Fiction - Results from #3050

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer
Sydney Padua, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307908278

Summary
Sydney Padua transforms one of the most compelling scientific collaborations into a hilarious series of adventures.

Meet Victorian London’s most dynamic duo: Charles Babbage, the unrealized inventor of the computer, and his accomplice, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the peculiar protoprogrammer and daughter of Lord Byron.

When Lovelace translated a description of Babbage’s plans for an enormous mechanical calculating machine in 1842, she added annotations three times longer than the original work. Her footnotes contained the first appearance of the general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built.

Sadly, Lovelace died of cancer a decade after publishing the paper, and Babbage never built any of his machines.

But do not despair!

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage presents a rollicking alternate reality in which Lovelace and Babbage do build the Difference Engine and then use it to build runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wilder realms of mathematics, and, of course, fight crime—for the sake of both London and science.

Complete with extensive footnotes that rival those penned by Lovelace herself, historical curiosities, and never-before-seen diagrams of Babbage’s mechanical, steam-powered computer, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is wonderfully whimsical, utterly unusual, and, above all, entirely irresistible. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Where—Canada
• Education—Sheridan College
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK

Melina Sydney Padua is a graphic artist and animator. She is the author of the 2D Goggles webcomic and her animation work appears in several popular Hollywood films—Marmaduke, Clash of the Titans, The Golden Compass, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Iron Giant, and Quest for Camelot.

Her work has been exhibited at the BBC Tech Lab and at a Steampunk exhibition by Oxford's Museum of the History of Science. She gave a conference on storytelling at The Story, an event shared with Cory Doctorow, Tim Etchells, David Hepworth, Aleks Krotoski, and Tony White among others.

Originally from the Canadian prairie, she now lives in London with her husband and far too many books

Lovelace and Babbage
Padua writes the steampunk webcomic 2D Goggles or The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. It features a pocket universe where Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage have actually built an analytical engine and use it to "fight crime" at Queen Victoria's request Also featured in the comic is the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whom Padua has called "The Wolverine of the early Victorians."

The comic is based on thorough research on the biographies and correspondence between Babbage and Lovelace, as well as other bits of early Victoriana, which is then twisted for humorous effect. According to Padua,

Some of the documents are more entertaining than the actual comic. Plenty of times, I've thrown something into the comic just so I'd have an excuse to refer to some document.

The comic began as a one-shot for Ada Lovelace Day—a celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Disliking the fact that both Babbage and Lovelace died with their life work incomplete, Padua ended the comic with the alternate events, then found that...

[A] lot of people saw it and thought that I was actually going to do a comic, which I had no intention of doing. But then I started thinking, "What if I actually did the comic?" I started fooling around, and I guess I'm still fooling around with it.

Originally, in 2011, the comic was meant to be a limited edition print of only 25 to raise money for The Ada Initiative. Two years later, in 2013, it was adapted as a stage show, A Note of Discord by Theatre Paradok at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Then, in 2015, the comic was published as a 320-page book titled The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Pantheon Books. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/3/2016.)

Visit the author's blog.

Book Reviews
Much of this material is interesting, but it reads as a more or less unedited jumble. The impression it gives is that Padua was captivated by her research and couldn’t bear to leave much out, however peripheral to the main story line. Eventually a reader must give up trying to follow a narrative and read The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage primarily as a miscellany of historical curiosities.
Lauren Redniss - New York Times Book Review

Informative and entertaining... It’s a book that makes you a lot smarter as it makes you laugh.
Nancy Szokan - Washington Post

Reading The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is like auditing a dozen high-level, inventively taught college classes simultaneously: more than a little overwhelming yet fascinating.
Margaret Quamme - Columbus Dispatch

Sydney Padua’s new book is definitely "Yowza!" material.
Etelka Lehoczky - NPR

An outlandish, enlightening tale.
Discover Magazine

(Starred review.) [A] must-have for anyone who enjoys getting lost in a story as brilliant in execution as conception. Padua debut graphic novel transforms the collaboration between Ada Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron) and Charles Babbage (a noted polymath) into an inspired, “What If?” story.... [A] spirit of genuine inventiveness.
Publishers Weekly

Originally a webcomic, this collection of jests interweaves history, literature, and fantasy into short stories starring Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Babbage's machines, and a number of 19th-century luminaries.... Padua's extravaganza is very much for the whimsical intelligentsia.... —Martha Cornig
Library Journal

Sydney Padua’s impeccably researched, yet playfully imagined graphic biography is a treat for history buffs and graphic novel lovers alike…With fantastically detailed art, footnotes and diagrams…, this is a whimsical graphic account like no other.
BookPage

(Starred review.) [A]udaciously imagined.... [W]ritten and illustrated by an artist and computer animator, [it] begins with a sliver of fact—the brief, apparently unproductive "intellectual partnership" between Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage.... A prodigious feat of historically based fantasy that engages on a number of levels.
Kirkus Reviews

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Thunderstruck
Erik Larson, 2006
Crown Publishing
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400080670

Summary
A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world’s “great hush”

In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.

Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners, scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world transformed, and the rich outdid one another with ostentatious displays of wealth. Against this background, Marconi races against incredible odds and relentless skepticism to perfect his invention: the wireless, a prime catalyst for the emergence of the world we know today. Meanwhile, Crippen, “the kindest of men,” nearly commits the perfect crime.

With his superb narrative skills, Erik Larson guides these parallel narratives toward a relentlessly suspenseful meeting on the waters of the North Atlantic. Along the way, he tells of a sad and tragic love affair that was described on the front pages of newspapers around the world, a chief inspector who found himself strangely sympathetic to the killer and his lover, and a driven and compelling inventor who transformed the way we communicate. Thunderstruck presents a vibrant portrait of an era of séances, science, and fog, inhabited by inventors, magicians, and Scotland Yard detectives, all presided over by the amiable and fun-loving Edward VII as the world slid inevitably toward the first great war of the twentieth century. Gripping from the first page, and rich with fascinating detail about the time, the people, and the new inventions that connect and divide us, Thunderstruck is splendid narrative history from a master of the form. (From the publisher.)

Erik Larson is an American journalist and nonfiction author. Although he has written several books, he is particularly well-know for three: The Devil in the White City (2003), a history of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and serial killer H. H. Holmes, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and An American Family in Hitler's Berlin (2011), a portrayal of William E. Dodd, the first American ambassador to Nazi Germany, and his daughter Martha, and Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (2015).

Early life
Born in Brooklyn, Larson grew up in Freeport, Long Island, New York. He studied Russian history at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated summa cum laude in 1976. After a year off, he attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, graduating in 1978.

Journalism
Larson's first newspaper job was with the Bucks County Courier Times in Levittown, Pennsylvania, where he wrote about murder, witches, environmental poisons, and other "equally pleasant" things. He later became a features writer for the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, where he is still a contributing writer. His magazine stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and other publications.

Books
Larson has also written a number of books, beginning with The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities (1992), followed by Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun (1995). Larson's next books were Isaac's Storm (1999), about the experiences of Isaac Cline during the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, and The Devil in the White City (2003), about the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and a series of murders by H. H. Holmes that were committed in the city around the time of the Fair.

The Devil in the White City won the 2004 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category. Next, Larson published Thunderstruck (2006), which intersperses the story of Hawley Harvey Crippen with that of Guglielmo Marconi and the invention of radio. His next book, In the Garden of Beasts (2011), concerns William E. Dodd, the first American ambassador to Nazi Germany and his daughter. Dead Wake, published in 2015, is an account of the sinking of the Lusitania, which led to America's intervention in World War I.

Teaching and public speaking
Larson has taught non-fiction writing at San Francisco State University, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and the University of Oregon, and he has spoken to audiences from coast to coast.

Personal
Larson and his wife have three daughters. They reside in New York City, but maintain a home in Seattle, Washington. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/17/2015.)

Book Reviews
Erik Larson has done it again. In Thunderstruck, just as in his last book, The Devil in the White City, he has taken an unlikely historical subject and spun it into gold. The formula is simple enough, though the finished books verge on alchemy. The only question is whether we’re getting true magic or mere sleight of hand.
Kevin Baker - New York Times

Larson's gift for rendering an historical era with vibrant tactility and filling it with surprising personalities makes Thunderstruck an irresistible tale. Of London, he writes, "There was fog...that left the streets so dark and sinister that children of the poor hired themselves out as torchbearers...the light formed around the walkers a shifting wall of gauze, through which other pedestrians appeared with the suddenness of ghosts." He beautifully captures the awe that greeted early wireless transmissions on shipboard: "First-time passengers often seemed mesmerized by the blue spark fired with each touch of the key and the crack of miniature thunder that followed." Larson can be forgiven his obsessions as he restores life to this fascinating, long-lost world.
Lauren Belfer - Washington Post

In this splendid, beautifully written followup to his blockbuster thriller, Devil in the White City, Erik Larson again unites the dual stories of two disparate men, one a genius and the other a killer. The genius is Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of wireless communication. The murderer is the notorious Englishman Dr. H.H. Crippen. Scientists had dreamed for centuries of capturing the power of lightning and sending electrical currents through the ether. Yes, the great cable strung across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean could send messages thousands of miles, but the holy grail was a device that could send wireless messages anywhere in the world. Late in the 19th century, Europe's most brilliant theoretical scientists raced to unlock the secret of wireless communication. Guglielmo Marconi, impatient, brash, relentless and in his early 20s, achieved the astonishing breakthrough in September 1895. His English detractors were incredulous. He was a foreigner and, even worse, an Italian! Marconi himself admitted that he was not a great scientist or theorist. Instead, he exemplified the Edisonian model of tedious, endless trial and error. Despite Marconi's achievements, it took a sensational murder to bring unprecedented worldwide attention to his invention. Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, a proper, unattractive little man with bulging, bespectacled eyes, possessed an impassioned, love-starved heart. An alchemist and peddler of preposterous patent medicines, he killed his wife, a woman Larson portrays lavishly as a gold-digging, selfish, stage-struck, flirtatious, inattentive, unfaithful clotheshorse. The hapless Crippen endured it all until he found the sympathetic Other Woman and true love. The "North London Cellar Murder" so captured the popular imagination in 1910 that people wrote plays and composed sheet music about it. It wasn't just what Crippen did, but how. How did he obtain the poison crystals, skin her and dispose of all those bones so neatly? The manhunt climaxed with a fantastic sea chase from Europe to Canada, not just by a pursuing vessel but also by invisible waves racing lightning-fast above the ocean. It seemed that all the world knew-except for the doctor and his lover, the prey of dozens of frenetic Marconi wireless transmissions. In addition to writing stylish portraits of all of his main characters, Larson populates his narrative with an irresistible supporting cast. He remains a master of the fact-filled vignette and humorous aside that propel the story forward. Thunderstruck triumphantly resurrects the spirit of another age, when one man's public genius linked the world, while another's private turmoil made him a symbol of the end of "the great hush" and the first victim of a new era when instant communication, now inescapable, conquered the world.
Publishers Weekly

(Adult/High School) Larson's page-turner juxtaposes scientific intrigue with a notorious murder in London at the turn of the 20th century. It alternates the story of Marconi's quest for the first wireless transatlantic communication amid scientific jealousies and controversies with the tale of a mild-mannered murderer caught as a result of the invention. The eccentric figures include the secretive Marconi and one of his rivals, physicist Oliver Lodge, who believed that he was first to make the discovery, but also insisted that the electromagnetic waves he studied were evidence of the paranormal. The parallel tale recounts the story of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, accused of murdering his volatile, shrewish wife. As he and his unsuspecting lover attempted to escape in disguise to Quebec on a luxury ocean liner, a Scotland Yard detective chased them on a faster boat. Unbeknownst to the couple, the world followed the pursuit through wireless transmissions to newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. A public that had been skeptical of this technology suddenly grasped its power. In an era when wireless has a whole new connotation, young adults interested in the history of scientific discovery will be enthralled with this fascinating account of Marconi and his colleagues' attempts to harness a new technology. And those who enjoy a good mystery will find the unraveling of Dr. Crippen's crime, complete with turn-of-the-century forensics, appealing to the CSI crowd. A thrilling read. —Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
School Library Journal

A murder that transfixed the world and the invention that made possible the chase for its perpetrator combine in this fitfully thrilling real-life mystery. Using the same formula that propelled The Devil in the White City (2003), Larson pairs the story of a groundbreaking advance with a pulpy murder drama to limn the sociological particulars of its pre-WWI setting. While White City featured the Chicago World's Fair and America's first serial killer, this combines the fascinating case of Dr. Hawley Crippen with the much less gripping tale of Guglielmo Marconi's invention of radio. (Larson draws out the twin narratives for a long while before showing how they intersect.) Undeniably brilliant, Marconi came to fame at a young age, during a time when scientific discoveries held mass appeal and were demonstrated before awed crowds with circus-like theatricality. Marconi's radio sets, with their accompanying explosions of light and noise, were tailor-made for such showcases. By the early-20th century, however, the Italian was fighting with rival wireless companies to maintain his competitive edge. The event that would bring his invention back into the limelight was the first great crime story of the century. A mild-mannered doctor from Michigan who had married a tempestuously demanding actress and moved to London, Crippen became the eye of a media storm in 1910 when, after his wife's "disappearance" (he had buried her body in the basement), he set off with a younger woman on an ocean-liner bound for America. The ship's captain, who soon discerned the couple's identity, updated Scotland Yard (and the world) on the ship's progress-by wireless. The chase that ends this story makes up for some tedious early stretches regarding Marconi's business struggles. At times slow-going, but the riveting period detail and dramatic flair eventually render this tale an animated history lesson.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In his note to the reader, Larson quotes P. D. James: "Murder, the unique crime, is a paradigm of its age." How is the murder in Thunderstruck a paradigm of its time? Can you think of a notorious murder in our own era that is an equivalent?

2. The murderer Hawley Harvey Crippen and the inventor Guglielmo Marconi came from similarly prosperous backgrounds, and yet their lives took quite opposite turns. Compare the two men as characters-in what ways are they similar, and in what ways are they different? Who would you most like to have met, and why?

3. Now compare the two men to their respective spouses-is Marconi at all like Beatrice? What about Crippen and Belle?

4. Larson mentions Marconi's "social blindness" throughout the book, considering it a defining trait. How did it affect Marconi's success or failure? What wasCrippen's defining trait?

5. In specific terms, Crippen and Marconi were not linked-they never interacted with each other-and yet in Larson's hands their stories fit together naturally. Why do you think that is? In what ways do the two men's lives play off each other? How do you imagine they would have gotten along, had they actually met?

6. Marconi and Crippen were both foreigners in England, and yet they received very different treatment from the moment of their respective arrivals. Why? How is this reminiscent of the ways foreigners are treated in this country today?

7. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the supernatural, medical sleight-of-hand, and science were often treated in similar fashion-consider Lodge's "scientific" studies of the paranormal, Crippen's involvement in patent medicine, and the public's mistrust of Marconi's wireless technology. What parallels, if any, do you see to the way we treat emerging technologies now?

8. Isolation was a very real thing in those days, without the benefits of modern communication methods. How did Marconi's invention change the world? Ultimately, do you think it was a change for the better, or are there benefits to the old ways?

9. Throughout the book, there are countless instances of betrayal: Marconi betrays Preece and vice versa, Belle betrays Crippen, Fleming betrays Lodge. Discuss the idea of betrayal and the specifics of it in Thunderstruck. In your opinion, whose betrayal is the most damaging?

10. Secrecy was vital to both Marconi and Crippen, but for very different reasons. Discuss the nature of their secrets, the motivations for them, and the ultimate effects.

11. Much of Marconi's success was apparently based on gut instinct and simple trial and error, rather than any understanding of the science that lay beneath his discoveries. How would his methods be received now?

12. On page 69, Larson says that Marconi "was an entrepreneur of a kind that only would become familiar to the world a century or so later, with the advent of the so-called 'start-up' company." What did he mean by this? Do Marconi's practices remind you of any specific business leaders today?

13. Each man had two major romantic relationships in the book. Which, if any, was the healthiest? Which woman did you like best, and why?

14. Crippen is willing to subsidize Belle's lifestyle and even her relationship with another man, only to murder her years later. Why do you think he behaves this way? Why didn't he just cut her off financially? What finally drove him to murder?

15. Throughout the book, Larson foreshadows events that will come to pass in later pages. What purpose does this serve? How did you respond?

16. Crippen's method for disposing of Belle's body was quite gruesome. Larson quotes Raymond Chandler on page 377: "I cannot see why a man who would go to the enormous labor of deboning and de-sexing and de-heading an entire corpse would not take the rather slight extra labor of disposing of the flesh in the same way, rather than bury it at all." Why do you think Crippen did it in that particular way? What does this say about him?

17. Do you believe that Ethel had no idea what had happened to Belle? Why, or why not?

18. The realities of an international manhunt were very different in the early twentieth century than they are today-as Larson says on page 341, "Wireless had made the sea less safe for criminals on the run." Why has it changed so, and in what ways? Is it possible to hide in our world?

19. Discuss the media circus surrounding Dew's chase of Crippen. Was this the beginning of a new era in journalism? What parallels do you see to many celebrities' current war with the paparazzi? Compare the pursuit of Crippen to the O. J. Simpson chase.

20. If it weren't for Marconi's invention, do you think Crippen would have been caught? How might it have played out otherwise?

21. On page 379, Larson says, "The Crippen saga did more to accelerate the acceptance of wireless as a practical tool than anything the Marconi company previously had attempted." Why do you think that is? What might have happened to wireless technology if not for Crippen?

22. At the very end of the book, Larson writes that Ethel was asked if she would still marry Crippen even after learning all that he had done. What do you think her answer was?

