, he offered this list:

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens—All of Dickens, really. The breadth of his canvas, the importance he places on vivid minor characters, his understanding that comedy is serious business. And in the character of Pip, I learned, even before I understood I'd learned it, that we recognize ourselves in a character's weakness as much than his strength. When Pip is ashamed of Joe, the best man he knows, we see ourselves, and it's terrible, hard-won knowledge. 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain—Twain's great novel demonstrates that you can go to the very darkest places if you're armed with a sense of humor. His study of American bigotry, ignorance, arrogance, and violence remains so fresh today, alas, because human nature remains pretty constant. I understand the contemporary controversy, of course. Huck's discovery that Jim is a man is hardly a blinding revelation to black readers, but the idea that much of what we've been taught by people in authority is a crock should resonate with everybody. Especially these days.  

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald—Mostly, I suppose, because his concerns -- class, money, the invention of self -- are so central to the American experience. Fitzgerald understood that our most vivid dreams are often rooted in self-doubt and weakness. Many people imagine that we identify with strength and virtue. Fitzgerald knew better.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck—For the beauty of the book's omniscience. It's fine for writers to be humble. Most of us have a lot to be humble about. But it does you no good to be timid. Pretend to be God? Why not? (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews 
Although this is a much smaller canvas than Russo has worked on in recent years, what That Old Cape Magic lacks in breadth and plot momentum it makes up for with psychological nuance about the ties that bind—and snap. It's a marvelous portrayal of the strands of affection and irritation that run through a family, entangling in-laws and children's crushes and even old friends…The shelf of books about middle-aged guys going through midlife crises is long, of course, but Russo threads more comedy through this introspective genre than we get from John Updike, Richard Ford or Chang-rae Lee. He's a master of the comic quip and the ridiculous situation.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

When we finish reading That Old Cape Magic, we know we’ll start rereading it soon. And that the characters will come to mind at the most unpredictable times. We will stay on speaking terms with them more than we do with some of our real-life cousins.
Betsy Willeford - The Miami Herald

A comic yet thoughtful take on marriage.... But amid the humor, it raises questions about the complications we inherit and the ones we build for ourselves.
Bob Minzesheimer - USA Today

Crafting a dense, flashback-filled narrative that stutters across two summer outings to New England (and as many weddings), Russo (Empire Falls) convincingly depicts a life coming apart at the seams, but the effort falls short of the literary magic that earned him a Pulitzer. A professor in his 50s who aches to go back to screenwriting, Jack Griffin struggles to divest himself of his parents. Lugging around, first, his father's, then both his parents' urns in the trunk of his convertible, he hopes to find an appropriate spot to scatter their ashes while juggling family commitments—his daughter's wedding, a separation from his wife. Indeed, his parents—especially his mother, who calls her son incessantly before he starts hearing her from beyond the grave—occupy the narrative like capricious ghosts, and Griffin inherits “the worst attributes of both.” Though Russo can write gorgeous sentences and some situations are amazingly rendered—Griffin wading into the surf to try to scatter his father's ashes, his wheelchair-bound father-in-law plummeting off a ramp and into a yew—the navel-gazing interior monologues that constitute much of the novel lack the punch of Russo's earlier work.
Publishers Weekly

Joy and Jack Griffin head to Cape Cod to attend a friend's wedding, where their daughter Laura announces her own engagement. Sensing the malaise in their 30-year marriage, the Griffins decide to reconnect by visiting the B & B where they once honeymooned. Their arrival in separate vehicles seems symbolic of the discord in their hearts and minds. Jack, still coming to terms with his father's death and bristling at his mother's constant criticism, feels restless in his career as a college professor, wondering whether he should have left a lucrative screenwriting gig in L.A. Joy, chafing at Jack's implicit displeasure with her sunny disposition and maddening family, longs for an empathetic listener. Russo lovingly explores the deceptive nature of memory as each exquisitely drawn character attempts to deconstruct the family myths that inform their relationships. Verdict: The Griffins may not find magic on old Cape Cod, but readers will. Those who savored Russo's long, languid novels (e.g., Pulitzer winner Empire Falls) may be surprised by this one's rapid pace, but Russo's familiar compassion for the vicissitudes of the human condition shines through. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL
Library Journal

Wryly funny…An impressively expansive analysis of familial dynamics between not only spouses but also in-laws, parents and children.... It’s Russo all the same, and his many fans are sure to savor the journey.
Booklist

A change of pace from Pulitzer-winning author Russo (Bridge of Sighs, 2007, etc.). In contrast to his acclaimed novels about dying towns in the Northeast, the author's slapstick satire of academia (Straight Man, 1997) previously seemed like an anomaly. Now it has a companion of sorts, though Russo can't seem to decide whether his protagonist is comic or tragic. Maybe both. The son of two professors who were unhappy with each other and their lot in life, Jack Griffin vowed not to follow in their footsteps, instead becoming a hack screenwriter in Los Angeles. Then he leaves that career to become a cinema professor and moves back East with his wife Joy. Most of the novel takes place during two weddings a year apart: one on Cape Cod, where Jack had endured annual summer vacations and convinced Joy to spend their honeymoon; the other in Maine, where Joy had wanted to honeymoon. Plenty of flashbacks concerning the families of each spouse seem on the surface to present very different models for marriage, and there is an account of the year between the weddings that shows their relationship changing significantly. It isn't enough that Jack feels trapped by his familial past; he carries his parents' ashes in his trunk, can't bear to scatter them and carries on conversations with his late mother that eventually become audible. Will Jack and Joy be able to sustain their marriage? Will their daughter succumb to the fate of her parents, just as Jack and Joy have? Observes Jack, "Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming." Readable, as always with this agreeable and gifted author.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. What does Jack Griffin want?

2. In reference to his parents' ongoing but fruitless search for a Cape Cod beach house, Griffin muses, “Perhaps...just looking was sufficient in and of itself” (page 9). Is looking enough? Which characters prove or disprove this point of view?

3. One page 16, Griffin points out to his mother that she and his father used to sing “That Old Cape Magic” on the Sagamore Bridge, “as if happiness were a place.” Is it possible for happiness to be a place? Can a place save a relationship?

4. Griffin poses a question to himself: “Why was he more resentful of Harve and Jill, who really wanted to understand how he made his living, than his own parents, who had never, to his knowledge, seen a single film he had anything to do with” (page 49)? Griffin doesn't admit to an answer, but what do you think the answer is?

5. In “The Summer of the Brownings,” young Griffin refuses to spend his last night on the Cape with Peter, even though the decision only serves to hurt everyone. Can you point to other incidents in which Griffin exercises his perverse desire to hurt himself and others?

6. Why is Griffin so apprehensive of commitment? What is he afraid of losing?

7. Griffin notes that “his wife's natural inclination was toward contentment” (page 105). What is Griffin's natural inclination?

8. Is Griffin afraid of being happy? Is being the happy the same as “settling”?

9. How has Griffin's cynicism caused him to misinterpret the intentions of those around him?

10. Why does it take so long for Griffin to dispose of his parents' remains?

11. Why does Griffin feel the need to carry on internal conversations with his mother?

12. How does Griffin's relationship with his parents lead to the dissolution of his marriage to Joy?

13. Why does Griffin insist on staying in L.A., away from Joy?

14. Griffin uneasily considers the parallels between Joy's attachment to himself and Tommy and Laura's attachment to Andy and Sunny. How do these similar triangles play out?

15. This book dances around the concept of responsibility: filial responsibility, marital responsibility, and personal responsibility, to name a few. What do Russo's characters feel about responsibility?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Adults 
Caroline Hulse, 2018
Random House
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525511748


Summary
A couple (now separated), plus their daughter, plus their new partners, all on an epic Christmas vacation. What could go wrong? This razor-sharp novel puts a darkly comic twist on seasonal favorites like Love Actually and The Holiday.

Claire and Matt are no longer together but decide that it would be best for their daughter, Scarlett, to have a "normal" family Christmas.

They can’t agree on whose idea it was to go to the Happy Forest holiday park, or who said they should bring their new partners. But someone did—and it’s too late to pull the plug.

Claire brings her new boyfriend, Patrick (never Pat), a seemingly sensible, eligible from a distance Ironman in Waiting. Matt brings the new love of his life, Alex, funny, smart, and extremely patient. Scarlett, who is seven, brings her imaginary friend Posey. He’s a giant rabbit.

Together the five (or six?) of them grit their teeth over Forced Fun Activities, drink a little too much after Scarlett’s bedtime, overshare classified secrets about their pasts … and before you know it, their holiday is a powder keg that ends where this novel begins—with a tearful, frightened call to the police.

What happened? They said they’d all be adults about this…. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1976-77
• Where—UK
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Manchester, England


Caroline Hulse spends most of her days writing, having fulfilled her dream of having a job she could do in pajamas. She also works in human resources sometimes. She is openly competitive and loves playing board and card games. She can often be found in casino poker rooms.

In fact, Hulse is a professional poker player, translating her powers of observation at the card table to her fictional characters. As she told NPR's Robin Young (Here and Now), when playing poker…

[Y]ou just spend a lot of time observing people in competitive environments where they are feeling quite emotional and not necessarily at their best…. It's also a feeling like other people might be taking advantage of you, which often doesn't bring the best out of people. So I think poker has definitely been a really big influence on my writing, even though I don't actually write about poker.

Hulse lives with her husband in Manchester, England. (Author bio adapted from the publisher and WBUR.)

Book Reviews
Brilliantly funny.
Good Housekeeping (UK)


Razor-sharp comedy.
Sunday Mirror (UK)


(Starred Review) Hulse does an excellent job building…. This debut is the whole package­: realistic, flawed characters placed in an increasingly tense situation, resulting in a surprising, suspenseful novel.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred Review) A snappy writing style and changing viewpoints make the pages of this debut fly by as readers will want to know what happens next
Library Journal


[D]eteriorating relationships are interspersed with police interviews and excerpts from Happy Forest brochures as the narrative gradually reveals who shot whom under what circumstances. An entertaining, tongue-in-cheek tale of people who are the adults, after all. —Michele Leber
Booklist


A very bad idea for a holiday vacation turns out even worse than expected for a bunch of Brits.… A bit too heavily staged, but with good dialogue and some nice farcical moments.
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 ADULTS … then take off on your own:

1. How would you classify this novel: as a comedy of manners, a bedroom farce, a suspense novel, or a domestic drama? All of the above, none of the above, or something else entirely?

2. Author Caroline Hulse has said that she draws inspiration for her characters by watching how professional poker players (she is one) react under pressure. (See the Author Bio above). Where in The Adults do you find evidence of people behaving when they're not at their best?

3. Why has Matt not been forthright with Alex regarding the breakup of his and Claire's marriage? What do you think of his lack of honesty? How do you see Alex's reaction?

4. Is there one character out of the bunch (let's exclude Scarlett for now) that you approve of—one more sympathetic than others? Who, in your opinion, behaves worse than the others—someone whom you have little or no sympathy for?

5. What do Claire and Patrick see in one another? Same question for Alex and Matt.

6. (Follow-up to Question 5) What are the fault lines exposed in the novel's relationships? When do you begin to detect them?

7. (Follow-up to Question 4) Consider Scarlett. What is her role in all of this? And what about Posey?

8. Discuss, of course, the delicious irony of the book's title. Same goes for the name of the park, Happy Forest.

9. What are your predictions for the characters? What do you think will happen to them, say, in the fairly near future?

10. The book's narrative is interspersed with police interviews and excerpts from the Happy Forest brochure. How did that interruptive technique affect your reading? Did it enhance or detract from your experience?

11. Does anything good result from the holiday?

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

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The Au Pair
Emma Rous, 2019
Penguin Publishing
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780440000457 


Summary
Seraphine Mayes and her twin brother, Danny, were born in the middle of summer at their family's estate on the Norfolk coast.

Within hours of their birth, their mother threw herself from the cliffs, the au pair fled, and the village thrilled with whispers of dark cloaks, changelings, and the aloof couple who drew a young nanny into their inner circle.

Now an adult, Seraphine mourns the recent death of her father.

While going through his belongings, she uncovers a family photograph that raises dangerous questions. It was taken on the day the twins were born, and in the photo, their mother, surrounded by her husband and her young son, is smiling serenely and holding just one baby.

Who is the child, and what really happened that day? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Emma Rous grew up in England, Indonesia, Kuwait, Portugal and Fiji, and from a young age she had two ambitions: to write stories, and to look after animals. She studied veterinary medicine and zoology at the University of Cambridge, and worked as a small animal veterinarian for eighteen years before starting to write fiction.

Emma lives near Cambridge in England with her husband and three sons, and she now writes full time.
The Au Pair was published in 2019. (From Amazon.)