23. Why do you think Larson gave this book the title Thunderstruck? How does the term apply to Marconi and Crippen?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Tiefling: Angel Kissed, Devil Touched
Barbara T. Cerny, 2015
Phantasm Books / Assent Publishing
332 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781628279863

Summary
Transformed by the devil and betrayed by God, Branan Lachlan is made to battle demons with naught but his Scottish wit.

The soul of half an angel.
The body of a demon.
The devil on his tail.

When the devil came for Branan Lachlan and turned him into a demon, he expected to train the young Scotsman to be the antithesis of God and his own damned apprentice. Cursed at twenty-one, Branan fought his demonic character armed only with an iconic sword and an unwavering light in his belly. Plagued by an internal battle of good versus evil, one part of him playing against the other, he is destined to walk Scotland forever, neither living nor dying.

Until now.

Turning his brother to save Earc’s life, Branan returns to the fold of his tiny family to lead them on a strange journey through the devil’s world on Earth. He is helped by Fionna Frazier, a young peasant girl with a shocking secret of her own.

The trio travels around Macbeth’s Scotland trying to escape from the devil’s spawn, Raum. They meet vampires, druids, murderers, and a harpy, all which add adventure and demand they make choices between good versus evil. In the end, will they win the epic battle with Raum and return to God or will they lose their souls to Lucifer forever?

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Denver, Colorado, USA
• Education—A.S., Mesa State College; B.S., Arizona State University; M.S., Lehigh University
• Currently—Oakwood, Ohio

Author Barbara T. Cerny grew up in Grand Junction, Colorado, which at that time was a small town of 30,000 people.

She left that little burg to see the world, garner three college degrees, and to serve in the US Army. After eight years on active duty and fourteen years in the reserves, she retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2007.

While deployed to the Middle East in 2005, Ms. Cerny finally figured out she had to get going on the real love of her life, writing. She wrote her first two novels during that time and hasn’t stopped. She is presently working on novels number seven, eight, and nine.

When not writing, Ms. Cerny works as an information technology specialist and supervisor for the US Air Force. She lives with her loving husband, their two active teenagers, two needy cats, and two turtles. The turtles patiently watch her write and listen to her intently as she discusses plot lines with them. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow Barbara on Facebook...and Twitter.

Book Reviews
(5 Stars) A fascinating read. The use of Gaelic words is a wonderful touch as it matched so well with the story. It is an interesting take on creationism and evolution, woven through with touches of Heaven, hell and life on earth in old Scotland. Love, hate, evil, fear, frustration, and anger all compete for your attention in this new twist on angels, demons, and myths of Scotland. It is a riveting read with an interesting plot, well written and totally engrossing. Barbara has a most vivid imagination and this shows clearly in the way she draws you into the story.
Carol Coetzee, Readers' Favorite

(5 Stars) I require that a novel be both well written and interesting. The Tiefling satisfied both of these requirements. The narrative, characters, and research reflected quality writing. The internal struggle of Brannan kept me enthralled. The entire plot and cast of characters were intriguing; however, I always gravitate toward inner conflict, even if the battle includes a demon within. I would highly recommend The Teifling for any lover of the time period or the genre.
Christina Bergling, author of Savages and The Waning

(5 stars) An excellent read that uses the first person point of view from more than one character. The author did a fantastic job introducing a cast of characters (human and not) and the book will keeps the reader turning pages.
JJ Hensley, author of Resolve and Measure Twice

Discussion Questions
1. The Tiefling is a new kind of demon, different from a vampire. Did this kind of “creature” set well for this story? Did you find the introduction of a tiefling well-done or overdone?

2. The book is told in first person POV from two different people’s perspective. Does this work for the storyline or would just one POV have been better. Why/why not?

3. Did you get the flavor of old Scotland from the setting and descriptions? Did the old language add to or detract from the story? Did it make it harder to read or add just the right spice?

4. Fionna followed Branan to hell and back. Could you follow your lover to hell? Do people actually fall that far into love as to give up everything they know and have worked for just to be with that person?

5. Was the turning of Earc necessary for the story? Could Branan and Fionna fought through to the end without him? Did his turning add to the plotline?

6. What was their most intriguing adventure and why? The demon horse? Druids? Hounds of Hell? Elpeth? The harpy? Why?

7. Do you believe there is angel light in any of us? Could that be what drives some people like Mother Theresa? Are we connected to angels?

8. Did you find The Tiefling to be spiritual? Why/Why not?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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The Tiger's Wife
Tea Obreht, 2011
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385343831

Summary
Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Tea Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker’s twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.

In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel.

Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather’s final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weekly trips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,” a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age.

But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. “These stories,” Natalia comes to understand, “run like secret rivers through all the other stories” of her grandfather’s life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 20, 1985
• Where—Belgrade, Yugoslavia
• Raised—Cyprus; Egypt; Georgia, & California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Southern California; M.A.
Cornell University
• Currently—lives in Ithica, New York

Tea Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997.

Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading. The Tiger’s Wife (2011), is her first novel.

She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. Tea Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York.

Among many influences, Obreht has mentioned in press interviews the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric, Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, Isak Dinesen, and the children's writer Roald Dahl. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Ms. Obreht…writes with remarkable authority and eloquence, and she demonstrates an uncommon ability to move seamlessly between the gritty realm of the real and the more primary-colored world of the fable. It's not so much magical realism in the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Gunter Grass as it is an extraordinarily limber exploration of allegory and myth making and the ways in which narratives (be they superstitions, cultural beliefs or supernatural legends) reveal—and reflect back—the identities of individuals and communities: their dreams, fears, sympathies and hatreds…Ms. Obreht has not only made a precocious debut, but she has also written a richly textured and searing novel.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Ingeniously, Obreht juxtaposes [her protagonist’s] matter-of-fact narration with contemporary folk tales that are as simple, enthralling, and sometimes brutal as fables by Kipling or Dinesen…Filled with astonishing immediacy and presence, fleshed out with detail that seems firsthand, The Tiger’s Wife is all the more remarkable for being a product not of observation but imagination.... Arrestingly, Obreht shows that you don’t have to go back centuries to find history transformed into myth; the process can occur within a lifetime is a gifted observer is on hand to record it.
Lisl Shillinger - New York Times Book Review

Tea Obreht's swirling first novel…draws us beneath the clotted tragedies in the Balkans to deliver the kind of truth that histories can't touch. Born in Belgrade in 1985…she captures the thirst for consecration that a century of war has left in that bloody part of the world. It's a novel of enormous ambitions that manages in its modest length to contain the conflicts between Christians and Muslims, Turks and Ottomans, science and superstition.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife comes freighted with more critical anticipation than any debut novel in recent memory…That sort of unearned, pre-emptive prestige spurs both impossible expectations and skeptical readings – a burden that would doom most first novels Yet The Tiger’s Wife, in its solemn beauty and unerring execution, fully justifies the accolades that Ms. Obreht’s short fiction inspired. She has a talent for subtle plotting that eludes most writers twice her age, and her descriptive powers suggest a kind of channeled genius. No novel this year has seemed more likely to disappoint; no novel has been more satisfying.
Wall Street Journal

So rich with themes of love, legends and mortality that every novel that comes after it this year is in peril of falling short in comparison with its uncanny beauty…Not since Zadie Smith has a young writer arrived with such power and grace... [An] astounding debut novel.
Time

(Starred review.) The sometimes crushing power of myth, story, and memory is explored in the brilliant debut of Obreht, the youngest of the New Yorker's 20-under-40. Natalia Stefanovi, a doctor living (and, in between suspensions, practicing) in an unnamed country that's a ringer for Obreht's native Croatia, crosses the border in search of answers about the death of her beloved grandfather, who raised her on tales from the village he grew up in, and where, following German bombardment in 1941, a tiger escaped from the zoo in a nearby city and befriended a mysterious deaf-mute woman. The evolving story of the tiger's wife, as the deaf-mute becomes known, forms one of three strands that sustain the novel, the other two being Natalia's efforts to care for orphans and a wayward family who, to lift a curse, are searching for the bones of a long-dead relative; and several of her grandfather's stories about Gavran Gaile, the deathless man, whose appearances coincide with catastrophe and who may hold the key to all the stories that ensnare Natalia. Obreht is an expert at depicting history through aftermath, people through the love they inspire, and place through the stories that endure; the reflected world she creates is both immediately recognizable and a legend in its own right. Obreht is talented far beyond her years, and her unsentimental faith in language, dream, and memory is a pleasure.
Publishers Weekly

In the torn-up Balkans, as medic Natalia is preparing to cross what was once not a border to help vaccinate orphans, she learns that her distinguished physician grandfather has died in an obscure clinic not far from where she's going. No one knows what he was doing there, though Natalia does know he was seriously ill. This incident opens up Obreht's dizzyingly nuanced yet crisp, muscularly written narrative by allowing Natalia to introduce two stories (fables? truth?) that her grandfather related to her. One concerns the "deathless man" her grandfather sometimes encountered, who collected the souls of the dead. The other concerns a tiger that escaped from the zoo during World War II and made its way to the village where her grandfather lived as a boy. Attempts to kill the tiger fail, but the butcher's abused, deaf-mute wife seems mystically connected to the great beast, rousing the villagers' fear and anger. That tiger—and others seen later at the zoo—looms here as a symbol of defiant, struggling hope as the deathless man continues his task.Verdict: Demanding one's full attention, this complex, humbling, and beautifully crafted debut from one of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 is highly recommended for anyone seriously interested in contemporary fiction. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Not even Obreht’s place on The New Yorker’s current “20 Under 40” list of exceptional writers will prepare readers for the transporting richness and surprise of this gripping novel of legends and loss…[Contains] moments of breathtaking magic, wildness and beauty…Every word, every scene, every thought is blazingly alive in this many-faceted, spellbinding, and rending novel of death, succor, and remembrance.
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. Natalia says that the key to her grandfather’s life and death “lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man.” What power do the stories we tell about ourselves have to shape our identity and help us understand our lives?

2. Which of the different ways the characters go about making peace with the dead felt familiar from your own life? Which took you by surprise?

3. Natalia believes that her grandfather’s memories of the village apothecary “must have been imperishable.” What lesson do you think he might have learned from what happened to the Apothecary?

4. What significance does the tiger have to the different characters in the novel: Natalia, her grandfather, the tiger’s wife, the villagers? Why do you think Natalia’s grandfather’s reaction to the tiger’s appearance in the village was so different than the rest of the villagers?

5. “The story of this war—dates, names, who started it, why—that belongs to everyone,” Natalia’s grandfather tells her. But “those moments you keep to yourself” are more important. By eliding place names and specific events of recent Balkan history, what do you think the author is doing?

6. When the deathless man and the grandfather share a last meal before the bombing of Sarobor, the grandfather urges the deathless man to tell the waiter his fate so he can go home and be with his family. Is Gavran Gailé right to decide to stop telling people that they are going to die? Would you rather know your death was coming or go “in suddenness”?

7. Did knowing more about Luka’s past make him more sympathetic? Why do you think the author might have chosen to give the back stories of Luka, Dariša the Bear, and the apothecary?

8. The copy of The Jungle Book Natalia’s grandfather always carries around in his coat pocket is not among the possessions she collects after his death. What do you think happens to it?

9. The novel moves back and forth between myth and modern-day “real life.” What did you think of the juxtaposition of folklore and contemporary realism?

10. Of all the themes of this novel—war, storytelling, family, death, myth, etc.—which one resonated the most for you?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Tigers in Red Weather
Lisa Klaussmann, 2012
Little, Brown & Company
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316211338

Summary
Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sunbleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha's Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. In the days following the end of the Second World War, the world seems to offer itself up, and the two women are on the cusp of their 'real lives': Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own young husband, Hughes, about to return from the war.

Soon the gilt begins to crack. Helena's husband is not the man he seemed to be, and Hughes has returned from the war distant, his inner light curtained over. On the brink of the 1960s, back at Tiger House, Nick and Helena--with their children, Daisy and Ed--try to recapture that sense of possibility. But when Daisy and Ed discover the victim of a brutal murder, the intrusion of violence causes everything to unravel. The members of the family spin out of their prescribed orbits, secrets come to light, and nothing about their lives will ever be the same.

Brilliantly told from five points of view, with a magical elegance and suspenseful dark longing, Tigers in Red Weather is an unforgettable debut novel from a writer of extraordinary insight and accomplishment. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Liza Klaussmann worked as a journalist for the New York Times for over a decade. She received a BA in Creative Writing from Barnard College, where she was awarded the Howard M. Teichman Prize for Prose. She lived in Paris for ten years and she recently completed with distinction an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, in London, where she lives. She is the great-great-great granddaughter of Herman Melville. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Ms. Klaussmann's strongest suit is the cut-glass quality of her prose, which presents the characters' perceptions in bold contours while still suggesting their emotional fragility.
Sam Sacks - The Wall Street Journal

With echoes of Nancy Drew murder mysteries and The Great Gatsby that extend well beyond the names Nick and Daisy-plus allusions to Wallace Stevens, to which it owes its abstruse title. Tigers in Red Weather is a deftly constructed, suspenseful family melodrama that exposes the dark innards of privilege.
USA Today

A fine and subtle first novel.... [Klaussmann's] written an elegant playbook on passive aggression, a study of the desires and resentments that burn away souls behind teeth-clenched smiles.... This is a well-crafted novel that tracks the way familial disappointments can ferment into poisonous hatreds. Its alluring accumulation of bile reminded me of Maggie O'Farrell's The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox.... Klaussmann is a master at unexpressed despair, which is always eventually expressed, of course.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

Tennessee Williams knew it; so did Harper Lee. There's something about a story anchored in the summer months that makes deception a little juicier, desire a little sultrier, and murder just a little more wicked. Brimming with all three, Liza Klaussmann's skillfully constructed debut novel of family intrigue and restless secrets...arrives this summer as a riveting addition to the genre.... Klaussmann's full-bodied prose considers the shortcomings of intimacy and the pitfalls of searching for an overarching family truth—all with the seductive pull of a Gothic melodrama.
Antonina Jedrzejczak - Vogue

Klaussmann's...sharp observations and lyrical prose make for a poignant read.
Sara Vilkomerson - Entertainment Weekly

Tigers in Red Weather has the irresistible, opiate undertow of a fine Southern gothic novel; it's best read in long, languid, effortless pulls.
Laura Miller - Salon

Klaussmann's carefully crafted soap opera skillfully commingles mystery with melodrama, keeping readers guessing about what really happened until the end. While her characters' duplicitous behavior will elicit strong reactions, Ed's psychological progression is the most fascinating to watch. The shocking finale, seen through Ed's all-knowing eyes, scintillates as much as it satisfies.
Publishers Weekly

A meditation on love, desire, and personal choices, this rich and compelling literary debut novel by a former New York Times journalist and the great-great-great-granddaughter of Herman Melville is sure to appeal to a variety of readers
Library Journal

A smart, unsettling debut.... Klaussmann's pitch-perfect portrait of the Derringer marriage gives the novel a strong emotional charge. Their complicated, painfully loving relationship and their mutual tenderness for fresh-faced Daisy ring true....... Stinging dialogue and sharp insights offer strong foundations on which this novice author can build.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Does Tigers in Red Weather have a main character? If so, who do you think it is?

2. What does the murder represent in the novel? Does it have equal impact on all of the characters?

3. Is Nick a heroine or villain? Do you believe her assertion that she didn’t have an affair with Tyler? Does she really love Daisy, or does she resent her?

4. What brings about Hughes’s newfound feelings for Nick later in the novel? Is there a specific catalyst?

5. Hughes finds Ed’s behavior disturbing throughout the novel, but it’s not just the boy’s actions he’s threatened by. How does Ed’s way of thinking, and the knowledge he’s accumulated, threaten Hughes’s relationships and his world?

6. Why is the first-person used only in Ed’s section?

7. Tigers in Red Weather is divided into five sections, each focused on a different character. Which sections did you enjoy most and least, and why? What do you think we’re meant to feel about each of the characters? How does the author show us that something is off about Ed long before his first-person narration grants us a window into his psyche?

8. Why does Helena stay with Avery, despite her unhappiness?

9. Why is so much of Daisy’s character told from a child’s point of view? What does that say about her role in the novel?

10. On page 134, after witnessing Tyler and Peaches kiss, Daisy wishes she could be like Scarlett O’Hara, independent and free, and forget about Tyler, but she’s also scared. When you were a child, who were your role models, literary or otherwise? What they did represent for you? Now that you’re older, who do you look up to?

11. If you ranked the characters from most to least moral, where do they stand?

12. What does the title of the book mean? How is the poem related to the story?

13. On page 298, Ed tries to explain to Hughes his hunch that people are “going about it all the wrong way.” What do you think Ed means? Which people, and what do you think Ed would approve of as the “right” way? Why does Ed’s comment so unsettle Hughes?

14. On page 351, Nick says to Hughes, “It’s the strangest thing, but I have this feeling.... Like everything...” And Hughes replies, “Yes. Everything is.” Complete Nick’s sentence for her. What do you imagine she’s trying to say? Given the circumstances, is there any other way to interpret it? Why do you think the author chose to leave this vague, and how did it affect your experience as a reader?

15. What did you make of the ending of Tigers in Red Weather? Do you think Ed is rehabilitated?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Time Between
Karen White, 2013
Penguin Group USA
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451239860

Summary
Karen White delivers a novel of two generations of sisters and secrets set in the stunning South Carolina Lowcountry.

Eleanor Murray will always remember her childhood on Edisto Island, where her late father, a local shrimper, shared her passion for music. Now her memories of him are all that tempers the guilt she feels over the accident that put her sister in a wheelchair—and the feelings she harbors for her sister’s husband.