Book Reviews
This is one hell of a ride.
New York Post


[An] atmospheric if muddled first novel….  Rous ably interweaves accounts from dual narrators, Seraphine and Laura, to fan the suspense, but her plot-driven page-turner eventually founders after a few too many fantastic turns.
Publishers Weekly


A splendid read that will be best enjoyed with a book club or a buddy, as you’ll be itching to digest the tale’s twists with someone else, especially when you reach the jaw-drop­ping climax.”
BookPage


As delicious and spellbinding as a soap opera, complete with the dramatic moments and outrageous twists. A promising first novel from Rous, The Au Pair is an absolutely absorbing and scandalous page-turner.
Booklist


An unfamiliar photo causes a British woman to question her identity and investigate long-hidden family secrets in this debut thriller. …The ambiance of Summerbourne and the family that inhabits it… adds [a] gothic touch…. A modern gothic suspense novel done right.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What were your feelings about Summerbourne as the setting for this story? Did you empathize with Seraphine’s attachment to the house, or are you more like Danny as far as bricks and mortar are concerned?

2. Seraphine tells us early on she’s "never felt much need for friendships." Do you think this might have been influenced by her early childhood experiences? Do you think her attitude might have changed at all by the end of the book?

3. Laura says to Alex, "We all did bad things, Alex. You, me, Ruth, Dominic. Just because we haven’t been arrested like Vera doesn’t mean we got away with it." Do you think all four of them carry an equal amount of blame for their actions?

4. Pregnancy denial is a real phenomenon. Did you pick up on clues in the book that Laura was pregnant—clues that she herself simultaneously mentioned and ignored? Have you come across other forms of psychological denial, such as people refusing to acknowledge problems in their relationships, jobs, health, or behavior?

5. The Latin inscription at the folly translates as "A precipice in front, wolves behind." Do you think this is an apt description of the situation Laura finds herself in after the babies are born? Could she have achieved a better outcome?

6. When Vera admits she had initial doubts about the babies’ identities, Seraphine tells us: "I try to embrace [Vera’s] meaning: that it doesn’t matter to her, that she loves us anyway. But it’s not enough. Her love for us doesn’t give her the right to hide the truth from us." Do you agree? Do you have any sympathy with Vera’s desire to bring up the babies as Summerbourne twins irrespective of where they came from?

7. How did Michael’s stories and the village gossip about the Mayes family make you feel? Do you think rumors and gossip are inevitable in any community?

8. Do you believe Vera was guilty of all three of the crimes she was charged with—Ruth’s murder, Dominic’s murder, and Laura’s attempted murder?

9. If you could spend an afternoon on the Summerbourne patio with any one of the characters from The Au Pair, which one would you choose, and why?

10. What do you hope the future might hold for Laura and Seraphine?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes  (A Hunger Games Novel)
Suzanne Collins, 2020 
Scholastic Press
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781338635171


Summary
Revisiting the world of Panem sixty-four years before the events of The Hunger Games, starting on the morning of the reaping of the Tenth Hunger Games.

—Ambition will fuel him.
—Competition will drive him.
—But power has its price.

It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games.

The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute.

The odds are against him. He’s been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined—every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin.

Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute—and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 10, 1962
• Where—Hartford, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., Indiana University; M.F.A., New York University
• Currently—lives in Connecticut

Collins's career began in 1991 as a writer for children's television shows. She worked on several television shows for Nickelodeon, including Clarissa Explains It All, The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo, Little Bear, and Oswald. She was also the head writer for Scholastic Entertainment's Clifford's Puppy Days. She received a Writers Guild of America nomination in animation for co-writing the critically acclaimed Christmas special, Santa, Baby!

After meeting children's author James Proimos while working on the Kids' WB show Generation O!, Collins was inspired to write children's books herself. Her inspiration for Gregor the Overlander, the first book of the best selling series "The Underland Chronicles," came from Alice in Wonderland, when she was thinking about how one was more likely to fall down a manhole than a rabbit hole, and would find something other than a tea party.

Between 2003 and 2007 she wrote the five books of the "Underland Chronicles": Gregor the Overlander, Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane, Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods, Gregor and the Marks of Secret, and Gregor and the Code of Claw. During that time, Collins also wrote a rhyming picture book illustrated by Mike Lester entitled When Charlie McButton Lost Power (2005).

In September 2008 Scholastic Press released the The Hunger Games, the first book of a new trilogy by Collins. The Hunger Games was partly inspired by the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Another inspiration was her father's career in the Air Force, which allowed her to better understand poverty, starvation, and the effects of war.

This was followed by the novel's 2009 sequel, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay in 2010. In just 14 months, 1.5 million copies of the first two "Hunger Games" books have been printed in North America alone. The Hunger Games has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than 60 weeks in a row. Collins was named one of Time magazine's most influential people of 2010.

Collins earned her M.F.A. from New York University in Dramatic Writing. She now lives in Connecticut with her husband, their two children, and 2 adopted feral kittens. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
As much as this is Coriolanus's origin story, it is an origin story for the Games themselves, an answer to the question… posed by Katniss in Mockingjay…: "Did a group of people sit around and cast their votes on initiating the Hunger Games?"… People who love finding out the back stories in fictional universes—why Sherlock Holmes wears a deerstalker hat… will relish the chance to learn these details.
Sarah Lyall - New York Times


Readers who loved the moral ambiguity, crisp writing and ruthless pacing of the first three books might be less interested in an overworked parable about the value of Enlightenment thinking.… It's the sheer obviousness that drags, the way that we know what the right answer is supposed to be.
NPR


For true fans of The Hunger Games, Collins shines most as she weaves in tantalizing details that lend depth to the gruesome world she created in the original series and Coriolanus’s place in its history.
Time


The prequel is stranger than its predecessors, and funnier, overlong, dangerously goofy.…  The storytelling itself trends desperate at times. Chapters close on violent cliffhangers that edge into parody….  Collins still has a gift for horrorshow scene-setting…. [A] major work with major flaws, but it sure gives you a lot to chew on.
Entainment Weekly


[An] unflinching exploration of power and morality…. A gripping mix of whipsaw plot twists and propulsive writing make this story's complex issues—vulnerability and abuse, personal responsibility, and institutionalized power dynamics—vivid and personal.
Publishers Weekly


Collins humanizes [Coriolanus Snow] as superficially heroic and emotionally relatable… resulting in both a tense, character-driven piece and a cautionary tale.… The twists and heartbreaks captivate despite tragic inevitabilities.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:

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

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

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The Bear 
Andrew Krivik, 2020
Bellevue Literary Press
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781942658702


Summary
A gorgeous fable of Earth’s last two human inhabitants, and a girl’s journey home

In an Edenic future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They possess a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb.