To help support her sister, Eleanor works at a Charleston investment firm during the day, but she escapes into her music, playing piano at a neighborhood bar. Until the night her enigmatic boss walks in and offers her a part-time job caring for his elderly aunt, Helena, back on Edisto. For Eleanor, it’s a chance to revisit the place where she was her happiest—and to share her love of music with grieving Helena, whose sister recently died under mysterious circumstances.

An island lush with sweetgrass and salt marshes, Edisto has been a peaceful refuge for Helena, who escaped with her sister from war-torn Hungary in 1944. The sisters were well-known on the island, where they volunteered in their church and community. But now Eleanor will finally learn the truth about their past: secrets that will help heal her relationship with her own sister—and set Eleanor free. (From the publisher.)

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

Karen White is an American author of more than fifteen fiction novels. She was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and during her childhood lived in numerous states and also in Venezula and London, England, where she graduated from The American School in London. White attended college at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she obtained a Bachelor of Science in Management.

Her first book, In the Shadow of the Moon was a double finalist for the Romance Writers of America RITA Award. The Girl on Legare Street hit the New York Times Best Seller list in November 2009, and On Folly Beach in May 2010, which was also a NYT bestseller.

Most of White's novels are based in the low-country of the southeastern United States. When her most recent book, The Time Between, was released in June 2013, it debuted on the NYT Bestseller list at number 25 for Hardcover fiction.

White is married with two children and lives in Roswell, Georgia. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/2/2012.)

Book Reviews
Fourteen years after an accident left her sister Eve paralyzed and herself guilt-ridden, Eleanor Murray struggles to atone—not only for the accident, but also for falling in love with her brother-in-law, Glen. The accident fractured the family, dashing Eve's future as a beauty pageant contestant..... White once again crafts characters who transcend their romantic roles through their frailties and weaknesses. An appealing romance with intergenerational resonance.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. “The relationships between sisters is a little piece of heaven and hell. But we share the same soul.” Do you agree with Helena’s sentiment? How does this idea unfold over the course of the novel for each pair of sisters? Why is this relationship so complicated, special? Are our siblings an extension of us?

2. From Eve’s difficult pregnancy and Glen and Ellie’s affections, to Helena and Bernadette’s wartime tragedies, every character in the story seems to carry a burden of secrets. How do these secrets shape the story? Does airing them set the characters free?

3. Why does Eve wish for a child? Do you think it is wise or fair knowing the risks? What trumps her own safety in her heart?

4. In the novel, we spend a lot of time moving in and out of Gigi’s, Helena’s, and Bernadette’s bedrooms-what do these rooms say about the characters? Do you think these rooms define or illustrate our lives?

5. What did you think was hidden in Bernadette’s bedroom?

6. Why are the Gullah sweetgrass baskets, like the “secret keeper,” so significant? What kind of magic do you think is woven into them at the time of their creation?

7. How do Helena and Ellie mirror each other in terms of the guilt they feel over the past? Is forgiveness possible for either one?

8. Why do you think the author chose the title “The Time Between”? What does it mean in the context of the story?

9. How does Ellie’s caretaking of Helena transform them, even heal, them both? Why does Ellie stick with the job as Helena works to sabotage any relationship? When do things start to change?

10. Did you suspect any of the twists in the book? Which ones? Where did you think the paintings originated from?

11. Were you shocked by the revelations about Ben and Samuel’s fates? Could you ever imagine having to make such a set of life or death choices-especially if as a mother? Does knowing this background help you make sense of Helena’s behaviors? Do you think she did the “right” thing?

12. What does the Gullah woman mean by “All goodbye ain’t gone”? What does it mean to Ellie? Gigi?

13. What does it mean for Ellie to finally play the Chopin piece?
(Questions from author's website.)

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Time Flies
Clair Cook, 2013
Touchstone
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451673678

Summary
Two best friends, a high school reunion, and a rollicking road trip down memory lane...

Years ago, Melanie followed her husband, Kurt, from the New England beach town where their two young sons were thriving to the suburbs of Atlanta. She’s carved out a life as a successful metal sculptor, but when Kurt leaves her for another woman, having the tools to cut up their marriage bed is small consolation.

She’s old enough to know that high school reunions are often a big disappointment, but when her best friend makes her buy a ticket and an old flame gets in touch to see if she’ll be going, she fantasizes that returning to her past might help her find her future...until her highway driving phobia resurfaces and threatens to hold her back from the adventure of a lifetime.

Time Flies is an epic trip filled with fun, heartbreak, and friendship that explores what it takes to conquer your worst fears...so you can start living your future. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 14, 1955
• Where—Alexandria, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., Syracuse University
• Currently—Scituate, Massachusetts

Raised on Nancy Drew mysteries, Claire Cook has wanted to write ever since she was a little girl. She majored in theater and creative writing at Syracuse University and immersed herself in a number of artistic endeavors (copywriter, radio continuity director, garden designer, and dance and aerobics choreographer), yet somehow her dreams got pushed to the side for more real-life matters—like marriage, motherhood, and a teaching career. Decades passed, then one day she found herself parked in her minivan at 5 AM, waiting for her daughter to finish swim practice. She was struck with a now-or-never impulse and began writing on the spot. By the end of the season, she had a first draft. Her first novel, Ready to Fall, was published in 2000, when Cook was 45.

Since then, this "late starter" has more than made up for lost time. She struck gold with her second book, Must Love Dogs. Published in 2002, this story of a middle-aged divorcee whose singles ad produces hilariously unexpected results was declared "funny and pitch-perfect" by the Chicago Tribune and "a hoot" by the Boston Globe. (The novel got a second life in 2005 with the release of the feature film starring Diane Lane and John Cusack.) Cook's subsequent novels, with their wry, witty take on the lives of middle-aged women, have become bestsellers and book club favorites.

Upbeat, gregarious, and grateful for her success, Cook is an inspiration for aspiring writers and women in midlife transition. She tours indefatigably for her novels and genuinely enjoys speaking with fans. She also conducts frequent writing workshops, where she dispenses advice and encouragement in equal measure. "I'm extraordinarily lucky to spend my time doing what I love," she has said on countless occasions. " The workshops are a way to say thank you and open doors that I stumbled through to make it easier for writers coming up behind me.''

Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:

• I first knew I was a writer when I was three. My mother entered me in a contest to name the Fizzies whale, and I won in my age group. It's quite possible that mine was the only entry in my age group since "Cutie Fizz" was enough to win my family a six-month supply of Fizzies tablets (root beer was the best flavor) and half a dozen turquoise plastic mugs with removable handles. At six I had my first story on the "Little People's Page" in the Sunday paper (about Hot Dog, the family Dachshund) and at sixteen, I had my first front page feature in the local weekly.

• In the acknowledgments of Multiple Choice I say that even though it's probably undignified to admit it, I'm having a blast as a novelist. To clarify that, having a blast as a novelist does not necessarily mean having a blast with the actual writing. The people part—meeting readers and booksellers and librarians and the media—is very social and I'm having lots of fun with that. The writing part is great, too, once you get past the procrastination, the self-doubt, and the feelings of utter despair. It's all of the stuff surrounding the writing that's hard; once you find your zone, your place of flow, or whatever it is we're currently calling it, and lose yourself in the writing, it really is quite wonderful. I've heard writers say it's better than sex, though I'm not sure I'd go that far.

• I love books that don't wrap everything up too neatly at the end, and I think it's a big compliment to hear that a reader is left wanting more. After each novel, I hear from many readers asking for a sequel— they say they just have to find out what will happen to these people next. I think it's wonderful that the characters have come to life for them. But, for now, I think I'll grow more as a writer by trying to create another group of quirky characters. Maybe a few books down the road, I'll feel ready to return to some of them—who knows?

• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is what she said:

I get asked this question a lot on book tour, and I'm always tempted to say anything by Jane Austen or Alice Munro, just so people will know I'm well read, and sometimes I'm even tempted to say something by Gogol, just so people will think I'm really, really well read. But, alas, ultimately I tell the truth. The Nancy Drew books influenced me the most. I think they taught me a lot about pacing, and about ending chapters in such a way that the reader just can't put the book down and absolutely has to read on to the next chapter. I also think these books are responsible for the fact that I can't, for the life of me, write a chapter that's much longer than ten pages.

There's another variation of this question that I'm asked all the time on book tour: Who are your favorite authors? I always answer it the same way: My favorite authors are the ones who've been nice to me. It's so important for established authors to take emerging authors under their wings. Two who've been particularly generous to me as mentors and friends are Mameve Medwed and Jeanne Ray. Fortunately, they both happen to be very talented—and funny—so if you've somehow missed their books, you should read them immediately.

(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
[Cook's] characters are always looking for the next exciting chapter in their lives and her tenth novel, Time Flies, takes her trademark theme in a thought provoking new direction...The resulting story is both touching and hilarious.
Bourne Journal

Cook’s penchant for hitting the emotional sore spot and combining it with humor hits the mark. ... A thoroughly enjoyable and amusing read, this story is sure to delight.
New York Journal of Books

Full of engaging characters and humorous situations.... This lighthearted story will have readers plumbing its hidden depths and enjoying the ride.
Romance Reviews Today

[F]unny, bittersweet.... Melanie is a metal artist in Atlanta struggling to get her sculptures acknowledged. One of her pieces has just been accepted into a juried art show and sold to a local chef. Melanie, who has recently separated from her husband, Kurt, is also dealing with her new life as a single, middle-aged woman.... Meanwhile, her best friend, BJ, pesters her to return to Massachusetts for their high school reunion...Cook's strong characters and the sense of humor...[infuse] her latest heartwarming novel. —Kristen Stewart, Pearland Lib., Brazoria Cty. Lib. System, TX
Library Journal
.

A spunky, lighthearted road trip down memory lane.... The banter is a lot of fun, and the characters’ realization of what is important is certain to make readers yearn for reconnections of their own. Another delightful beach read from the author of Wallflower in Bloom.
Booklist

The latest novel from Cook (Wallflower in Bloom, 2012, etc.). When Melanie's husband...leaves her for another woman, [her] artwork saves her sanity and attracts the attention of the charming restaurateur.... [H]er best friend from high school, B.J., is nagging her to come North for the upcoming high school reunion. Melanie doesn't want to, until she starts getting emails from a former boyfriend, now divorced.... After accompanying Melanie and B.J on their hysterical road trip, readers will feel like they've made friends for life. Women will like this book.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Time Flies begins with the sentence, “When my cell phone rang, I’d just finished cutting up my marriage mattress.” When her best friend B.J. asks narrator Melanie what’s up, she blows a sprinkling of sawdust off the phone and says, “Not much. Same old, same old.” How does this opening set you up for the rest of the book? What does it make you want to know?”

2. Melanie became a metal sculptor after moving to Atlanta. “Creativity had consoled me my whole life,” she says, “and conquering a new medium was something I could control. And if I was really, really honest, a part of the draw was that Kurt hated the idea.” Do you think this is part of the normal push and pull of a long-term marriage? Can you share any examples from your own life?

3. When Melanie’s highway driving phobia resurfaces, it takes her by surprise and throws her for a loop. What are you really, really, really afraid of? Can you imagine it ever crossing the line into a full-blown phobia? Why or why not?

4. Melanie and B.J.’s high school class reunion committee has decided they’re not going to mention either the year they graduated or how many years it’s been. They’re simply going to call it The Marshbury High School Best Class/Best Reunion Evah. How many years do you think it’s been? What are the clues?

5. Music plays a huge part in the stroll down memory lane for the characters in Time Flies. Do you think that’s true for everybody? What one song most reminds you of high school? Why?

6. Speaking of memories, Melanie’s son Troy accuses her of turning her memories of his childhood experiences into a Disney movie. What does he mean by that? Do you think all moms have that tendency?

7. Clearly, Melanie and Marion have some deep-seated sister issues. How do you see it? Who’s mostly at fault? Do you think it’s unusual to have a sibling that drives you crazy? Did you ever “borrow” anything from a sibling’s room when you were growing up? Did you get caught?

8. Throughout the book, Melanie and B.J. call each other Thelma, Louise, Romy and Michele. Why? Is there another movie that speaks to you about female friendship? Do you think in some ways Time Flies is a midlife takeoff on Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion? More baggage, more wrinkles, but the same need to impress?

9. When Melanie receives an email from Finn Miller, she jumps almost immediately into full retro crush mode. Why do you think it’s easier for her to do this than it is for her to deal with Ted Brody? What’s the lure of old high school crushes? Who’s yours?

10. What does finally getting a tattoo after all these years signify for B.J.? For Melanie? If your best friend talked you into getting one, what would it be? Real or temporary?

11. Why do you think Melanie and B.J. have stayed friends all these years? What do they do for each other? How would their relationship be different if they met as adults? Do you have high school friends still in your life? Why or why not?

12. Have you ever gone to a high school reunion? Will reading Time Flies make you more or less apt to go to your next one?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Time in Between
Maria Duenas, 2011
Atrias Books
624 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451616880

Summary
The inspiring international bestseller of a seemingly ordinary woman who uses her talent and courage to transform herself first into a prestigious couturier and then into an undercover agent for the Allies during World War II

Between Youth and Adulthood . . . At age twelve, Sira Quiroga sweeps the atelier floors where her single mother works as a seamstress. At fourteen, she quietly begins her own apprenticeship. By her early twenties she has learned the ropes of the business and is engaged to a modest government clerk. But everything changes when two charismatic men burst unexpectedly into her neatly mapped-out life: an attractive salesman and the father she never knew.

Between War and Peace . . . With the Spanish Civil War brewing in Madrid, Sira leaves her mother and her fiancé, impetuously following her handsome lover to Morocco. However, she soon finds herself abandoned, penniless, and heartbroken in an exotic land. Among the odd collection of European expatriates trapped there by the worsening political situation back on the Continent, Sira reinvents herself by turning to the one skill that can save her: her gift for creating beautiful clothes.

Between Love and Duty . . . As England, Germany, and the other great powers launch into the dire conflict of World War II, Sira is persuaded to return to Madrid, where she takes on a new identity to embark upon the most dangerous undertaking of her career. As the preeminent couturier for an eager clientele of Nazi officers’ wives, Sira becomes embroiled in the half-lit world of espionage and political conspiracy rife with love, intrigue, and betrayal.

Already a runaway bestseller across Europe, The Time In Between is one of those rare, richly textured novels that enthrall down to the last page. María Dueñas reminds us how it feels to be swept away by a masterful storyteller. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Maria Duenas holds a PhD in English Philology and is currently a professor at the University of Murcia. She has also taught at American universities, is the author of several academic articles, and has participated in various educational, cultural, and editorial projects. (From the publisher .)

Book Reviews
A literary cocktail that mixes adventure, espionage, glamour, aristocracy, and passion.
La Vanguardia (Spain)

A tale of frustrated dreams and dreams come true, embodying all the perverse charm of what time, implacably, has swept away.... Don’t pass it by.
El Mundo (Spain)

From a terrific opening line to the final page, chapters zip by at a pulsing pace
USA Today

It is no surprise this debut novel was a runaway success in Europe. American fans of historical fiction looking for a dramatic, uncomplicated escape will be similarly entranced.
Library Journal

Packed with engaging characters, flawlessly researched, and breathlessly paced.
Booklist

"You wore blue. The Germans wore gray." So quoth Humphrey Bogart's character in Casablanca, the tutelary spirit behind bestselling Spanish debut novelist Duenas' high-minded historical soap.... Middlebrow and breezy. A perfect beach read, if a touch off-season, unless you're headed for Casablanca and its waters.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The first sentence of the book, "A typewriter shattered my destiny" is an example of the author's use of foreshadowing of future events. Were you immediately drawn into the story? Were you curious to know whose destiny was shattered and why?

2. What's Sira's relationship with her mother like at the outset of The Time in Between? In what ways does it change throughout the course of the story? Do you think that Sira becomes engaged because she's really in love, or because of pressure from her mother? And, is it her humble beginnings, naivetÉ, or something more that lures Sira into an affair with Ramiro? Can you think of other protagonists who were led astray by a charming older man?

3. Discuss what role heartbreak plays in The Time in Between. How does it change Sira? Do you think it ultimately makes her stronger? Why or why not?

4. Sira is a couture designer who was born on June 8, 1911. The story ends in the early 1940s. Discuss how the world of fashion and Sira changed with the political situation of the time (see pgs.7, 143, 155).

5. What do you think of Candelaria and Dolores? How did each of these women influence Sira's life and future choices?

6. Discuss the characters that Sira encounters in Candeleria's boarding house. What do you think of their interactions over the supper table? Does your opinion of Candelaria change throughout the novel? If so, why?

7. Who is Commissioner Claudio Vazquez? Was he friend, foe, or both to Sira?

8. How did the author give us insight into the political situation in Madrid and Morocco during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s and early World War II?

9. Felix is Sira's Pygmalion. How did their unlikely friendship benefit each of them?

10. Discuss the many ways Sira re-invented herself. How was Sira Quiroga different from Arish Agoriuq?

11. Rosalinda Fox says to Sira on page 197, "Sometimes luck decides to make our decisions for us, no? Asi es la vida. That's life, no?" Do you agree with that statement? Discuss how luck may have played a role in each of their lives.

12. How would you characterize Rosalind Fox? Does knowing that she's real affect your reading of her? How realistic does she seem to you?

13. Why is Sira so reticent about Marcus? What did you think about the revelations they each made about the other at the end?

14. Sira does extraordinary things throughout The Time in Between. Does this make her a heroine? Or, is she simply acting based on circumstances?

15. Like Sira, many of the other characters in The Time in Between take risks, particularly because of the wars. Which ones did you think were the most dangerous? Why? What do you think the title of the book signifies?

16. How would you cast the movie version of The Time in Between? Who would play the role of Sira? Marcus Logan? Ramiro Arribas?