The father teaches the girl how to fish and hunt, the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last of humankind.

But when the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness that offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can only learn to listen.

A cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature’s dominion. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Andrew Krivak is the author of three novels: The Bear (2020); The Signal Flame (2017), a Chautauqua Prize finalist; and The Sojourn (2011), a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Chautauqua Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Krivvak is also the author of A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life (2008), a memoir about his eight years in the Jesuit Order, and editor of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902–1912, which received the Louis L. Martz Prize.

Krivak lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
(Starred review) [Written] With artistry and grace…. Krivak delivers a transcendent journey into a world where all living things—humans, animals, trees—coexist in magical balance, forever telling each other’s unique stories. This beautiful and elegant novel is a gem.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) Most postapocalyptic novels bury us in blood or debris, but Krivak offers a completely different understanding of humans at the end of the line.… Poignant but not tragic, this … story shows that there's no loneliness in this world when we are one with nature. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


[Krivak’s] sentences are polished stones of wonder.… The elegiac tone reflects what is lost and what will be lost, an enchantment as if Wendell Berry had reimagined Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Booklist


(Starred review) A moving post-apocalyptic fable for grown-ups.… Krivak's slender story assures us that even without humans, the world will endure… It makes for a splendid thought exercise and a lovely fable-cum-novel. Ursula K. Le Guin would approve. An effective, memorable tale.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:

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

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

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The Current 
Tim Johnston, 2019
Algonquin Books
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616206772 


Summary
Tim Johnston, whose breakout debut Descent was called “astonishing,” “dazzling,” and “unforgettable” by critics, returns with The Current, a tour de force about the indelible impact of a crime on the lives of innocent people.

In the dead of winter, outside a small Minnesota town, state troopers pull two young women and their car from the icy Black Root River. One is found downriver, drowned, while the other is found at the scene—half frozen but alive.

What happened was no accident, and news of the crime awakens the community’s memories of another young woman who lost her life in the same river ten years earlier, and whose killer may still live among them.

Determined to find answers, the surviving young woman soon realizes that she’s connected to the earlier unsolved case by more than just a river, and the deeper she plunges into her own investigation, the closer she comes to dangerous truths, and to the violence that simmers just below the surface of her hometown.

Grief, suspicion, the innocent and the guilty—all stir to life in this cold northern town where a young woman can come home, but still not be safe.

Brilliantly plotted and unrelentingly propulsive, The Current is a beautifully realized story about the fragility of life, the power of the past, and the need, always, to fight back. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1962-63
• Where—Iowa City, Iowa, USA
• Education—University of Iowa; University of Massachusetts
• Awards—O'Henry Award
• Currently—lives in Iowa City, Iowa


Tim Johnston is best known as the author of the mystery/thrillers, The Current (2019) and Descent (2015). He was born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, earning degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He comes by his love of language naturally: his mother attended the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop for poetry and has written columns for the Des Moines (Iowa) Register, Iowa City Press-Citizen, and New York Times.

Johnston has also published a collection of short stories, The Irish Girl (2009), some of whose stories won The O'Henry Prize and other awards, while the collection as a whole won the Katherine Anne Porter Award. He is also the author of the young-adult novel, Never So Green (2005).

Johnston's stories have appeared in New England Review, New Letters, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, Double Take, Best Life Magazine, and Narrative Magazine, among others.

Before returning to Iowa City, where he now lives, Johnston taught writing at the University of Memphis and George Washington University, where he was a writer-in-residence. (Adapted from various online sources. Retrieved 1/28/2019 .)

Book Reviews
Pick up Tim Johnston's suspenseful novel The Current and you risk finding yourself glued to your chair, eyes to the pages, no thought of attending to daily obligations. Johnston's elegant, cinematic style takes us into the characters' lives and history, problems and concerns. The book examines that horrifying moment when everything changes, the before and after when love, friendship, hopes and trust turn into dread, guilt, blame and grief.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


Gripping as it is, Johnston’s masterful novel is worth lingering over—it soars above the constraints of a traditional thriller and pulls you deep into the secrets of a grief-stricken town.
People
 

Johnston dazzled with his breakout thriller, Descent; his follow-up is a more ambitious page-turner, unpacking how a shocking murder impacts the denizens of a small Minnesota town as they weather suspicion, guilt, and grief.
Entertainment Weekly
 
 
Tim Johnston’s gripping second novel is much more than a skillfully constructed, beautifully written whodunit. It’s a subtle and lyrical acclamation of the heart and spirit of small-town America. The Current is not your conventional, frenetically paced page-turner, although it smolders with a brooding, slow-burn tension that nudges the reader forward, catching you up in the lives of the troubled solitaries at the book’s core.
Washington Independent Review of Books
 

(Starred review) [O]utstanding…. Johnston imbues each character with believable motives. The nuanced plot delves deep into how a community—and surviving relatives—deal with the aftermath of a death.
Publishers Weekly


I would have taken a break long before 2:00 a.m. last night were it not for Johnston’s masterly ability to rummage inside the heads of his various characters.… We need a little hyperbole if we’re going to adequately describe how much we love a Tim Johnston novel. —Bill Ott
Booklist


(Starred review) [H]aunting…. [T]his novel has at its heart a strong belief that love… is the one thing that truly saves us… [The title] functions as a beautiful metaphor for all the secrets and emotions roiling beneath the surface of every human life.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Generic Mystery Questions for THE CURRENT … then take off on your own:

GENERIC QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?

4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?

5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.

• Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
• Are they plausible or implausible?
• Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?

6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?

7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends.Does the ending accomplish those goals?

•  Is the conclusion probable or believable?
•  Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
• Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
• Perhaps it's too predictable.
• Can you envision a different or better ending?

8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?

9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?

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

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The Dreamers 
Karen Thompson Walker, 2019
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812994162 


Summary
An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep in this mesmerizing novel from the bestselling author of The Age of Miracles.

One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up.

She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital.

When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster.

Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?

Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life—if only we are awakened to them. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—San Diego, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California, Los Angeles; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon


Karen Thompson Walker was born and raised in San Diego, California. She is a graduate of UCLA and the Columbia MFA program. In 2011 she received Sirenland Fellowship, as well as a Bomb magazine fiction prize.

A former editor at Simon & Schuster, she wrote The Age of Miracles in the mornings before work. Her debut was published in 2012. Her second novel, The Dreamers came out in 2019.

Walker lives with her husband, the novelist Casey Walker, and their two daughters in Portland, Oregon. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon. (Adapated from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
(Starred Review) [R]ichly imaginative and quietly devastating.… Walker jolts the narrative with surprising twists, ensuring it keeps its energy until the end. This is a skillful, complex, and thoroughly satisfying novel about a community in peril.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred Review) [A] science-fiction fairy tale about a mysterious epidemic putting [people] to sleep.… What is the nature of consciousness. What mix of loyalty and love binds individuals…: a few of the questions Walker raises in her provocative, hypnotic tale.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
 1. A contagious disease, a quarantined town—the characters in The Dreamers are facing an extreme situation. Our culture is dominated by two opposing narratives about how people respond to disasters: Some believe they bring out the worst in people, others that they bring out the best. How do these possibilities play out in The Dreamers?

2. What do you think of Matthew’s character? Are his actions heroic or heartless? Selfless or self-aggrandizing? Or some combination? Is it ethical to privilege the lives of one’s loved ones over the lives of strangers?

3. How does The Dreamers differ from other books about disaster and dystopia? What does it have in common with those stories?

4. Some of the sick dream of extraordinarily vivid alternate lives. Consider Rebecca, who dreams of an entire lifetime, including a son. Do you think her dreamed-of life is somehow real? Or just a delusion? What about Nathaniel’s extended dream of Henry?

5. Why do you think Karen Thompson Walker chose to feature a large cast of characters instead of focusing on just one person’s experience? How did this choice affect your reading of the book? Did one character resonate with you more than the others?

6. One of the main characters is a college freshman named Mei. How would you describe her personality? How does she change over the course of the novel?

7. The Dreamers includes many parent/child relationships. What do you think of the book’s portrayal of these bonds? How does the crisis affect these relationships?

8. The Dreamers involves a fictitious disease in a fictitious town, but what parallels do you see in today’s real world? How do you think the government would respond to a situation like this if it happened today?

9. How do you feel about the ending of the book? How do you imagine the lives of the surviving characters will look five years into the future? How do you think their experiences during the outbreak will affect the rest of their lives?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Exiles  
Christina Baker Kline, 2020
HarperCollins
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062356345


Summary
The author of the bestseller Orphan Train returns with an ambitious, emotionally resonant novel about three women whose lives are bound together in nineteenth-century Australia and the hardships they weather together as they fight for redemption and freedom in a new society.

Seduced by her employer’s son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison.

After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to “the land beyond the seas,” Van Diemen’s Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long voyage to this distant land.

During the journey on a repurposed slave ship, the Medea, Evangeline strikes up a friendship with Hazel, a girl little older than her former pupils who was sentenced to seven years transport for stealing a silver spoon.

Canny where Evangeline is guileless, Hazel—a skilled midwife and herbalist—is soon offering home remedies to both prisoners and sailors in return for a variety of favors.

Though Australia has been home to Aboriginal people for more than 50,000 years, the British government in the 1840s considers its fledgling colony uninhabited and unsettled, and views the natives as an unpleasant nuisance.

By the time the Medea arrives, many of them have been forcibly relocated, their land seized by white colonists. One of these relocated people is Mathinna, the orphaned daughter of the Chief of the Lowreenne tribe, who has been adopted by the new governor of Van Diemen’s Land.

In this gorgeous novel, Christina Baker Kline brilliantly recreates the beginnings of a new society in a beautiful and challenging land, telling the story of Australia from a fresh perspective, through the experiences of Evangeline, Hazel, and Mathinna.

While life in Australia is punishing and often brutally unfair, it is also, for some, an opportunity: for redemption, for a new way of life, for unimagined freedom.

Told in exquisite detail and incisive prose, The Exiles is a story of grace born from hardship, the unbreakable bonds of female friendships, and the unfettering of legacy. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1964
• Raised—in Maine and Tennessee, USA, and the UK
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.B., Cambridge University; M.F.A., University of Virginia
• Currently—lives in Montclair, New Jersey


Christina Baker Kline is a novelist, nonfiction writer, and editor. She is perhaps best known for her most recent novels, The Exiles (2020) A Piece of the World (2017) and Orphan Train (2013).

Kline also commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, Child of Mine and Room to Grow. She coauthored a book on feminist mothers and daughters, The Conversation Begins, with her mother, Christina L. Baker, and she coedited About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror with Anne Burt.

Kline grew up in Maine, England, and Tennessee, and has spent a lot of time in Minnesota and North Dakota, where here husband grew up. She is a graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing.

She has taught creative writing and literature at Fordham and Yale, among other places, and is a recent recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation fellowship. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her family. (From the pubisher.)

Book Reviews
[G]ripping…. The women, brought to their new lives against their wills, become a lens through which to see the development of colonial Australia.… [S]urprising twists, empathetic prose, and revealing historical details, [make a] resonant, powerful story.
Publishers Weekly


Evangeline… survives the journey [to Australia] with the help of gifted midwife and herbalist Hazel. Once they arrive, Mathinna, orphaned daughter of a Lowreenne chief… adds her voice to this chorus celebrating female friendship in adversity.
Library Journal


Kline deftly balances tragedy and pathos, making happy endings hard-earned and satisfying…. Book groups will find much to discuss, such as the uses of education, both formal and informal, in this moving work.
Booklist


[Monumental]…. This episode in history gets a top-notch treatment by Kline, one of our foremost historical novelists. This fascinating 19th-century take on Orange Is the New Black is subtle, intelligent, and thrillingly melodramatic.
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 EXILES … then take off on your own:

1. Talk about the reasons Evangeline is first sent to prison and then to the penal colony of Australia. How does her treatment reflect the stature of women in the 1840s—in what was then (along with France) the most civilized country in the world?

2. (Follow-up to Question 1) For fun, consider the disparity between the worlds of The Exiles and, say, Jane Austen's novels, which took place a couple of decades decades before the setting of this novel. Consider, also, that Austen, like Evangeline, was herself the daughter of a clergyman. Would her life have been as precarious as Evangeline's?

3. Describe the conditions—the hardships—Evangelina experienced both in Newgate Prison and on the months-long journey to Australia.

4. In light of the questions above, apply the same topics to Hazel, whom Evangeline meets on the ship. What is Hazel's background and the reason she is sent to Australia?