17. Maria Duenas is an academic. Does knowing this influence your reading of the story? If so, in what ways?

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The Time Keeper
Mitch Albom, 2012
Hyperion
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781401312855

Summary
A compelling fable about the first man on earth to count the hours. The man who became Father Time.

In Mitch Albom's newest work of fiction, the inventor of the world's first clock is punished for trying to measure God's greatest gift. He is banished to a cave for centuries and forced to listen to the voices of all who come after him seeking more days, more years. Eventually, with his soul nearly broken, Father Time is granted his freedom, along with a magical hourglass and a mission: a chance to redeem himself by teaching two earthly people the true meaning of time.

He returns to our world—now dominated by the hour-counting he so innocently began—and commences a journey with two unlikely partners: one a teenage girl who is about to give up on life, the other a wealthy old businessman who wants to live forever. To save himself, he must save them both. And stop the world to do so.

Told in Albom's signature spare, evocative prose, this remarkably original tale will inspire readers everywhere to reconsider their own notions of time, how they spend it and how precious it truly is. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 23, 1958
• Raised—Oaklyn, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Brandeis University; M.J., Columbia
University; M.B.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Detroit, Michigan

Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom is an American best-selling author, journalist, screenwriter, dramatist, radio, television broadcaster and musician. His books have sold over 30 million copies worldwide. Having achieved national recognition for sports writing in the earlier part of his career, he is perhaps best known for the inspirational stories and themes that weave through his books, plays and films.

Early life
Mitch Albom was born May 23, 1958 in Passaic, New Jersey. He lived in Buffalo for a little bit but then settled in Oaklyn, New Jersey which is close to Philadelphia. He grew up in a small, middle-class neighborhood from which most people never left. Mitch was once quoted as saying that his parents were very supportive and always used to say, “Don’t expect your life to finish here. There’s a big world out there. Go out and see it.”

His older sister, younger brother and he himself, all took that message to heart and traveled extensively, His siblings are currently settled in Europe. Albom once mentioned that how his parents presently say, “Great. All our kids went and saw the world and now no one comes home to have dinner on Sundays.”

Sports journalism
While living in New York, Albom developed an interest in journalism. Supporting himself by working nights in the music industry, he began to write during the day for the Queens Tribune, a weekly newspaper in Flushing, New York. His work there helped earn him entry into the Graduate School of Journalism. During his time there, to help pay his tuition he took work as a babysitter. In addition to nighttime piano playing, Albom took a part-time job with SPORT magazine.

Upon graduation, he freelanced in that field for publications such as Sports Illustrated, GEO, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and covered several Olympic sports events in Europe, paying his own way for travel and selling articles once he was there. In 1983, he was hired as a full-time feature writer for the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel, and eventually promoted to columnist. In 1985, having won that year’s Associated Press Sports Editors award for best Sports News Story, Albom was hired as lead sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press.

During his years in Detroit he became one of the most award-winning sports writers of his era; he was named best sports columnist in the nation a record 13 times by the Associated Press Sports Editors, and won best feature writing honors from that same organization a record seven times. No other writer has received the award more than once.

He has won more than 200 other writing honors from organizations including the National Headliner Awards, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association, and National Association of Black Journalists. In 2010, Albom was awarded the APSE's Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement, presented at the annual APSE convention in Salt Lake City, Utah. Many of his columns have been collected into a series of four anthologies—the Live Albom books—published from 1988-1995.

Sports books
Albom's first non-anthology book was Bo: Life, Laughs, and the Lessons of a College Football Legend (1998), an autobiography of football coach Bo Schembechler co-written with the coach. The book became Albom's first New York Times bestseller.

Albom's next book was Fab Five: Basketball, Trash Talk, The American Dream (1993), a look into the starters on the University of Michigan men's basketball team who, as freshman, reached the NCAA championship game in 1992 and again as sophomores in 1993. The book also became a New York Times bestseller.

Tuesdays with Morrie
Albom's breakthrough book came about after a friend of his viewed Morrie Schwartz's interview with Ted Koppel on ABC News Nightline in 1995, in which Schwartz, a sociology professor, spoke about living and dying with a terminal disease, ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease).

Albom, who had been close with Schwartz during his college years at Brandeis, felt guilty about not keeping in touch so he reconnected with his former professor, visiting him in suburban Boston and eventually coming every Tuesday for discussions about life and death. Albom, seeking a way to pay for Schwartz's medical bills, sought out a publisher for a book about their visits. Although rejected by numerous publishing houses, the idea was accepted by Doubleday shortly before Schwartz's death, and Albom was able to fulfill his wish to pay off Schwartz's bills.

The book, Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) is a small volume that chronicles Albom's time spent with his professor. The initial printing was 20,000 copies. Word of mouth grew the book sales slowly and a brief appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" nudged the book onto the New York Times bestseller's list in October 1997. It steadily climbed, reaching the No. 1 position six months later. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 205 weeks. One of the top selling memoirs of all time, Tuesdays With Morrie has sold over 14 million copies and been translated into 41 languages.

Oprah Winfrey produced a television movie adaptation by the same name for ABC, starring Hank Azaria as Albom and Jack Lemmon as Morrie. It was the most-watched TV movie of 1999 and won four Emmy Awards. A two-man theater play was later co-authored by Albom and playwright Jeffrey Hatcher and opened Off Broadway in the fall of 2001, starring Alvin Epstein as Morrie and Jon Tenney as Albom.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Albom's next foray was in fiction with The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003). The book was a fast success and again launched Albom onto the New York Times bestseller list, selling over 10 million copies in 35 languages. In 2004, it was turned into a television movie for ABC, starring Jon Voight, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Imperioli, and Jeff Daniels. The film was critically acclaimed and the most watched TV movie of the year, with 18.6 million viewers.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven is the story of Eddie, a wounded war veteran who lives what he believes is an uninspired and lonely life fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, Eddie is killed while trying to save a little girl from a falling ride. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a location but a place in which your life is explained to you by five people who were in, who affected, or were affected by, your life.

Albom has said the book was inspired by his real life uncle, Eddie Beitchman, who, like the character, served during World War II in the Philippines, and died when he was 83. Eddie told Albom, as a child, about a time he was rushed to surgery and had a near-death experience, his soul floating above the bed. There, Eddie said, he saw all his dead relatives waiting for him at the edge of the bed. Albom has said that image of people waiting when you die inspired the book's concept.

For One More Day
Albom's third novel, For One More Day (2006), spent nine months on the New York Times bestseller list after debuting at the top spot. It also reached No. 1 on USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. It was the first book to be sold by Starbucks in the launch of the Book Break Program in the fall of 2006. It has been translated into 26 languages. On December 9, 2007, the ABC aired the 2-hour television event motion picture Oprah Winfrey Presents: Mitch Albom's For One More Day, which starred Michael Imperioli and Ellen Burstyn. Burstyn received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for her role as Posey Benetto.

For One More Day is “Chick” Benetto, a retired baseball player who, facing the pain of unrealized dreams, alcoholism, divorce, and an estrangement from his grown daughter, returns to his childhood home and attempts suicide. There he meets his long dead mother, who welcomes him as if nothing ever happened. The book explores the question, “What would you do if you had one more day with someone you’ve lost?”

Albom has said his relationship with his own mother was largely behind the story of that book, and that several incidents in For One More Day are actual events from his childhood.

Have a Little Faith
His first nonfiction book since Tuesdays was published, Have a Little Faith (2009) recounts Albom's experiences which led to him writing the eulogy for Albert L. Lewis, a Rabbi from his hometown in New Jersey. The book is written in the same vein as Tuesdays With Morrie, in which the main character, Mitch, goes through several heartfelt conversations with the Rabbi in order to better know and understand the man that he would one day eulogize. Through this experience, Albom writes, his own sense of faith was reawakened, leading him to make contact with Henry Covington, the African-American pastor of the I Am My Brother's Keeper church, in Detroit, where Albom was then living. Covington, a past drug addict, dealer, and ex-convict, ministered to a congregation of largely homeless men and women in a church so poor that the roof leaked when it rained. From his relationships with these two very different men of faith, Albom writes about the difference faith can make in the world.

The Time Keeper
Albom's third work of fiction, The Time Keeper (2012) is fablistic tale about the inventor of the world's first clock who is punished for trying to measure God's greatest gift. He is banished to a cave for centuries and forced to listen to the voices of all who come after him seeking more days, more years. Eventually, with his soul nearly broken, Father Time is granted his freedom, along with a magical hourglass and a mission: a chance to redeem himself by teaching two earthly people the true meaning of time.

The First Phone Call from Heaven
Albom's fourth work of fiction, The First Phone Call from Heaven (2013) tells the story of a small town on Lake Michigan that gets worldwide attention when its citizens start receiving phone calls from the afterlife.

The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
Told from the point of view of the Spirit of Music, Albom's fifth novel (2015) traces the life of the legendary (and fictional) super guitarist Frankie Presto and his extraordinary impact on the music of his time.

Charity work
Albom has founded a number of charitable organizations whose missions are to aid disadvantaged and homeless people. The groups have raised funds to pay for resuce services, youth programs, beds, kitchen, food, and daycare.

• The Dream Fund at the College for Creative Studies (CCS) was started by Albom in 1992. Its purpose is to provide funding for under-served children to participate in the arts and to instill confidence in our youth. Since its founding, CCS has used the Dream Fund to support visual, performing, summer “Week at a Time” youth scholarships, community art programs, and even the Detroit 300 project in 2001. The Dream Fund has raised over $115,000 in scholarships since its inception.

• S.A.Y. Detroit (which stands for Super All Year Detroit) is an umbrella organization for charities dedicated to improving the lives of the neediest—including A Time to Help, S.A.Y. Detroit Family Health Clinic, and A Hole in the Roof Foundation. S.A.Y. distributes money to shelters in Detroit for projects specifically designed to help the plight of those in need. Its projects to date include the building of a state-of-the-art kitchen at the Michigan Veterans Foundation shelter and a day-care center at COTS for children of homeless women

• A Time To Help was established in 1997 as a means of galvanizing the people of Detroit to volunteer on a regular basis. The group has staged more than 100 monthly projects ranging from building houses, delivering meals, beautifying city streets, running adoption fairs, repairing homeless shelters, packing food, and hosting an annual Christmas party to a shelter for battered women.

• A Hole in the Roof Foundation helps faith groups of any denomination, who care for the homeless, to repair the spaces in which they carry out their work and offer their services. The seed that gave root to the Foundation—and also inspired its name—is the I Am My Brother's Keeper church in Detroit, MI. Here, despite a gaping hole in the roof, and no matter how harsh the weather, the pastor tends to his community to provide spiritual nourishment and a sanctuary for the homeless. (Adapted from Wikiipedia. First retrieved 9/18/2013.)

Book Reviews
A writer with soul.
Los Angeles Times

Once again, Albom gets to the heart of a topic that touches us all. Take time to read this book
Lincoln Journal Star

A compelling and uplifting moral tale...will inspire and satisdy readers in search of a more meditative approach to life in a fast-paced yet wonderful world.
Irish Independent

A wonderful fantasy with characters both human and mythical
Rabbi Jason Miller - Huffington Post

Think of Mitch Albom as the Babe Ruth of popular literature, hitting the ball out of the park every time he's at bat.
Time

There's comfort in Albom's unwavering conviction that our lives have meaning.
People

This is an unforgettable story, poignant, inspirational and beautifully written. Splendid"
Image

"This exquisitely wrought story has all the magic of a fairytale, but at its core are searching questions about the meaning of life and death, and time... How these three [characters] come together is beautifully conceived, by a writer whose prose is itself perfectly measured.
Good Book Guide (UK)

Albom turns his attention to Father Time in his new fabulist page-turner. Long ago—before a word like "ago" had any meaning—a man named Dor began to chart the passage of time, immediately realizing that "all his days were numbered," and so were his wife's.... With a clever conceit and frequent shifts in perspective, Albom deftly juggles multiple narratives to craft an inspiring tale that will please his fans and newcomers alike.
Publishers Weekly

A story that weaves together religion, philosophy and common sense like classic fables that readers may remember from childhood and reminds people how to try to live each day.
Bookreporter.com

Cleverly constructed fable and "heartrending morality play reminiscent of both A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life.
Booklist

Albom seems to have taken the template for his novel from a corporate report, each page studded with boldfaced passages that would seem to signal something momentous; a person in a hurry could well read just those boldfaced passages and emerge with a pretty good idea of the storyline, which is plenty predictable in any event.
Kirkus Reviews

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A Time to Kill
John Grisham, 1989
Random House
672 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780440245919

Summary
In this searing courtroom drama, best-selling author John Grisham probes the savage depths of racial violence as he delivers a compelling tale of uncertain justice in a small southern town.

Clanton, Mississippi. The life of a ten-year-old girl is shattered by two drunken and remorseless young man. The mostly white town reacts with shock and horror at the inhuman crime. Until her black father acquires an assault rifle—and takes justice into his own outraged hands.

For ten days, as burning crosses and the crack of sniper fire spread through the streets of Clanton, the nation sits spellbound as young defense attorney Jake Brigance struggles to save his client's life...and then his own. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 8, 1955
• Where—Jonesboro, Arkansas, USA
• Education—B.S., Mississippi State; J.D., University of Mississippi
• Currently—lives in Oxford, Mississippi and Albermarle, Virginia

John Ray Grisham, Jr. is an American lawyer, politician, and author, best known for his popular legal thrillers. He has written more than 25 novels, a short story collection (Ford County), two works of nonfiction, and a children's series.

Grisham's first bestseller was The Firm. Released in 1991, it sold more than seven million copies. The book was later adapted into a feature film, of the same name starring Tom Cruise in 1993, and a TV series in 2012 which "continues the story of attorney Mitchell McDeere and his family 10 years after the events of the film and novel." Eight of his other novels have also been adapted into films: The Chamber, The Client, A Painted House, The Pelican Brief, Skipping Christmas, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, and his first novel, A Time to Kill. His books have been translated into 29 languages and published worldwide.

As of 2008, his books had sold over 250 million copies worldwide. Grisham is one of only three authors to sell two million copies on a first printing; the others are Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling.

Early life and education
Grisham, the second oldest of five siblings, was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Wanda Skidmore Grisham and John Grisham. His father was a construction worker and cotton farmer; his mother a homemaker. When Grisham was four years old, his family started traveling around the South, until they finally settled in Southaven in DeSoto County, Mississippi. As a child, Grisham wanted to be a baseball player. neither of his parents had advanced education, he was encouraged to read and prepare for college.

As a teenager, Grisham worked for a nursery watering bushes for $1.00 an hour. He was soon promoted to a fence crew for $1.50 an hour. At 16, Grisham took a job with a plumbing contractor. Through a contact of his father, he managed to find work on a highway asphalt crew in Mississippi at the age of 17.

It was during this time that an unfortunate incident made him think more seriously about college. A fight broke out among the crew with gunfire, and Grisham ran to the restroom for safety. He did not come out until after the police had "hauled away rednecks." He hitchhiked home and started thinking about college.

His next work was in retail, as a salesclerk in a department store men's underwear section, which he described as "humiliating." He decided to quit but stayed when he was offered a raise. He was given another raise after asking to be transferred to toys and then to appliances. A confrontation with a company spy posing as a customer convinced him to leave the store. By this time, Grisham was halfway through college.

He went to the Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi and later attended Delta State University in Cleveland. Grisham drifted so much during his time at the college that he changed colleges three times before completing a degree. He graduated from Mississippi State University in 1977, receiving a BS degree in accounting.

He later enrolled in the University of Mississippi School of Law planning to become a tax lawyer. But he was soon overcome by "the complexity and lunacy" of it. He decided to return to his hometown as a trial lawyer, but his interest shifted to general civil litigation. He graduated in 1983 with a JD degree.

Law and politics
Grisham practiced law for about a decade and also won election as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990 at an annual salary of $8,000. By his second term at the Mississippi state legislature, he was the vice-chairman of the Apportionment and Elections Committee and a member of several other committees.

With the success of his second book The Firm, published in 1991, Grisham gave up practicing law. He returned briefly in 1996 to fight for the family of a railroad worker who had been killed on the job. It was a commitment made to the family before leaving law to become a full-time writer. Grisham successfully argued his clients' case, earning them a jury award of $683,500—the biggest verdict of his career.

Writing
Grisham said that, sometime in the mid-1980s, he had been hanging around the court one day when he overheard a 12-year-old girl telling the jury how she been beaten and raped. Her story intrigued Grisham, so he began to watch the trial, noting how members of the jury wept during her testimony. It was then, Grisham later wrote in the New York Times, that a story was born. Musing over "what would have happened if the girl's father had murdered her assailants," Grisham took three years to complete his first book, A Time to Kill.

Finding a publisher was not easy. The book was rejected by 28 publishers before Wynwood Press, an unknown publisher, agreed to give it a modest 5,000-copy printing. It was published in June 1989. The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on his second novel, the story of an ambitious young attorney "lured to an apparently perfect law firm that was not what it appeared." The Firm remained on the the New York Times' bestseller list for 47 weeks and became the bestselling novel of 1991.

Beginning with A Painted House in 2001, the author broadened his focus from law to the more general rural South, but continued to write legal thrillers. He has also written sports fiction and comedy fiction.

In 2005, Grisham received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

In 2010, Grisham started writing legal thrillers for children 9-12 years old. The books featured Theodore Boone, a 13-year-old boy, who gives his classmates legal advice—everything from rescuing impounded dogs to helping their parents prevent their house from being repossessed. His daughter, Shea, inspired him to write the Boone series.

Marriage and family
Grisham married Renee Jones in 1981, and the couple have two grown children together, Shea and Ty. The family spends their time in their Victorian home on a farm outside Oxford, Mississippi, and their other home near Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Innocence Project
Grisham is a member of the Board of Directors of The Innocence Project, which campaigns to free unjustly convicted people on the basis of DNA evidence. The Innocence Project argues that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events but instead arise from systemic defects. Grisham has testified before Congress on behalf of the Project and appeared on Dateline on NBC, Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, and other programs. He also wrote for the New York Times in 2013 about an unjustly held prisoner at Guantanamo.

Libel suit
In 2007, former legal officials from Oklahoma filed a civil suit for libel against Grisham and two other authors. They claimed that Grisham and the others critical of Peterson and his prosecution of murder cases conspired to commit libel and generate publicity for themselves by portraying the plaintiffs in a false light and intentionally inflicting emotional distress. Grisham was named due to his publication of the non-fiction book, The Innocent Man. He examined the faults in the investigation and trial of defendants in the murder of a cocktail waitress in Ada, Oklahoma, and the exoneration by DNA evidence more than 12 years later of wrongfully convicted defendants Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz. The judge dismissed the libel case after a year, saying, "The wrongful convictions of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz must be discussed openly and with great vigor."

Misc.
The Mississippi State University Libraries maintains the John Grisham Room, an archive containing materials related to his writings and to his tenure as Mississippi State Representative.

Grisham has a lifelong passion for baseball demonstrated partly by his support of Little League activities in both Oxford, Mississippi, and Charlottesville, Virginia. He wrote the original screenplay for and produced the 2004 baseball movie Mickey, starring Harry Connick, Jr. He remains a fan of Mississippi State University's baseball team and wrote about his ties to the university and the Left Field Lounge in the introduction for the book Dudy Noble Field: A Celebration of MSU Baseball.

In an October 2006 interview on the Charlie Rose Show, Grisham stated that he usually takes only six months to write a book and that his favorite author is John le Carre. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/6/2013.)

Book Reviews
(Pre-internet books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon or Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

In this lively novel, Grisham explores the uneasy relationship of blacks and whites in the rural South. His treatment is balanced and humane, if not particularly profound, slighting neither blacks nor whites. Life becomes complicated in the backwoods town of Clanton, Mississippi, when a black worker is brought to trial for the murder of the two whites who raped and tortured his young daughter. Everyone gets involved, from Klan to NAACP. Grisham's pleasure in relating the byzantine complexities of Clanton politics is contagious, and he tells a good story. There are touches of humor in the dialogue; the characters are salty and down-to-earth. An enjoyable book, which displays a respect for Mississippi ways and for the contrary people who live there. Recommended. —David Keymer, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Utica
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1 . How would you describe Sheriff Ozzie Walls?

2. Why did Tonya envision her father running "desperately" through the woods?

3. Talk about the town's reaction to Tonya's rape. What role does race play in the way the townspeople respond?

4. Why does Carl Lee Hailey shoot Cobb and Willard? What are the chances that the two men would have been convicted and sentenced? What were your feelings when Hailey shot them?

5. Is Carl Lee Hailey sane...or insane?

6. Why does Jake Brigance decide to take Carl Lee Hailey's case? What, according to Brigance, would a similar case normally cost?

7. Why does Brigance hang a portrait of William Faulkner in his office? What does Faulkner represent to him? And what is implied by the fact that, as Brigance notices, no streets or buildings are named after Grant or Lincoln?

8. Talk about the three families: the Haileys, Cobbs and Willards. How different are they? Do they have anything in common?

9 . What do lawyers fight for—according to Chapter 10?

10. Describe Rufus Buckley. How do he and Jake Brigance compare with one another—in their beliefs, motivations and in the way they approach the law? Now compare Omar Noose. Why does Brigance liken him to Ichabod Crane?

11. How does Brigance's respond to Ethel's concern about the phone calls? What does this reveal about his state of mind?

12. What does Brigance reveal about himself during the New York Times interview?

13. Talk about the various decisions that Jake Brigance makes throughout the book? Are they ethical? Is Jake ethical?

14. What about Reverend Agee, who collects donations for the Hailey fund? Is he fair?

15. What is later revealed about Tonya? Has she recovered from her ordeal?

16. Talk about the role of court testimony by psychiatrists? How credible...or non-credible are they?

17. What have you learned in this book about way the legal system works? What are preliminary hearings, grand juries, and arraignments? Does the system work the way you believe it should?

18. Talk about the volunteer/pro bono team that assists Brigance. What do you think of Ellen Roark, for instance? What assets and liabilities does each team member bring to the Hailey case?

19. What is the significance of Jake's vomiting and weeping? How is this trial changing him? What is the (non-literal) meaning of the sentence, "Jake sipped his beer and searched for daylight through the window"?

20. Talk about the Ku Klux Klan and its role in the trial.

21. Examine Brigance's closing argument: how does he endear the jury to Dr. Bass and reestablish the relevance of the doctor's testimony? How does Brigance portray Buckley as a father figure? What part of Looney's testimony does he call to mind? Does his recalling the rape scene from Tonya's perspective help the insanity plea?

22. Talk about the jury...and the way in which it reaches its decision. Why are members unwilling to deadlock? How does Wanda Womack's proposal sway them?

23. After reading this book, has your attitude toward the legal system changed in any way?
(Questions adapted by LitLovers from Scholastic Inc.'s Teacher's Guide.)

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The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger, 2004
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
546 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780156029438

Summary
A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.

An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 13, 1963
• Where—South Haven, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.F.A., School of the Art Institute of Chicago;
M.F.A., Northwestern University
• Awards—Ragdale Foundation Fellowships
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois

Audrey Niffenegger is a professor in the M.F.A. program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts.

The Time Traveler's Wife, her first novel, was published in 2004. In 2005, she published an illustrated story: Three Incestuous Sisters. Her Fearful Symmetry, Niffenegger's third book, was published in 2009. Niffenegger lives in Chicago. (Adapted from the publisher.)

More
In her book Three Incestuous Sisters, Audrey Niffenegger tells the tale of a trio of sisters, each with her own special trait. There is blond Bettine, the beautiful one, blue-haired Ophile, the smart one, and then there's Clothilde. While hardly unintelligent and certainly not unattractive, it is still probably no coincidence that Niffenegger decided to cast her fellow redhead Clothilde as the talented one considering that she is so abundant in talent. A gifted illustrator and writer, Niffenegger is parlaying her quirky imagination into one of the most interesting bodies of work in contemporary literature.

Niffenegger's love of writing developed when she was a young girl, quietly spending her time writing and illustrating books as a hobby. Her wonderfully eccentric imaginativeness was in play from her earliest writing efforts. "My ‘first' novel was an epic about an imaginary road trip [sic] I went on with The Beatles," she explains on her website, "handwritten in turquoise marker, seventy pages long, which I wrote and illustrated when I was eleven."

Niffenegger's mini-magical mystery tour may have been her "first novel," but the first one to which the rest of the world would be privy came many years later. She had already established herself as a prominent artist whose work had been shown in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, and the Houghton Library at Harvard University when The Time Traveler's Wife was published in 2003. "I wanted to write about a perfect marriage that is tested by something outside the control of the couple," Niffenegger told bookbrowse.com. "The title came to me out of the blue, and from the title sprang the characters, and from the characters came the story."

The Time Traveler's Wife, a sci-fi romance about the mercurial time traveler Henry and Clare, the wife who patiently awaits his return to the present, became a sensation upon its publication. This thoroughly original love story captured mass praise from USA Today, the Washington Post, People Magazine, and the Denver Post, not to mention celebrity couple Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, who promptly purchased the rights to the book and are currently developing it into a motion picture.

Now that she had established herself as a talent to watch, Niffenegger finally had the opportunity to produce a book she would describe as "a fourteen-year labor of love." Three Incestuous Sisters: An Illustrated Novel, is a gorgeous, modern-gothic storybook about the love and rivalry shared between three women. With its minimal text, Niffenegger's chiefly uses her eerie illustrations to convey the sisters' story. Booklist summed up Three Incestuous Sisters quite succinctly by stating that "Niffenegger's grim yet erotic tale and stunningly moody gothic prints possess the sly subversion of Edward Gorey, the emotional valence of Edvard Munch, and her very own brilliant use of iconographic pattern, surprising perspective, and tensile line in the service of a delectable, otherworldly sensibility."

In her third book, Niffenegger turned her attentions back to straight prose: Her Fearful Symmetry. "It's set in London's Highgate Cemetery, and features as many of the cliches of 19th century fiction as I can summon," she said in an interview with the Hennepin County Library in Minneapolis. Amazingly, with such a wide variety of styles in her still budding body of work — from science fiction to fairy tale to her impending period piece — Audrey Niffenegger's books still share a strong sense of unity, a distinctly peculiar and particular vision. "The thing that unites all my work is narrative," she said on her website. "I'm interested in telling stories, and I'm interested in creating a world that's recognizable to us as ours, but is filled with strangeness and slight changes in the rules of the universe." (From Barnes & Noble.)

Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:

• My current job is teaching graduate students how to write, print type on letterpresses, and create limited-edition books by hand. I work for Columbia College's Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago. I helped to found the Center, and it is the center of my universe nine months of the year. The other three months I try to ignore the phone, and I do my own work.

• I make art. Readers can see some of it at Printworks Gallery in Chicago. They have a web site: printworkschicago.com.

• Almost all of the places mentioned in my book are real places that you can visit. The Newberry Library is open to people who have research projects that fit the collections of the Newberry. Vintage Vinyl is a real record store in Evanston. The Aragon Ballroom, South Haven, Michigan, Bookman's Alley, The Berghoff — I heartily recommend them all.

• I collect taxidermy, skeletons, books (of course), comics (mostly Raw and post-Raw independent stuff, no superheroes). I only collect small taxidermy, no bison heads, my place isn't that big. I don't own a TV. I spend a lot of time hanging out with my boyfriend, Christopher Schneberger, and attending Avocet concerts (Avocet is the band Chris plays drums with). We travel a lot; my new book is set in London, so there's lots of research to do. I garden, in a rather haphazard way. I also enjoy finding, buying, and wearing vintage clothes. All in all, it's a pleasant life. ("More" and "Extras" from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
In a clever, sometimes funny story, time travel becomes a prism through which we view love. The events are delightfully screwy.... Nonetheless, the novel has a slightly commercial feel to it, as if written in the expectation of a Hollywood film. [Ed. note—the film was released in 2009. Verdict? Neh...]
A LitLovers LitPicks (Oct. '06)

What The Time Traveler's Wife does best is to show the inner life of an enduring relationship as only its protagonists can know it.
Eric Weinberger - The Washington Post

Young lovers often believe themselves crossed by fate or by time, but those in Niffenegger’s spirited first novel have more reason than most. Henry suffers from Chrono-Impairment—a quasi-medical condition that catapults him, unwillingly, from one random point in time to another. Clare first meets him in 1977, when she is six and he materializes near her parents’ garden as a thirty-six-year-old from 2000; he returns regularly throughout her childhood from different times in their shared future. At last, when Clare is twenty and Henry twenty-eight, they meet in his present, and the relationship begins in earnest. But romance proves even trickier than usual when one person keeps vanishing to distant, and occasionally dangerous, times. Niffenegger plays ingeniously in her temporal hall of mirrors, but fails to make the connection between the lovers as compelling as their odd predicament.
The New Yorker

Niffenegger, despite her moving, razor-edged prose, doesn't claim to be a romantic. She writes with the unflinching yet detached clarity of a war correspondent standing at the sidelines of an unfolding battle. She possesses a historian's ye for contextual detail. This is no romantic idyll.
Kathy Balog - USA Today

This highly original first novel won the largest advance San Francisco-based MacAdam/Cage had ever paid, and it was money well spent. Niffenegger has written a soaring love story illuminated by dozens of finely observed details and scenes, and one that skates nimbly around a huge conundrum at the heart of the book: Henry De Tamble, a rather dashing librarian at the famous Newberry Library in Chicago, finds himself unavoidably whisked around in time. He disappears from a scene in, say, 1998 to find himself suddenly, usually without his clothes, which mysteriously disappear in transit, at an entirely different place 10 years earlier-or later. During one of these migrations, he drops in on beautiful teenage Clare Abshire, an heiress in a large house on the nearby Michigan peninsula, and a lifelong passion is born. The problem is that while Henry's age darts back and forth according to his location in time, Clare's moves forward in the normal manner, so the pair are often out of sync. But such is the author's tenderness with the characters, and the determinedly ungimmicky way in which she writes of their predicament (only once do they make use of Henry's foreknowledge of events to make money, and then it seems to Clare like cheating) that the book is much more love story than fantasy. It also has a splendidly drawn cast, from Henry's violinist father, ruined by the loss of his wife in an accident from which Henry time-traveled as a child, to Clare's odd family and a multitude of Chicago bohemian friends. The couple's daughter, Alba, inherits her father's strange abilities, but this is again handled with a light touch; there's no Disney cuteness here. Henry's foreordained end is agonizing, but Niffenegger has another card up her sleeve, and plays it with poignant grace. It is a fair tribute to her skill and sensibility to say that the book leaves a reader with an impression of life's riches and strangeness rather than of easy thrills.
Publishers Weekly

This debut novel tells the compelling love story of artist Clare and her husband, Henry, a librarian at the Newberry Library who has an ailment called Chrono-Displaced Person (CDP), which without his control removes him to the past or the future under stressful circumstances. The clever story is told from the perspectives of Henry and Clare at various times in their lives. Henry's time travels enable him to visit Clare as a little girl and later as an aged widow and explain "how it feels to be living outside of the time constraints most humans are subject to." He seeks out a doctor named Kendrik, who is unable to help him but hopes to find a cure for his daughter, Alba, who has inherited CDP. The lengthy but exciting narrative concludes tragically with Henry's foretold death during one of his time travels but happily shows the timelessness of genuine love. The whole is skillfully written with a blend of distinct characters and heartfelt emotions that hopscotch through time, begging interpretation on many levels. —David A. Beron , Univ. of New Hampshire, Durham
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. In The Time Traveler’s Wife, the characters meet each other at various times during their lifetime. How does the author keep all the timelines in order and “on time”?

2. Although Henry does the time traveling, Clare is equally impacted. How does she cope with his journeys and does she ultimately accept them?

3. How does the writer introduce the reader to the concept of time travel as a realistic occurrence? Does she succeed?

4. Henry’s life is disrupted on multiple levels by spontaneous time travel. How does his career as a librarian offset his tumultuous disappearances? Why does that job appeal to Henry?

5. Henry and Clare know each other for years before they fall in love as adults. How does Clare cope with the knowledge that at a young age she knows that Henry is the man she will eventually marry?

6. The Time Traveler’s Wife is ultimately an enduring love story. What trials and tribulations do Henry and Clare face that are the same as or different from other “normal” relationships?

7. How does their desire for a child affect their relationship?

8. The book is told from both Henry and Clare’s perspectives. What does this add to the story?

9. Do you think the ending of the novel is satisfactory?

10. Though history there have been dozens of mediums used for time travel in literature. Please site examples and compare The Time Traveler’s Wife to the ones with which you are familiar.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Time's Convert
Deborah Harkness, 2018
Penguin Publishing
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399564512

Summary
A novel about what it takes to become a vampire. Set in contemporary Paris and London, and the American colonies during the upheaval and unrest that exploded into the Revolutionary War, Times Convert tells the sweeping story that braids together the past and present.

On the battlefields of the American Revolution, Matthew de Clermont meets Marcus MacNeil, a young surgeon from Massachusetts, during a moment of political awakening when it seems that the world is on the brink of a brighter future.

When Matthew offers him a chance at immortality and a new life, free from the restraints of his puritanical upbringing, Marcus seizes the opportunity to become a vampire. But his transformation is not an easy one and the ancient traditions and responsibilities of the de Clermont family clash with Marcus's deeply-held beliefs in liberty, equality, and brotherhood.

Fast forward to contemporary London, where Marcus has fallen for Phoebe Taylor, a young employee at Sotheby's.

Phoebe decides to become a vampire, too, and though the process at first seems uncomplicated, the couple discovers that the challenges facing a human who wishes to be a vampire are no less formidable in the modern world than they were in the 18th century. The shadows that Marcus believed he'd escaped centuries ago may return to haunt them both—forever.

A passionate love story and a fascinating exploration of the power of tradition and the possibilities for change, Time's Convert will delight fans of the All Souls trilogy and all readers of magic, the supernatural, and romance. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—near Philadelphia, PA, USA
• Education—B.A., Mount Holyoke College; M.A., Northwestern University; Ph.D., University of California-Davis
• Currently—lives in southern California

Deborah Harkness is a professor of history at the University of Southern California. She has received Fullbright, Guggenheim, and National Humanities Center fellowships, and her most recent scholarly work is The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. She also writes an award-winning wine blog, Good Wine Under $20. (From the publisher.)

More
In her own words

I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and have lived in western Massachusetts, the Chicago area, Northern California, upstate New York, and Southern California. In other words, I’ve lived in three out of five time zones in the US! I’ve also lived in the United Kingdom in the cities of Oxford and London.

For the past twenty-eight years I’ve been a student and scholar of history, and received degrees from Mount Holyoke College, Northwestern University, and the University of California at Davis. During that time I researched the history of magic and science in Europe, especially during the period from 1500 to 1700.

The libraries I’ve worked in include Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the All Souls College Library at Oxford, the British Library, London’s Guildhall Library, the Henry E. Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Newberry Library—proving that I know my way around a card catalogue or the computerized equivalent. These experiences have given me a deep and abiding love of libraries and a deep respect for librarians. Currently, I teach European history and the history of science at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

My previous books include two works of non-fiction: John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (Yale University Press, 2007). It has been my privilege to receive fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. And I was honored to receive accolades for my historical work from the History of Science Society, the North American Conference on British Studies, and the Longman’s/History Today Prize Committee.