5. In an outward show of grace and charity, Lady Franklin has adopted Mathinna, a young Aboriginal girl. What is Lady Franklin's actual purpose in bringing Mathinna into her household? What are her true feelings toward Australia's indigenous peoples?

6. Considering the cruelty, hardships, and death in this novel, did you find sections difficult to read at times? If you made it through to the end, why did you persist? What drove you to overcome those painful parts to reach the novel's conclusion? And if you reached the end, was it satisfying?

7. All good historical fiction engages us with real history: it brings the past alive and puts it in the context of living (albeit fictional) human beings—and so we learn. What did you learn about the settlement of Australia that you hadn't known previously?

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

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The Farm:  A Novel
Joanne Ramos, 2019
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781984853752 


Summary
Nestled in New York’s Hudson Valley is a luxury retreat boasting every amenity: organic meals, personal fitness trainers, daily massages—and all of it for free.

In fact, you’re paid big money to stay here—more than you’ve ever dreamed of. The catch?

For nine months, you cannot leave the grounds, your movements are monitored, and you are cut off from your former life while you dedicate yourself to the task of producing the perfect baby.

For someone else.

Jane, an immigrant from the Philippines, is in desperate search of a better future when she commits to being a "Host" at Golden Oaks—or the Farm, as residents call it. But now pregnant, fragile, consumed with worry for her family, Jane is determined to reconnect with her life outside.

Yet she cannot leave the Farm or she will lose the life-changing fee she’ll receive on the delivery of her child.

Gripping, provocative, heartbreaking, The Farm pushes to the extremes our thinking on motherhood, money, and merit and raises crucial questions about the trade-offs women will make to fortify their futures and the futures of those they love. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1973
• Where—Philippines
• Raised—State of Wisconsin, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Joanne Ramos was born in the Philippines and moved to Wisconsin when she was six. She graduated with a BA from Princeton University.

After working in investment banking and private-equity investing for several years, she wrote for The Economist as a staff writer. She lives in New York City with her husband and three children. The Farm is her first novel. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
The Farm may be an "issue" book, but it wears the mantle lightly. It’s a breezy novel full of types (the Shark, the Dreamer, the Rebel, the Saint), and veers, not always successfully, from earnestness into satire. That shift in voice can obscure the novel’s intent—though to be fair, ambiguity may be the point.
Jen McDonald - New York Times Book Review


In lesser hands, Mae would read like a cartoon villain. But Ramos writes her with enough depth that the career woman reads as much a product of her environment as Jane.… [T]he book is so eager to make its point. Because what’s so striking about… isn’t that it imagines a frightening dystopia. This isn’t a hundred years in the future, it’s next week. This is reality, nudged just a touch to its logical extreme. Its very plausibility is a warning shot.
USA Today


[The Farm] hits home hard—a thrilling read about the myth of meritocracy, the way some people get ahead in life before they’re even born.
New York Magazine


[Joanne] Ramos’s debut novel couldn’t be more relevant or timely.
Oprah Magazine


This compelling first novel has echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale.… It’s one that’ll really make you think.
Good Housekeeping


A sharp takedown of the idea of American meritocracy.
Refinery29


The Farm is a smart, thoughtful novel about women, choices, and the immigrant experience that asks the question: How far would you go for the American dream?
PopSugar
 

Ramos’s transfixing debut scrutinizes the world of high-end surrogacy with stinging critiques and sets up heartrending dilemmas.… A surefire hit with book groups, this striking novel will also appeal strongly to readers who like dystopian touches and ethically complicated narratives.
Publishers Weekly


Traveling from the glitz of Manhattan to multiethnic, immigrant Queens and the isolation of the rural Hudson Valley, this is an exciting read about the politics of motherhood and female autonomy.
Library Journal


(Starred review) Compelling storytelling…. Ramos’s debut is so engaging that the reader might not understand the depths she probes until the book is done.…Each character’s complexity will give book groups plenty to discuss.
Booklist


(Starred review) At a luxurious secret facility in the Hudson Valley of New York, women who need money bear children for wealthy would-be mothers with no time for pregnancy.… Excellent, both as a reproductive dystopian narrative and as a social novel about women and class.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:

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

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

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The Fortunes 
Peter Ho Davies, 2016
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544263703


Summary
Sly, funny, intelligent, and artfully structured, The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience.
 
Inhabiting four lives—a railroad baron’s valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption—this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive—as much through love as blood.
 
Building fact into fiction, spinning fiction around fact, Davies uses each of these stories—three inspired by real historical characters—to examine the process of becoming not only Chinese American, but American.(From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 30, 1966
• Where—Coventry, England, UK
• Education—B.A. Cambridge University; M.A. Boston University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

Peter Ho Davies is an author and professor of creative writing. He was born in Coventry, England, to a Welsh father and Chinese mother. He has lived more than half his life in the United States. He is perhaps best known for his novels, The Welsh Girl (2007) and The Fortunes (2016), although his two earlier collections of short fiction are highly regarded.

Davies started out studying physics at Manchester University but later switched to English at Cambridge University. In 1992 he moved to the US to study in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University, where he received his M.A. Since then he has taught at the University of Oregon, Emory University, and is currently a Professor in the graduate program for Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Works and awards
His debut collection, The Ugliest House in the World (1997), won the John Llewellyn Rhys and PEN/Macmillan awards in Britain. His second collection, Equal Love (2000), was hailed by the New York Times Book Review for its “stories as deep and clear as myth.” The collection was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a New York Times Notable Book.

Davies is also a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a winner of the PEN/Malamud Award.

In 2003 Davies was named among the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta. The Welsh Girl, his first novel, was published in 2007 and his second, The Fortunes, in 2016. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/28/2016.)