In 2006, I took up my keyboard and entered the world of blogging and Twitter. My wine blog, Good Wine Under $20, is an online record of my search for the best, most affordable wines. These efforts have been applauded by the American Wine Blog Awards, Saveur.com, Wine & Spirits magazine, and Food & Wine magazine. My wine writing has also appeared on the website Serious Eats and in Wine & Spirits magazine. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
[R]ich but meandering…. The large cast can be daunting, and those not already familiar with the All Souls trilogy may be lost, but returning readers will find this a delightful excursion.
Publishers Weekly

Harkness starts off in Revolutionary America, where young surgeon Marcus MacNeil leaps at Matthew de Clermont's offer to make him a vampire. Marcus's liberty-and-brotherhood ideals sit uneasily with de Clermont's traditionalism, a conflict that resonates all the way to contemporary times.
Library Journal

Effortlessly sweeping across time and continents… Harkness replaces the captivating Matthew and Diana dynamic with a passionate new love story.
Booklist

The book rambles from storyline to storyline …[with] epiphanies that don’t feel entirely supported by what came before.… [The] usual loving attention both to historical detail and romantic/familial angst, but perhaps the author will apply her talents to fresh fictional territory in the future.
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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Timebound (The Chronos Files, 1)
Rysa Walker, 2013
Skyscape
374 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781477848159

Summary
Winner, 2013 Grand Prize and Young Adult Fiction Winner

When Kate Pierce-Keller’s grandmother gives her a strange blue medallion and speaks of time travel, sixteen-year-old Kate assumes the old woman is delusional.

But it all becomes horrifyingly real when a murder in the past destroys the foundation of Kate’s present-day life. Suddenly, that medallion is the only thing protecting Kate from blinking out of existence.

Kate learns that the 1893 killing is part of something much more sinister, and her genetic ability to time travel makes Kate the only one who can fix the future. Risking everything, she travels back in time to the Chicago World’s Fair to try to prevent the murder and the chain of events that follows.

Changing the timeline comes with a personal cost—if Kate succeeds, the boy she loves will have no memory of her existence. And regardless of her motives, does Kate have the right to manipulate the fate of the entire world?

Timebound was originally released as Time’s Twisted Arrow. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Born—N/A
• Where—Penscola, Florida, USA
• Raised—Wewahitchka, Florida
• Education—B.A., St. Andrews Presbyterian College; Ph.D., University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill
• Awards—Amazon's Grand Prize and Young Adult Awards
• Currently—lives in Cary, North Carolina

Rysa Walker is the author of the bestselling "Chronos Files" series. Timebound, the first book in the series, was the Young Adult and Grand Prize winner in the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards.

Rysa grew up on a cattle ranch in the South, where she read every chance she got. On the rare occasion that she gained control of the television, she watched Star Trek and imagined living in the future, on distant planets, or at least in a town big enough to have a stop light.

She currently lives in North Carolina, where she is working on her next series, "The Delphi Project." If you see her on social media, please tell her to get back into the writing cave. (From the publsiher.)

Visit the author's website.

Book Reviews
Walker delivers a solid, leisurely paced tale that mixes romance with temporal intrigue.... However, the plot simmers for much of the book, heavy with infodumps, informed backstory, and little progress...leading to an imbalanced, though entertaining story (Ages 12–up).
Publishers Weekly

This is a wonderful book full of mystery, adventure and romance.... What would you do in Kate's shoes? Remember every change in the past can cause a dramatic change in your future and in the lives of others. —Toni Jourdan
Children's Literature

Discussion Questions
1. In Timebound, Kate must wrestle with the fact that changing the past could result in some innocent individuals never existing. When faced with the possibility of creating an alternate future, who has the right to choose?

2. We don't currently have the ability to choose "genetic gifts" for our offspring, but it's something that could, arguably, exist within a matter of decades. Could a reasonable line be drawn or is this a Pandora's Box that should never be opened?

3. Saul demonstrates how easy it would be to manipulate religious faith with some advanced technology and knowledge of the future. Do you think the author's depiction of the Cyrists is believable? Does this aspect of the story enhance or detract from your enjoyment of the overall story?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

LitLovers thanks Dorothy Hughes of the Dirty Dogs Book Club for bring this book to our attention and providing information.

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Christmas Box Collection: The Christmas Box, Timepiece, The Letter
Richard Paul Evans, 1993, '96, '97
Simon & Schuster
672 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780671027643

Summary
Richard Paul Evans' #1 New York Times bestseller The Christmas Box has become a holiday classic, a tale so touching that it continues to "tug families' heartstrings" (USA Today). His exquisite prequel, Timepiece, and The Letter completed the glorious trilogy of the Parkin family. Now all three magical stories are compiled in one extraordinary treasury that -reaches into that place where all broken hearts will forever be made whole" (The Star, Chicago).

The Christmas Box
A Christmas story unlike any other, The Christmas Box is the poignant tale of a widow and the young family who moves in with her. Together, they discover the first gift of Christmas — and what the holiday is really all about.

Timepiece
Tracing the lives of a young couple as they discover love, loyalty, and the power of forgiveness, Timepiece is a tale of wisdom and of hope — and a gentle reminder that the connections from one generation to the next are indelible.

The Letter
A mysterious letter is found at the grave of a couple's only child in this unforgettable conclusion to the collection. As they face love's greatest challenge, they find its truest meaning and learn the lessons that are echoed throughout. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 11, 1962
• Where—Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Utah
• Awards—American Mother Book Award; two Story Telling
World Awards (2000, 2001)
• Currently—lives in Salt Lake City, Utah

The story of Richard Paul Evans's massive success is so miraculous that it could have been the subject of one of his inspirational stories if it hadn't been true. He'd written his very first book The Christmas Box as a holiday gift for his daughters in 1993. As he saw it, this story of a widow and the young family that moves into her home was a tangible, timeless expression of his fatherly love. So, Evans produced twenty copies of the novella, which he then handed out to a select group of friends and family as Christmas gifts.

Incredibly, those mere twenty books began to circulate. And circulate. And circulate. By the following month, copies of The Christmas Box had passed through no less than 160 pairs of hands, some of which belonged to people who were rather influential. Amazingly, book stores began calling Evans at home, asking for copies of his little homemade opus.

The story of The Christmas Box does not end there. This moving tale about the meaning of Christmas was soon picked up by Simon & Schuster and went on to make publishing history when it simultaneously became both the bestselling hardcover and the bestselling paperback book in America. Suddenly, former advertising executive and clay animator Evans was a bestselling writer with a whole new career ahead of him.

Evans followed up The Christmas Box with a prequel titled Timepiece in 1996. Timepiece was another major hit with readers, as was The Letter, the final installment in the Christmas Box trilogy. From there, Evans expanded his repertoire while continuing to focus on the themes dearest to him: faith, family, forgiveness, love, and loyalty. He published The Christmas Candle, his first book for kids.

His work also often became subject to small-screen adaptations. In fact, a 1995 production of The Christmas Box starring Maureen O'Hara and Richard Thomas snared an Emmy for best costuming in a miniseries or special. The following year, a version of Timepiece featured an early appearance by future superstar Naomi Watts, not to mention choice performances by James Earl Jones and Ellen Burstyn, as well as an associate producer credit for the author, himself.

Meanwhile, Evans continued penning and publishing heart-warming mega-sellers like The Locket, The Looking Glass, and The Carousel. In 2001, he took some time to reflect on his stunning success in The Christmas Box Miracle, which recounted his most unusual journey to the top of the bestseller list.

Another string of crowd pleasers followed, including the romantic The Last Promise, A Perfect Day, and The Sunflower, a critically acclaimed account of blossoming love at a humanitarian mission in Peru. Now, Evans is back with Finding Noel, the story of Mark Smart, whose pained life is completely turned around after a chance encounter in a coffee shop. Fans of Evans—and there are legions of them—will no doubt be delighted and deeply touched by his latest work.

Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:

• Evans is one of the few writers in history to place on both the fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists.

• When Evans is not writing bestsellers, he often makes public appearances as a motivational speaker. He has shared the stage with such notable people as director Ron Howard, writer Deepak Chopra, humorist Steven Allen, and both George Bush senior and George W. Bush.

• In 1997, Evans founded The Christmas Box House International, a foundation responsible for building shelters for abused, neglected, and homeless children throughout the world. More than 16,000 kids have found homes in one of Evans's shelters.

• Evans is the father of five children, who take up most of his time.

• He is the founder of The Christmas Box House International, which builds shelter assessment facilities for abused children. According to Evans, "The most interesting trip I have been on lately was in the jungles of Peru, where we hunted crocodiles in leaky canoes at midnight. I have lived in both China and Italy, which is why I often have characters from those lands."

• Evans loves playing the game Risk. Also Paintball. He says, "When possible, I round up my friends and go down to our ranch in southern Utah, where we play weekend soldiers."

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

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. I was 20 years old when I read it. I was visiting my brother in Monterey, California, where the book takes place, and I became so enraptured by Steinbeck's writing that I decided then that I wanted to write a book someday.

(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Timepiece — A small treasury of wisdom....You will probably read many books this year; you will not read one written with more skill or more heart than
Yulsa World

Timepiece — Like the titular treasure chest of Evans's bestselling The Christmas Box, the eponymous timepiece-"a beautiful rose-gold wristwatch"-of this heart-plucking prequel fairly vibrates with sentimentality. Readers of the former novel will recall how the author met aged widow MaryAnne Parkin and learned of her deceased husband, David, a successful businessman, and how their infant daughter, Andrea, died a tragic death. Here, Evans traces events some 80-odd years back to tell this family's story, but not before recalling the eve of his own daughter's wedding, in 1967, when he presents her with the wristwatch, given to him by MaryAnne. Fragments of David Parkin's diary, dated 1908-1918 and set in Salt Lake City, weave evocatively throughout the author's account of the Parkins' courtship, marriage and family tragedy. At the thematic center of the tale lies the timepiece, bequeathed by a wealthy widow to David's friend Lawrence Flake, a black man who repairs clocks. Events force Lawrence to kill another in self-defense; fearing for his friend, David tells police that he fired the shot, and is exonerated. In revenge, the dead man's friends set a fatal fire at the Parkin house and steal the symbolic timepiece, which will come back to the Parkins only after an extraordinary act of kindness and forgiveness by MaryAnne. Evans has a more ambitious tale to tell here than in The Christmas Box, and he generally carries it off with aplomb, though the dark events of the central story and an unabashedly sappy wedding-eve coda don't quite mesh. The nation's supply of Kleenex is bound to deplete after this hits the bookstore shelves.
Publishers Weekly

Timepiece — The prequel to Evans's mega bestseller, The Christmas Box, is longer than the earlier book, has its same cartoony thinness, is just as creaky at the joints—and reveals, if anything, a considerable rise in the tears-per-page ratio.We go back to Salt Lake City, this time to 1908, when David Parkin— thoughtful and sensitive person, millionaire head of Parkin Machinery Co., and collector of clocks—hires as his secretary one MaryAnne Chandler, the young woman (originally from England) destined to become David's wife, to live in his big mansion, and, in time, to become the benevolent, devout, mysteriously wise widow of The Christmas Box. How MaryAnne achieved such wisdom (quick answer: through suffering a lot) is the real subject of this book, and Evans out-Dickenses Dickens in his facile uses of melodrama in getting to his desired end. In Evans's world of tears and truth, people are by and large either all good or all bad, and if MaryAnne's perfections include being attractive, spunky, quick, principled, courageous, loving, and morally unwavering, the qualities of the base and degenerate villains who reduce her life to ashes are her perfect opposites not in some but all ways ("The men entered clumsily, growling in foul and guttural tones, drunk with whiskey and hatred"). In the beginning, there will be marriage, birth, and immeasurable happiness; and then, with purest villainy as its catalyst, there will be profound and equally immeasurable sorrow. But the healing spirit of human love and hope and goodness will not be destroyed entirely, living on in the muted but unquenchable goodness of MaryAnne's heart; in Evans's perfectly choreographed little flurry of symbols at the close; and even in the transformation of one of those pure villains into purely sensitive penitent. Certain handkerchief heaven for many, while others may experience the stirring of—well, let's just say other feelings
Kirkus Reviews

The Christmas Box — Self-published in paperback during the Christmas season 1994, Evans's first novel quickly gained national media attention. Now the cleverly told tale, which the author reputedly wrote for his daughters and which revels in sentimentality, is available in hardcover. The story relates how a young couple, Richard (who narrates) and Keri, accept a position to care for a lonely widow, Mary Parkin, in her spacious Victorian mansion. As Christmas draws near, Mary becomes anxious about Richard's obsession with success and his failure to make time for his family. She urges him to reconsider his priorities, but he is always too busy to heed her advice. It is only when Mary is on her deathbed and her secret sorrow is revealed through the letter-laden Christmas box of the title that Richard realizes what she has been trying to tell him. The message concerns love, of course, and the strings Evans pulls to vivify it should squeeze sobs from even the stoniest of hearts. It's notable, however, that unlike many well-known Christmas tales (such as Dickens's), which carry that message in a basically nonsectarian manner, this is steeped in specific Christian imagery and belief as the author draws on the drama of Jesus as God's sacrifice for the world's sins, and of his crucifixion and resurrection.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions

1. What is the significance of the ornately carved wooden box that Richard finds in the attic of MaryAnne Parkin's home? Which, if any, of the various explanations Richard Paul Evans offers for the source of the box's magic has particular appeal for you? Do you think it is important that a reader believe in the magic of the box in order to experience the full emotional and spiritual impact of the story? Why or why not?

2. In what sense is the story of The Christmas Box allegorical? What is the central message of the story? In what ways did you find that message meaningful for your own life? Why does it become a matter of such urgency for Mary that Richard understand what the first gift of Christmas was?

3. The #1 bestseller in the nation when it was first published, The Christmas Box has become a modern Christmas classic, selling more than seven million copies in 17 languages worldwide, and inspiring an award-winning CBS television movie starring Maureen O'Hara and Richard Thomas. Why do you think The Christmas Box has become so hugely popular? How do you think it compares with other classic Christmas stories?

4. Asked to tell which of the senses she most identifies with Christmas, Mary points to the sounds of the Yuletide season, while for Richard it is the sense of smell. Which of the senses do you think is most affected by Christmas and why? Are any of your senses more acute than the others? If you were to lose one of your senses, which do you think would be the most difficult to do without? Which one would be the easiest? How do the various senses stir your memories of childhood or other important moments in your past?

5. The author explains to the reader that he believes in angels, "though not the picture-book kind with wings and harps." What kind of angels does Evans believe in and what function do they serve in The Christmas Box? What is the meaning of the recurrent angel dreams that start haunting Richard's slumber once he moves into the Parkin home? Why does the angel that visits Richard in his dreams turn to stone? What role, if any, do angels play in your own life? Why do you think there has been such an explosion of interest in angels in our popular culture—from books and television shows about angels to angel motifs on a wide range of objects from jewelry to clothes?

6. Many of the events of The Christmas Box are shrouded in mystery. Why does Richard hear a lullaby in the middle of the night that seems to be emanating from the Christmas Box? How could the box play music without possessing any mechanism normally found in a music box? Why is Richard, a man who ordinarily wouldn't consider intruding on anyone's privacy, irresistibly drawn to read the letters contained in the Christmas Box? Why are the leaves of MaryAnne's Bible stained from tears—both dried tears from the past and moist ones that seem to have just been spilled? How do you account for these mysterious occurrences? Do you think they are meant to be interpreted literally or symbolically? Do they require a supernatural explanation?

7. As Mary lies in a hospital bed dying, why do the "gentle, sweet tines of the Christmas Box" fill the room? Why does Mary finally seem so at peace? How do you think Richard's life will change now that Mary has helped him to see that "in my quest for success in this world I had been trading diamonds for stones"? Talk about a transforming experience in your own life when you came to a realization that you were pursuing the wrong dreams. Have you ever read a book that inspired you to reorder your priorities? Why do you think so many readers of The Christmas Box have described it as a heartwarming story that not only touched their emotions but actually transformed their lives? Do you think the book will have such a transforming effect on you? Why or why not?

8. Why at the end of the book does Richard throw the letters from the Christmas Box into the fireplace and let the flames devour them one by one? What does Richard mean when he says, "it is the emptiness of the box that I will treasure most"? Is the box really empty?

9. The Christmas Box is the first novel in a trilogy that also includes the prequel, Timepiece, in which we discover the source of the wisdom that MaryAnne bequeaths to Richard; and the sequel, The Letter, in which David and MaryAnne Parkin face love's greatest challenge and discover its truest meaning. When you enjoy a work of fiction do you often wish you could spend more time with the characters? Do you prefer that to be time in the past, or in the future? When reading a prequel, how does it affect your reading pleasure to step back in time to witness earlier events unfolding in characters' lives even though you already know what has happened? Were you inspired by The Christmas Box to read the other books in the trilogy? Why or why not?

10. Fans of Richard Paul Evans's books have often pointed to their multiple-hanky appeal. One captivated reader, sharing her opinion on the web, calls "The Christmas Box" trilogy "perfect to sit down and cry over." Why do you think so many people relish a book that gives the reader a good cry?

11. Before reading The Christmas Box, if you knew that USA Today expected the book to "tug families' heartstrings," would you have been more or less inclined to read it? Why? The Daily Universe, reviewing the final book in the trilogy, has said: "In a day when popular fiction often fails to inspiregoodness...Evans's story manages to wrap warm hands around its readers, instilling in them a hunger for goodness to prevail." Do you think that the ability to inspire goodness is an appropriate standard by which to evaluate a book? Why or why not? The angel statue described in The Christmas Box has inspired the erection of similar angel monuments in cities across America, from Salt Lake City, Utah, to West Palm Beach, Florida, where parents who have lost a child can come to grieve and heal. Does knowing this change the way you feel about the book? How?
(Questions from author's website.)