Book Reviews
Emily Dickinson’s dictum, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” the opening epigraph in The Fortunes, could easily serve as its title. The characters in this astute, beautifully written, and often funny novel are searching for truth—of who they are and where they belong. But truth comes at them sideways, never straight on. The novel is actually four novellas, linked only by the fact that the main characters are Chinese or Chinese-Americans living in the U.S. Each section is set in a different era, which together span some 150 years, beginning with construction of the transcontinental railroad and ending in the present time.  READ MORE.
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers


[A] rewarding, unorthodox novel.
Wall Street Journal


Vividly detailed novellas whose rich language and engaging characters not only bring history alive but also address contemporary issues of race and belonging with heartache, fire and empathy.... The Fortunes is an important novel that attempts to give voice to Chinese-American characters who have been silenced in the past. Ho Davies' perspective is a welcome addition in the ongoing discussion of race in American society.
Dallas Morning News


The book is more than the sum of its parts, and Davies (the son of Welsh and Chinese parents) achieves an extraordinary novelistic intimacy against backdrops of historical vibrancy. Moreover, he considers what it means to be identified with, but not now belong to, an ancestral culture one can’t escape or fully embrace—in an immigrant society that promises but doesn’t deliver full racial inclusion.
Seattle Times


Davies writes with a rare emotional resonance and a deft sense of structure; it's hard not to be in awe of the way he's composed this complex, beautiful novel. The Fortunes is a stunning look at what it means to be Chinese, what it means to be American, and what it means to be a person navigating the strands of identity, the things that made us who we are, whoever that is.
NPR


Davies distills 150 years of Chinese-American history in his timely and eloquent new novel. In Gold, the first of its four sections, Ah Ling, 14, the son of a Hong Kong prostitute, seeks his fortune in California. He works as valet to Charles Crocker, who hires thousands of Chinese to expand his transcontinental railroad. Silver portrays the 30-year career of the LA-born actress Anna May Wong, who co-stars with Douglas Fairbanks at 19.  Davies also writes of Vincent Chin, beaten to death in Detroit in 1982 by two auto workers who mistake him for Japanese, and of a half-Chinese writer visiting China to adopt a baby daughter, thinking of how to prepare her to answer the question he’s heard all his life: where are you from?
BBC.com


Davies, a master storyteller, blends fact with fiction in this saga of immigration, acclimation, and Chinese culture, which he tells through the experiences of Chinese-Americans at different points in history.
Entertainment Weekly


The Fortunes crafts four tales that speak of the broader history of Chinese immigrants in the United States, from the hardworking valet who serves a white railroad mogul to Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American movie star. Through these elegant, deeply embodied stories, Davies portrays the uneasy relationship between these people and their new country.
Elle


The Fortunes is the kind of book that raises far more questions than it resolves. Not only does it present a vast swathe of often-ignored history, in deftly fictionalized form, it’s an empathetic book, not just to its protagonists but to its secondary and tertiary characters and even, often, to its villains. It questions motivations, feelings, intentions, rarely certain despite the author’s fictional imperative. Sometimes I found myself wondering―why is Vincent Chin’s friend curious at all about the kind of father-stepson relationship Chin’s killers had? Why should I care?  But The Fortunes isn’t out to convince you that you should care about that, or anything in particular. Instead, it’s doing what a great novel should do: revealing what there is to care about and to think about. Even better, it’s revealing those questions about a slice of history that America needs to be dealing with.  The Bottom Line: In a thought-provoking, sharply written, four-part novelistic chronicle of Chinese-American life, The Fortunes proves uneven at times but the powerful prose and themes shine through.
Huffington Post


(Starred review.) The book’s scope is impressive, but what’s even more staggering is the utter intimacy and honesty of each character’s introspection. More extraordinary still is the depth and the texture created by the juxtaposition of different eras.... Davies has created a brilliant, absorbing masterpiece.
Publishers Weekly


The absence of a contiguous story line may initially alarm, but patient readers will discover how cleverly Davies interweaves fact and fiction to pull the novel together and show how far Chinese Americans have progressed—and how great the journey ahead is. A thought-provoking literary work. —Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Intertwining fact with fictional license and creative finesse, Davies charts the conflicted, complicated journey of being a minority American through multiple generations. Rich rewards await readers searching for superbly illuminating historical fiction; think Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’sCrossing (2011) or Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy.
Booklist


With the whole country talking about identity politics, racism, and cultural awareness, Peter Ho Davies’ provocative new novel could not be more timely... The scope and research of The Fortunes is impressive, but what makes the novel memorable is the honesty of each narrative voice.... A masterful, perceptive and very modern look at identity, migration and the intertwined histories of the United Stated and China
BookPage


A four-part suite of astute, lyrical, and often poignant stories poses incisive questions about what changes—and what does not—when people from another culture become Americans.... Davies' nuanced contemplation of how America has affected the Chinese (and vice versa) forces the reader to confront...cross-cultural transactions.
Kirkus Reviews

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

Gold
1. What does the oft repeated phrase "to see the elephant" mean? How is it used by the various characters? What is the elephant—as a metaphor, what does it represent?

2. SPOILER ALERT: why does Ling decide to quit his comfortable position with Charles Crocker in order to join the railroad workers?

3. Why does he choose to work as a bone collector? What satisfactions does it provide him?

4. How does he finally come to see himself and his place in America?

Silver
5. What are the many indignities Anna Mae Wong faces as the first Asian-American actress in Hollywood?

6. Follow-up to Questions 5: How does Anna Mae respond to the rejections, even from her own father?

7. Describe her feelings when she visits China. Does she find peace, a sense of belonging, or more exclusion and an even greater sense of alienation?

8. How does Anna Mae finally come to see herself and her place in America?

Jade
9. In what ways does the narrator of this section cast doubt on the events of Vincent Chin's murder? What difference does the uncertainty make, if any, in the final out come?

10. Follow-up to Question 9: When listening to members of the America Citizens for Justice refer to Vince's murder, the narrator thinks:

"[A] brutal slaying" wasn't the way you'd talk about it if you were there. That wasn't how I remembered it (p. 190).

What does he mean? Why was his remembrance of the beating different from their imagining? How reliable or faulty is memory? Are we, the reader, to doubt the version of the events that were made public?

11. The narrator questions himself continually: "Vincent was my friend. So how could I leave him?" How blameworthy is he, how at fault? What do you think most of us would do in the same situation? Do you have any idea how you might react?

12. At the end of this story, the narrator visits a strip club. He asks the stripper whether she is Chinese or Japanese (why does he ask her that?), and she retorts, "All-American, Baby. We're all American here." His final thoughts are:

It felt like something to cover ourselves in, that word, its warm anonymity. And I nodded, sank back on my stool, bought her that drink (p. 204).

What does his observation suggest? What emotional response is he expressing? Has he come to some resolution? If so, what?

Pearl
13. It is now the 21st Century. In what way does John feel marginalized by his Chinese heritage: "Growing up he felt burdened." Once he arrives in China, how does he feel?

14. How do the three previous stories come together with John's story in China?

15. Why do John and his wife decide to accept the baby offered them as a replacement for the baby who died? What was going through their minds? What might you have done?