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Tin Man
Sarah Winman, 2017 (2018, U.S.)
Penguin Publishing
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735218727

Summary
An unforgettable and heartbreaking novel celebrating love in all of its forms and the little moments that make up the life of an autoworker in a small working-class town.

This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that.

Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers.

And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more.

But then we fast forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question, what happened in the years between?

With beautiful prose and characters that are so real that they jump off the page, Tin Man is a love letter to human kindness and friendship, and to loss and living. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 24, 1964
• Where—Illford, Essex, England, UK
• Education—Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art
• Awards—Costa Award, shortlisted
• Currently—lives in London, England

Sarah Winman is a British author and actor, born in Essex County, England. After attending the Webber Douglas Aademy of Dramatic Art, Winman pursued an acting career in theater and film, turning to writing in 2011 with her debut novel, When God Was a Rabbit. That novel becme an international bestseller, winning her the designation "New Writer of the Year" from the Galaxy National Book Awards.

Four years later, in 2015, Winman published her second novel, A Year of Marvellous Ways. Her third, Tin Man, came out in 2017 and was shortlisted for that year's prestigious Costa Book Awards. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/25/2018.)

Book Reviews
Winman has crafted something of a small miracle here.… The slow build of emotion and the cascade of quet, well-earned tears are testament to how rich this meditation on love, art, loss and redemption truly is.
New York Times Book Review

Affecting.… [A] universalized fable of love and loss.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Complex characterization and emotional astonishments.… These are real people, in all their anxieties and quirks, their good intentions and their unfortunate choices, just as we all are. And all this is an impressive accomplisment, even for a novelist who already seemed to know the truth about humanity by heart and could spill it onto the page with ease.
Toronto Globe and Mail

A spare, physically small novel that feels epic.… The book is filled, like brush strokes on canvas, with the quiet moments of kindness and true friendship that make up a life.
Winnipeg Free Press

The most therapeutic emotional journey of the year.
EW.com

(Starred review) [An] achingly beautiful novel about love and friendship.… Without sentimentality or melodrama, Winman stirringly depicts how people either interfere with or allow themselves and others to follow their hearts.
Publishers Weekly

A love triangle in the age of AIDS…. The narrative shifts back and forth in time—not always smoothly— … [and] the writing is overwrought …too dependent on illness and accident.… [Despite] affecting moments, the book tries too hard to be… soulful.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1.Tin Man is narrated by both Michael and Ellis, each in a different section. What was this reading experience like? Whose story is this?

2. The female characters in the novel are pivotal in Michael’s and Ellis’s lives—we see this through Dora and her kindness to Michael, Mabel taking in Ellis, and then Annie taking on Michael as almost an integral part of her relationship with Ellis. In what ways do these three women underpin Michael’s and Ellis’s lives, and their relationship?

3. What do you think the title, Tin Man, refers to? Discuss its possible meanings.

4. Discuss the use of the color yellow throughout the story, taking a close look at the van Gogh painting that features in the book.

5. How is Michael and Ellis’s relationship affected by the time and place they live in? Consider their childhood in Oxford, their summer in France, and their adult lives after Michael returns.

6. Discuss the different ways that grief and mourning are portrayed in Tin Man. Think about the reactions of Ellis, his father, and Michael after losing someone they love.

7. Ellis and Michael each describe their summer together in France in 1969. Discuss this pivotal time period and its impact on the characters, as well as your experience reading about it from two different points of view.

8. How does Annie connect with both Ellis and Michael? How did you see her role in the trio?

9. What do you imagine happens to Ellis after the close of the book? What kind of life do you hope he lives?

10 Do you think Tin Man is ultimately a sad story? A hopeful one? How did youfeel after reaching the end of the novel?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Tinkers
Paul Harding, 2009
Bellevue Literary Press
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781934137123

Summary
Pulitizer Prize, 2010

An old man lies dying. As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1967
• Raised—Wenham, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Massachusetts; M.F.A., Iowa
Writers' Workshop
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize
• Currently—lives in Georgetown, Massachuesetts

Paul Harding is an American musician and author, best known for his debut novel Tinkers (2009) which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Harding was drummer for the band Cold Water Flat from approximately the founding in 1990 to 1997. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an M.F.A from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught writing at both Harvard University and the University of Iowa.

Harding grew up on the north shore of Boston in the town of Wenham, Massachusetts. As a youth he spent a lot of time "knocking about in the woods" which he attributes to his love of nature. His grandfather fixed clocks and he apprenticed under him, an experience that found its way into his novel Tinkers. After graduating from UMass, he spent time touring with his band Cold Water Flat in the US and Europe.

He had always been a heavy reader and while in the middle of reading Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra he remembered putting it down and thinking "this is what I want to do." In that book Harding saw the entire world, all of history. When he next had time off from touring with the band he signed up for a summer writing class at Skidmore College in New York. By pure chance his teacher was Marilynne Robinson (Gilead, Housekeeping) and through her he learned about the Iowa Writers' Workshop writing program and applied and was accepted.

There he studied with Barry Unsworth, Elizabeth McCracken and later Marilynne Robinson. At some point he realized some of the people he admired most were "profoundly religious" and so he spent years reading theology, and was "deeply" influenced by Karl Barth and John Calvin. He considers himself a "self-taught modern New England transcendentalist".

Musically, he admires jazz drummers and considers Coltrane's drummer, Elvin Jones, the greatest.

Harding lives near Boston with his wife and two sons. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Harding's interest is in the universalities: nature and time and the murky character of memory.... The small, important recollections are rendered with an exactitude that is poetic.... Harding's prose is lyrical and specific...Tinkers is a poignant exploration of where we may journey when the clock has barely a tick or two left and we really can't go anywhere at all.
Boston Globe

This compact, adamantine debut dips in and out of the consciousness of a New England patriarch named George Washington Crosby as he lies dying on a hospital bed in his living room, "right where they put the dining room table, fitted with its two extra leaves for holiday dinners." In Harding's skillful evocation, Crosby's life, seen from its final moments, becomes a mosaic of memories, "howing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment."
The New Yorker

Harding's outstanding debut unfurls the history and final thoughts of a dying grandfather surrounded by his family in his New England home. George Washington Crosby repairs clocks for a living and on his deathbed revisits his turbulent childhood as the oldest son of an epileptic smalltime traveling salesman. The descriptions of the father's epilepsy and the "cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure" are stunning, and the household's sadness permeates the narrative as George returns to more melancholy scenes. The real star is Harding's language, which dazzles whether he's describing the workings of clocks, sensory images of nature, the many engaging side characters who populate the book, or even a short passage on how to build a bird nest. This is an especially gorgeous example of novelistic craftsmanship.
Publishers Weekly

Writing with breathtaking lyricism and tenderness, Harding has created a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

George Washington Crosby has eight days to live. After this first line, the life of George and of his father, Howard, who left when George was 12, is explored through the metaphor of George's hobby of repairing clocks. Howard was a peddler, traveling with a cart and mule through eastern Maine around the turn of the century. This isolated profession allowed him to keep his affliction, epilepsy, successfully hidden from most everyone until, finally, his wife decides he has to be institutionalized for the safety of her children. It is to avoid this that Howard disappears. George, as he lays dying, considers his life and family coming in and out of reality and history. Harding, an MFA from Iowa Writer's Workshop, creates a beautifully written study of father-son relationships and the nature of time. This short work is a solid addition for larger literary collections. Recommended.
Josh Cohen - Library Journal

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Tinkers:

1. Start with the book's title: what is the thematic significance of "tinkers" (plural, not singular) to the story? Who are the tinkers...and what does it mean to be a tinker, literally...and figuratively, within this story?

2. Consider, too, the evocative book cover with its vast white snowscape and the single figure in the distance. How might the image be related, symbolically, to the story? What connection is explored between wilderness and humanity, life and dying?

3. At the beginning, as George lies dying, the ceiling collapses on top of him. Think about the irony: in most deathbed scenes, souls float upward to heaven; in this one, heaven comes crashing down. Did it actually happen...or is it an hallucination? And why does the story begin as it does?

4. How would you describe Howard—a man who makes his living selling tangible goods but who stops, literally, to smell the flowers? What about his disappearance? Was Howard right to simply disappear when threatened with hospitalization? Was his wife justified in wanting him institutionalized?

5. Talk about the way in which the author writes about Howard's epilepsy, how seizures offer Howard a visionary sense of reality, of the world. Do Harding's descriptions of the seizures seem plausible...overly artistic...? Why, as an author, might Harding have given his character this disorder?

6. Howard is the link between two generations of men in this novel. Talk about those three men—especially Howard's relationship with his father...and with his son George? What impact did Howard's father's dementia have on him...and what impact did his own epilepsy have on George?

7. This book is concerned with the joining of matter (people and things) with the transcendent—unknowable space and time. Talk about George's love of time-pieces—ticking clocks with their gears and tumblers—and Howard's love of his tin pots, wrought iron, nails, and nylon stockings. What do these dual fascinations suggest about the ability, or desire, of humans to control time and space? Can time be tamed?

8. Discuss the book's structure, the ways the points of view, time frame, and even tenses change. Did you find the various ways of telling—through journals, manuals, diaries, meditations—difficult to follow? Does the book, to you, lack unity or seem disjointed? Why might Harding have chosen this unusual narrative structure?

9. What role do Native Americans play in this story? Why do we catch glimpses of them—chasing salmon beneath boats, as "silhouettes traced by the sun," repairing birch bark—only to see them vanish quietly back into the forest? What is their connection to the novel's themes?

10. Paul Harding says he is a transcendentalist (see "About the Author," above). What is a transcendentalist (think Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau) and how are those beliefs and philosophy expressed within this novel? In what way is this book a transcendentalist work, perhaps akin to Thoreau's Walden? (You might want to do a little research.)

11. Ultimately, what does this book have to say about the passage from life to death, about how the past shapes the present, and about our dreams? Can you put into words some of the life issues Paul Harding explores in this work?

12. Talk about the books publishing history. According to the New York Times (4/18/10), the book was rejected over and over again by major publishing houses. Harding says all the rejection letters suggested that "Nobody wants to read a slow, contemplative, meditative, quiet book." "It was, 'Where are the car chases?'" Of course...now Harding is vindicated: the book has won critical acclaim, including the 2010 Pulitzer. What do you feel about the remark that Tinkers is too slow paced and contemplative? Did you feel that way reading it? Do you think it will appeal to a wider audience—or to only serious readers? If you were an editor, would you have taken a chance on this book...or passed it over?

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

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'Tis the Season
Lorna Landvik, 2008
Random House
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345499752

Summary
Bestselling author Lorna Landvik shines in this delightful holiday novel of redemption and forgiveness.

Heiress Caroline Dixon has managed to alienate nearly everyone with her alcohol-fueled antics, which have also provided near-constant fodder for the poison-pen tabloids and their gossip-hungry readers. But like so many girls-behaving-badly, the twenty-six-year-old socialite gets her comeuppance, followed by a newfound attempt to live a saner existence, or at least one more firmly rooted in the real world.

As Caro tentatively begins atoning for past misdeeds, she reaches out to two wonderful people who years ago brought meaning to her life: her former nanny, Astrid Brevald, now living in Norway and Arizona dude ranch owner, Cyril Dale. While Astrid fondly remembers Caro as a special, sweet little girl left in her charge, Cyril recalls how he and his late wife were quite taken with the quick-witted teenager Caro had become when she spent a difficult period in her life at the ranch as her father was dying.

In a series of e-mail exchanges, Caro reveals the depth of her pain and the lengths she went to hide it. In turn, Astrid and Cyril share their own stories of challenging times and offer the unconditional support this young woman has never known. The correspondence leads to the promise of a reunion, just in time for Christmas. But the holiday brings unexpected revelations that change the way everyone sees themselves and one another.

At once heartfelt and witty, ’Tis the Season bears good tidings of great joy about the human condition–that down and out doesn’t mean over and done, that the things we need most are closer than we know,and that the true measure of one’s worth rests in the boundless depths of the soul. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Rasied—Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Education—attended University of Minnesota
• Currently—lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Lorna Landvik is the bestselling author of Patty Jane’s House of Curl, Your Oasis on Flame Lake, The Tall Pine Polka, Welcome to the Great Mysterious, Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons, Oh My Stars, and The View from Mount Joy.

Married and the mother of two daughters, she is also an actor, playwright, and dog park attendee with the handsome Julio. Lorna Landvik wishes everyone holiday greetings of peace, love, joy, and a renewed commitment to fun. (From the publisher.)

More
From an interview with editors at Barnes and Noble:

Q: Where do you get your inspiration?

Sometimes, like Flannery [in Angry Housewives], I find inspiration everywhere—from a billboard, a snatch of music, a scent. Other times, I have no idea where it comes from: all of a sudden, a character appears unbidden in my head, with the urgent desire that I write about her or him.

Q: How did a book club end up at the center of [Angry Housewives]?

After the publication of my first novel, I got invited to speak at a book club and since then I've been to dozens and dozens. What always impresses me is the fun and friendship of these groups, some of which have been together for decades, and that's why I decided to write about one.

Q: Which books would make your greatest-hits list?

A short list would include To Kill a Mockingbird, Handling Sin (both of which are selections in the book), Huckleberry Finn, Great Expectations, and maybe a book I have great affection for, the Dick and Jane books, because they were the books that taught me how to read.

Q: What is your average workday like?

I like to work every day, but that doesn't mean I do. During the school year, I usually take a walk in the morning, come home, make a latte, and read the papers, and then I try to settle down and work. But I don't stick to a regular schedule—if I have something really important going on in the day (a lunch date, a movie), I'll work later in the afternoon or at night. My family's very accommodating and I've also learned to write among them, amid distraction.

Q: What do you do when the words won't come?

I get up, find the chocolate, and if that doesn't help, I might read and see if someone else's ability to tell a story can help fire up mine.

(Interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Just in time for Christmas, Landvik gets into the head of a Paris Hilton-like celebuditz in this lively "novel" propelled by e-mails, tabloid gossip and letters primarily written by, about or to young celebrity bad girl Caroline "Caro" Dixon. The gorgeous heiress's boozy rampages have made her notorious, but now she's considering a 12-step program, hence the bitter apology letter she writes to "everyone I have supposedly hurt." She tosses it out, and, in true Hollywood fashion, the catty missive turns up in a trashy tabloid. The ensuing firestorm of negative publicity and hate mail convinces Caro to give sobriety a shot. Caro's effort to dispel her image as "Little Miss Hangover" has its moments, but the choppy epistolary structure leaves much to be desired. Still, readers who love snark—it's doled out here by the shovelful—will dig this.
Publishers Weekly

Landvik's first holiday novel features her signature sense of humor and quirky characters. Young socialite Caroline Dixon gets out of rehab and attempts to live a more stable life. Having alienated everyone she knows, she goes into hiding and tries to reach out to people from her past. Narrated in a series of letters, emails, and gossip-column snippets, this quick, charming read is suitable for all popular fiction collections.
Rebecca Vnuk - Library Journal

Form trumps content in this slight holiday package from Landvik. The story unfolds through a series of e-mails and notes, as a debauched heiress leaves her life of tabloid embarrassments for a state of sober normalcy. Though the tale has a certain lurid interest—think Paris and Britney, shaken and served—the method of conveyance doesn't do the novel any favors; the prose is about as elegant as the average e-mail. Through exchanged missives, we learn of 26-year-old Caroline Dixon, rich, beautiful and usually drunk (a kind of holy trinity for the world's paparazzi). Interspersed are updates on Caro's exploits from the gossip column "Here's Buzz," which is cruel and, of course, quite popular. She winds up in rehab and afterward reaches out to those she's hurt. Most of her flimsy friendships evaporate, but she gets encouraging responses from two ghosts from her past: Cyril, the owner of an Arizona dude ranch she visited at 13, and Astrid, her Norwegian nanny. Truth be told, they need Caro as much as she needs them. Widowed Cyril has lost all interest in people, and Astrid is holed up on a tiny Norwegian island, hoping that seclusion will protect her from any future pain. The trio have three-way communiques, pour out their respective souls and decide that Christmas together at the dude ranch would all but guarantee a happier new year. Unfortunately, Cyril has a surprise guest who might push all good will out the window—the one and only "Buzz," who has been shish-kabobbing Caro for years. Will everyone get along? Is romance in the air? Will the spirit of giving triumph? The story, a succession of page-long messages followed by longer e-mails jam-packed with none-too-subtle character exposition, sacrifices much for a gimmick that was worn out several years ago. A rare stumble from an entertaining author who usually has a strong, sure hand with character.
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 'Tis the Season:

1. Does Caro remind you of anyone in the society news? Do you think Landvik does a fair job of portraying a young, rich heiress, drugged out and alienated? Are we to sympathize with or judge Caro? Or what...?

2. Does the paparazzi play a role in creating Caro's behavior? In other words, is the press's role exploitative or informative? Can fame come too early for someone to handle?

3. Who needs whom in this story?

4. Were you expecting what happens at the ranch? Was the ending predictable...or surprising?

5. Did you find Landvik's format—emails and excerpts from gossip columns—helpful in telling the story? Were they clever or distracting for you?

6. In what way does this book reinforce (or not) the meaning of Christmas?

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

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To Capture What We Cannot Keep
Beatrice Colin, 2016
Flatiron Books
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250071446

Summary
Set against the construction of the Eiffel Tower, this novel charts the relationship between a young Scottish widow and a French engineer who, despite constraints of class and wealth, fall in love.

In February 1887, Caitriona Wallace and Emile Nouguier meet in a hot air balloon, floating high above Paris, France—a moment of pure possibility. But back on firm ground, their vastly different social strata become clear

Cait is a widow who because of her precarious financial situation is forced to chaperone two wealthy Scottish charges. Emile is expected to take on the bourgeois stability of his family's business and choose a suitable wife.