16. In a final reflection on the way home, while thinking of the famous Terra Cotta army figures and the laborers who built them, John wonders,

What else can we represent if not ourselves, however uncertain or contradictory those selves might be. After all, aren't those very contradictions and uncertainties what makes us ourselves (p. 264)

Discuss that statement. Is he correct? Are most of us, especially perhaps immigrants, made of contradictions? How would that belief help John and his new daughter navigate life in America?

General
17. Which story of the four do you find most absorbing and why?

18. Consider the frequent jokes the characters tell, usually directed at themselves. How did you respond when first reading them? Did you laugh? Were you put off? Angered? Why do you think the characters tell such disparaging jokes at their own expense?

19. To what extent is America, hopefully, a more welcoming place than it was when the first two stories took place? Consider, also, that the (very real) events of the third section took place only three decades ago. Also consider the references in two of the stories about Asians taking jobs from Americans. Isn't that issue with us today?

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

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The Friend 
Sigrid Nunez, 2018
Penguin Publishing
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735219441


Summary
WINNER, 2018 National Book Awards-Fiction

A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.

When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind.

Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.

While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.

Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1950 ?
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—M.A., Barnard College; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Whiting Award, Rome Prize, Berlin Prize
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


Author Sigrid Nunez, daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father, was born and raised in New York City. She received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from Columbia University.

After finishing school she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books. She has taught at Princeton University, Amherst College, Smith College, Columbia University and the New School, and has been a visiting writer at Baruch College, Washington University, Vassar College and the University of California, Irvine, among others. She has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and of several other writers' conferences across the United States. She lives in New York City.

Writing
Nunez is the author of seven novels: A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), Naked Sleeper (1996), Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998), For Rouenna (2001), The Last of Her Kind (2006), Salvation City (2010), and The Friend (2018). Her major concerns as a novelist have been language, memory, identity, class, and writing itself.

In addition to fiction, Nunez is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (2011).

Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four volumes of Asian American literature. Among the journals she has contributed to are the New York Times, Paris Review, Harper's, McSweeney's, Believer, Threepenny Review, Tin House, and O: The Oprah Magazine.

Recognition
She was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in spring, 2005. Among her other honors are a Whiting Award and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/6/2018 .)

Book Reviews
[D]ry, allusive and charming.… This novel's tone in general …is mournful and resonant. It sheds rosin, like the bow of a cello.… The Friend is thick with quotations and anecdotes from the lives and work of many writers, in a way that can recall the bird's-nest-made-of-citations novels of David Markson. Nunez deals these out deftly; they do not jam her flow. The snap of her sentences sometimes put me in mind of Rachel Cusk.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


The contemplation of writing and the loss of integrity in our literary life form the heart of the novel.… Nunez’s prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts—the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence. She addresses important ideas unpretentiously and offers wisdom for any aspiring writer who, as the narrator fears, may never know this dear, intelligent friend—or this world that is dying. But is it dying? Perhaps. But with The Friend, Nunez provides evidence that, for now, it survives.
New York Times Book Review


With enormous heart and eloquence, Nunez explores cerebral responses to loss.… The Friend exposes an extraordinary reserve of strength waiting to be found in storytelling and unexpected companionship.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune


The book is an intimate, beautiful thing, deceptively slight at around 200 pages, but humming with insight… [an] artfully discursive meditation on friendship, love, death, solitude, canine companionship and the life of an aging writer in New York. Far from being heavy going, this novel, written as a letter to the late friend, is peppered with wry observations, particularly those of a writer stuck teaching undergraduates.
Economist (UK)

A penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory, what it means to be a writer today, and various forms of love and friendship... Nunez has a wry, withering wit.
NPR

In this slim but pitch-perfect novel, a writer loses her best friend and mentor suddenly without explanation…Wry and moving, The Friend is a love story, a mania story, and a recovery story.
Vanity Fair

A poignant reflection on loss and companionship.
Marie Claire

[A] sneaky gut punch of a novel …a consummate example of the human-animal tale.… The Friend’s tone is dry, clear, direct—which is the surest way to carry off this sort of close-up study of anguish and attachment.
Harper's

A wry riff on Rilke’s idea of love as two solitudes that "protect and border and greet each other."
Vogue

Often as funny as it is thoughtful, The Friend is an elegant meditation on grief, friendship, healing, and the bonds between humans and dogs.
Buzzfeed

[O]ver the course of the rest of the novel, her love for Apollo both consumes and heals [the narrator]. This elegant novel explores both rich memories and … the way … the past is often more vibrant than the present.
Publishers Weekly


This is very much a writer's novel[,] … a slow, poignant meditation on grief, rife with pithy literary myths and quotations. Verdict: Literature nerds, creative writing students, and dog lovers will find this work delightful. —Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
Library Journal


Nunez offers an often-hilarious, always-penetrating look at writing, grief, and the companionship of dogs.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Quietly brilliant and darkly funny, Nunez's latest novel finds her on familiar turf with an aggressively unsentimental interrogation of grief, writing, and the human-canine bond.… It is a lonely novel: rigorous and stark, so elegant.
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 discussion for THE FRIEND … then take off on your own:

1. How is the narrator's love for her friend different from that of a wife, of which he'd had three? For years till his death, even after early affair as student/teacher, the narrator considered him her dearest friend. Why?

2. Talk about the ways in which Apollo provides comfort to the narrator. Consider, for instance, how she describes the fact that "having a huge warm body pressed along the length of your spine is an amazing comfort." What experience with dogs (and cats) have you had in terms of their uncanny ability to recognize our moods and, consciously or not, offer solace?

3. Follow-up to Question 2: How does the narrator comfort Apollo (above and beyond providing food and shelter)?

4. What do you think of the friend, a womanizer who slept with his students, including herself? Were his actions ethical, especially if there is equal attraction? He once said, that "the classroom was the most erotic place in the world. To deny this was puerile." Does he have a point? Why do students fall for teachers? What's the dynamic?

5. Thinking of J.M. Coetzee's character in Disgrace, the narrator wonders about castration as a "fix" for her friend who, with such frequency, engaged in "disgusting...antics of a dirty old man." Any thoughts?

6. Why do her own students disappoint the narrator? What are the views some espouse in their papers?

7. "If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away." Why does the narrator feel this way about her fellow writers?

8. There is little in The Friend when it comes to drama; it's primarily a study of character and an exploration of ideas. Would more action have made a difference to you in terms of how you experienced the book? Nunez also includes a large number of quotations and stories from the works of writers. Are they well integrated into the novel? Did you enjoy them … or find them distracting?

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

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