As the Eiffel Tower rises, a marvel of steel and air and light, the subject of extreme controversy and a symbol of the future, Cait and Emile must decide what their love is worth.

Seamlessly weaving historical detail and vivid invention, Beatrice Colin evokes the revolutionary time in which Cait and Emile live—one of corsets and secret trysts, duels and Bohemian independence, strict tradition and Impressionist experimentation.

To Capture What We Cannot Keep, stylish, provocative, and shimmering, raises probing questions about a woman's place in that world, the overarching reach of class distinctions, and the sacrifices love requires of us all. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1963
• Where—London, England, UK
• Raised—Scotland
• Education—B.A., University of Glasgow; Ph.D., Strathclyde University
• Currently—lives in Glasgow, Scotland

Beatrice Colin is a British novelist and radio dramatist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. She has several novels under her belt, including two for children, and has written original plays for BBC Radio 4.

Born in London, England, Colin's family moved to Scotland when she was still a child. Her parents come from a line of Russian-Jews, who converted to Christianity in the 19th Century and departed Russia during the 1917 revolution.

One of her great-great-grandmothers had been a bestselling novelist in Russia at the turn of the 20th Century, and her great-aunt, Nina, had been a film actress in Germany between the first and second world wars. Nina became the inspiration behind Colin's 2008 novel, The Glimmer Palace (the UK title is The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite).

Colin attended the University of Glasgow where she studied English; following graduation, she worked as a journalist for the arts & features pages of the Scotsman, Sunday Herald, and the Guardian. She returned to school, earning her doctorate in 2010 at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Her doctoral dissertation argued for the potential of historical fiction to reclaim individuals who, due to the absence of diaries or memoirs, have never been recognized through the lens of history.

Novels
Colin's novels include To Capture What We Cannot Keep (2016), The Songwriter (2010), The Glimmer Palace (2008, US title), Disappearing Act (2002), and Nude Untitled (2000). Her two children's novels include Pyrate's Boy (2013) and My Invisible Sister (2010), which has been adapted to film by Disney.

Plays and short stories
Colin has written extensively for radio—both adaptions and original plays—on BBC Radio 4. Perhaps her best known play is The True Life of Bonnie Parker (2013), which was broadcast as a Woman’s Hour serial.

The author's short stories have been broadcast and published in anthologies and literary magazines such as Ontario Review and the London Magazine.

Beatrice is currently a lecturer in creative writing at Strathclyde University. (Author bio adapted from The Scotsman and the author's website .)

Book Reviews
Even while telling a very intimate story, Colin attends to the extraordinary mechanics and publicity surrounding this controversial project.... Colin is a talented literary engineer.... To Capture What We Cannot Keep will provide a string of shocking plot twists.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

It’s sexy escapism, but the book’s real selling point is its illumination of 19th-century Paris and that phenomenal landmark (Book of the Week).
People

Colin ably brings to life a time before the iron lattice of the Eiffel Tower became an iconic part of the Parisian landscape. To Capture What We Cannot Keep is part history lesson and part thrilling love story, leading to an ending full of depth, promise, and hope.
BookPage

(Starred review.) To be in Paris to witness the construction of the Eiffel Tower is a magnificent occasion: to have a hand, however small, in its building, even better…. This exquisitely written, shadowy historical novel will appeal to a wide variety of readers, including fans of the Belle Epoque
Library Journal

Beautifully restrained love story, told in a refreshingly unhurried manner and grounded in the era’s social constraints.... Drawn with care and suffused with stylish ambience, Colin’s Paris is a city of painters, eccentric aristocrats, desperate prostitutes, secret lovers, and the magnificent artistic vision taking shape high above them.
Booklist

Colin has a sure hand with the atmospheres of both [Paris and Glasgow] and with the mores and dress of the period, and she manages to continually raise the stakes for her characters without ever resorting to melodrama. A novel of soaring ambitions, public and private.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the novel’s epigraph, by Gustave Eiffel:

Before they meet at such an impressive height, the uprights appear to spring out of the ground, molded in a way by the action of the wind itself.

What sort of tone does the epigraph establish? How does it resonate with the novel that follows?

2. Caitriona is very much a woman constrained—by her status as a widow, by her poverty and her fall from high society, even by the clothes she wears. In our introduction to her, on the novel’s first page, Beatrice Colin writes:

She had laced tight that morning, pulling until the eyeholes in her corset almost met, and now her chest rose and fell in shallow gasps as she tried to catch her breath—in, out, in and out.

Were you therefore surprised by how her story turned out?

3. Jamie describes Cait as "a lady with real class," despite the fact that she is penniless. Discuss the complex and nuanced portrayal of class in To Capture What We Cannot Keep. How is class tied to material wealth, education, social status, and family? How do the classes mix in the novel, and what is the fallout?

4. Eiffel tells Emile, of Paris, "reputation in this city is everything, you know that." How does reputation shape the lives of Colin’s characters?

5. During a sightseeing boat trip in Paris, Alice watches...

with a mixture of horror and delight, as one of the women, still with a glass of red wine in one hand, pulled up her skirts to reveal purple bloomers and danced alone on the deck.

Discuss how Alice is frequently pulled between social propriety and Bohemian freedom. Does her character evolve over the course of the novel?

6. It’s clear that all of Colin’s characters are participating in sexual adventures. Yet as Jamie and the count show, the men seem immune to any censure while for the women, it can be their ruin. Does this double standard surprise you? Do you think things are much different today than they were back then?

7. Why is Gabrielle so devastated when she discovers that it was Emile who bought all of the paintings of her? When she laments, "I thought, I thought that at last all this meant something," what does it reveal of her insecurities about her romantic life and her artistic legacy?

8. Do you find Gabrielle likable or sympathetic? Did your opinion of her change as the novel progressed? Discuss your feelings on the likability of the characters in general.

9. Discuss the important role the Parisian art world plays in the novel. Were you surprised at the contemporary reactions to now-beloved Impressionist painters? How does the aesthetic of the Eiffel Tower fit in (or clash) with Impressionism?

10. Emile believes that, in his art class, "his style was the exact opposite of his technical work; his line was loose, economical, free. And he wanted to capture what he couldn’t keep, the fleeting, the transient." He believes, of his engineering, that "there was finesse in his composition of girders and blots; it was bold and brilliant, it was art." How do these two artistic passions shape him? How do they complement his attraction to both Cait and Gabrielle? What does the novel’s title mean to you? How do you think it speaks to the other characters in the novel?

11. Why do you think Emile’s mother holds such sway over him? What does she represent in the novel?

12. Discuss this conversation between Cait and Emile, about the Eiffel Tower:

But the fact is that it is not trying to be anything rather than what it is. Nothing is hidden and the reverse is also true; nothing in the city can hide. From the top on a clear day, you will be able to see everything. It will all be gloriously transparent.

It’s what we want, isn’t it? Transparency. One so rarely finds it.

What is the symbolic importance of the Eiffel Tower in the novel, and in Emile and Cait’s relationship?

13. To Capture What We Cannot Keeps moves between Glasgow, Paris, Edinburgh, and West Africa. How are the characters affected by setting, and how is a sense of place evoked in the writing?

14. Were you surprised that Cait moved to West Africa? What do you think her future holds?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee, 1961
HarperCollins
323 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061120084

Summary
Winner, 1961 Pulitzer Prize

At the age of eight, Scout Finch is an entrenched free-thinker. She can accept her father's warning that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, because mockingbirds harm no one and give great pleasure. The benefits said to be gained from going to school and keeping her temper elude her.

The place of this enchanting, intensely moving story is Maycomb, Alabama. The time is the Depression, but Scout and her brother, Jem, are seldom depressed. They have appalling gifts for entertaining themselves—appalling, that is, to almost everyone except their wise lawyer father, Atticus.

Atticus is a man of unfaltering good will and humor, and partly because of this, the children become involved in some disturbing adult mysteries: fascinating Boo Radley, who never leaves his house; the terrible temper of Mrs. Dubose down the street; the fine distinctions that make the Finch family "quality"; the forces that cause the people of Maycomb to show compassion in one crisis and unreasoning cruelty in another.

Also because Atticus is what he is, and because he lives where he does, he and his children are plunged into a conflict that indelibly marks their lives—and gives Scout some basis for thinking she knows just about as much about the world as she needs to. (From Barnes and Noble.)

See the 1962 movie with Gregory Peck.
Listen to the Screen Thoughts podcast as Hollister and O'Toole compare book and film.

Author Bio
• Birth—April 28, 1926
• Where—Monroeville, Alabama, USA
• Education—B.A. (later studied law), University of Alabama
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1961; Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2007
• Currently—Monroevill, Alabama; New York City

Harper Lee, known to friends and family as Nelle, was born in the small southwestern Alabama town of Monroeville, Alabama, on April 28, 1926, the youngest of four children. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who also served on the state legislature from 1926 to 1938. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote.

While pursuing a law degree at the University of Alabama, she wrote for several student publications and spent a year as editor of the campus humor magazine, Ramma-Jamma. Though she did not complete the law degree, she pursued studies for a summer in Oxford, England, before moving to New York in 1950, where she worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC in New York City. Lee continued working as a reservation clerk until the late 50s, when she resolved to devote herself to writing.

She lived a frugal lifestyle, traveling between her cold-water-only apartment in New York to her family home in Alabama to care for her ailing father. Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. The following month at the East 50th townhouse of her friends writer Michael Brown and Joy Williams Brown, she received a gift of a year's wages with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." Within a year, she had a first draft. Working closely with J. B. Lippincott & Co. editor Tay Hohoff, she completed To Kill a Mockingbird in the summer of 1959.

Published July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was an immediate bestseller and won her great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It remains a bestseller today, with over 30 million copies in print. In 1999, it was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll conducted by the Library Journal.

After completing To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee accompanied Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to assist him in researching what they thought would be an article on a small town's response to the murder of a farmer and his family. Capote expanded the material into his best-selling book, In Cold Blood (1966). The experiences of Capote and Lee in Holcomb were depicted in two different films, Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006).

Lee said of the 1962 Academy Award–winning screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird by Horton Foote: "If the integrity of a film adaptation can be measured by the degree to which the novelist's intent is preserved, Mr. Foote's sceen-play should be studied as a classic." She also became a close friend of Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, the father of the novel's narrator, Scout. She remains close to the actor's family. Peck's grandson, Harper Peck Voll, is named after her.

In June 1966, Lee was one of two persons named by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the National Council on the Arts. On May 21, 2006, she accepted an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame. To honor her, the graduating seniors were given copies of Mockingbird before the ceremony and held them up when she received her degree. In a letter published in Oprah Winfrey's magazine O (May 2006), Lee wrote about her early love of books as a child and her steadfast dedication to the written word: "Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books." In 2007 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

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

All the magic and truth that might seem deceptive or exaggerated in a factural account of a small town unfold beautifully in To Kill a Mockingbird.... Harper Lee...is clearly working hard to create a pointed story for the reader. Here is a story teller justifying the novel as a form that transcends time and place.... Miss Lee's characters are people to cherish in this winning first novel by a fresh writer with something significant to say, South and North.
Herbert Mitgang - New York Times (7/13/1960)

Discussion Questions
1. How do Scout, Jem, and Dill characterize Boo Radley at the beginning of the book? In what way did Boo's past history of violence foreshadow his method of protecting Jem and Scout from Bob Ewell? Does this repetition of aggression make him more or less of a sympathetic character?

2. In Scout's account of her childhood, her father Atticus reigns supreme. How would you characterize his abilities as a single parent? How would you describe his treatment of Calpurnia and Tom Robinson vis a vis his treatment of his white neighbors and colleagues? How would you typify his views on race and class in the larger context of his community and his peers?

3. The title of Lee's book is alluded to when Atticus gives his children air rifles and tells them that they can shoot all the bluejays they want, but "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." At the end of the novel, Scout likens the "sin" of naming Boo as Bob Ewell's killer to "shootin' a mockingbird." Do you think that Boo is the only innocent, or mockingbird, in this novel?

4. Scout ages two years—from six to eight—over the course of Lee's novel, which is narrated from her perspective as an adult. Did you find the account her narrator provides believable? Were there incidents or observations in the book that seemed unusually "knowing" for such a young child? What event or episode in Scout's story do you feel truly captures her personality?

5. To Kill a Mockingbird has been challenged repeatedly by the political left and right, who have sought to remove it from libraries for its portrayal of conflict between children and adults; ungrammatical speech; references to sex, the supernatural, and witchcraft; and unfavorable presentation of blacks. Which elements of the book-if any-do you think touch on controversial issues in our contemporary culture? Did you find any of those elements especially troubling, persuasive, or insightful?

6. Jem describes to Scout the four "folks" or classes of people in Maycomb County: "our kind of folks don't like the Cunninghams, the Cunninghams don't like the Ewells, and the Ewells hate and despise the colored folks." What do you think of the ways in which Lee explores race and class in 1930s Alabama? What significance, if any, do you think these characterizations have for people living in other parts of the world?

7. One of the chief criticisms of To Kill a Mockingbird is that the two central storylines—Scout, Jem, and Dill's fascination with Boo Radley and the trial between Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson—are not sufficiently connected in the novel. Do you think that Lee is successful in incorporating these different stories? Were you surprised at the way in which these story lines were resolved? Why or why not?

8. By the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, the book's first sentence: "When he was thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow," has been explained and resolved. What did you think of the events that followed the Halloween pageant? Did you think that Bob Ewell was capable of injuring Scout or Jem? How did you feel about Boo Radley's last-minute intervention?

9. What elements of this book did you find especially memorable, humorous, or inspiring? Are there individual characters whose beliefs, acts, or motives especially impressed or surprised you? Did any events in this book cause you to reconsider your childhood memories or experiences in a new light?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
Joshua Ferris, 2014
Little, Brown & Co.
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316033992

Summary
A big, brilliant, profoundly observed novel about the mysteries of modern life by National Book Award Finalist Joshua Ferris, one of the most exciting voices of his generation...

Paul O'Rourke is a man made of contradictions: he loves the world, but doesn't know how to live in it. He's a Luddite addicted to his iPhone, a dentist with a nicotine habit, a rabid Red Sox fan devastated by their victories, and an atheist not quite willing to let go of God.

Then someone begins to impersonate Paul online, and he watches in horror as a website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account are created in his name. What begins as an outrageous violation of his privacy soon becomes something more soul-frightening: the possibility that the online "Paul" might be a better version of the real thing. As Paul's quest to learn why his identity has been stolen deepens, he is forced to confront his troubled past and his uncertain future in a life disturbingly split between the real and the virtual.

At once laugh-out-loud funny about the absurdities of the modern world, and indelibly profound about the eternal questions of the meaning of life, love and truth, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a deeply moving and constantly surprising tour de force. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Raised—Florida and Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Iowa; M.F.A., University of
California, Irvine
• Awards— PEN/Hemingway Award
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut 2007 novel Then We Came to the End. Ferris graduated from the University of Iowa in English and Philosophy in 1996. He then moved to Chicago and worked in advertising for several years before obtaining an MFA in writing from UC Irvine.

His debut novel Then We Came to the End is a comedy about the American workplace. It takes place in a fictitious Chicago ad agency experiencing a downturn at the end of the '90s Internet boom. The novel was greeted by positive reviews from the New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, Esquire, and Slate. It received the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

An August, 2008, issue of The New Yorker published his short story "The Dinner Party," which earned him a nomination for a Shirley Jackson Award. Other short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Best New American Voices 2007 and New Stories from the South 2007. Ferris's nonfiction has appeared in the anthologies State by State and Heavy Rotation. The New Yorker included him in its 2010 "20 Under 40" list.

His next novel The Unnamed was published in 2010. Fiametta Rocco, Editor of Books and Arts at The Economist, called it "the best new novel I have read in the past ten years." His third novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour came out in 2014.

Joshua Ferris lives in New York (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/8/2014.)

Book Reviews
Ferris depicts Paul’s difficulties: in the workplace, he struggles to say good morning, has problems with the office manager.... [He's] an appealing—albeit self-involved—everyman, but Ferris’s effort to take on big topics...feels more like a set of thought experiments than an organic or character-driven story.
Publishers Weekly

As in his earlier novels, Ferris is both laugh-out-loud funny and even profound, often on the same page. [Paul O'Rourke's] journey to self-awareness is designed to be both amusing and thought provoking, allowing readers to take their own existential ride.
BookPage

(Starred review.) Utterly compelling....Ferris brilliantly channels the suburban angst of Yates and Cheever for the new millenium.
Booklist

(Starred review.) A bizarre case of identity theft forces a dentist to question his beliefs in this funny, thought-provoking return to form by Ferris.... Smart, sad, hilarious and eloquent, this shows a writer at the top of his game and surpassing the promise of his celebrated debut.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In the book's opening paragraph, Paul O'Rouke tells us that...

The mouth is a weird place: "not quite inside and not quite outside...but something in between...admitting access to an interior most people would rather not contemplate—where cancer starts, where the heart is broken, where the soul might just fail to turn up.

What kind of thematic concerns does this paragraph hint at for the book as a whole. Consider a later statement Paul makes that he is always "on the outside looking in."

2. How do the conditions of his patients' mouths affect, or perhaps simply correspond to, Paul's general view of humanity?

3. How would you describe Paul, his attitudes toward people and life, his relationship with women—in fact, his overall engagement in life? Betsy Convoy, his dental hygienist, accuses Paul of having a low opinion of humanity. Is that a fair assessment?

4. How has Paul's father's suicide affected his life as an adult?

5. What does baseball represent to Paul? Why is he such an avid Red Sox fan, and at the same time, why does he despair after the Sox finally win the World Series? SPOILER ALERT: Consider, too, the final pages of the book when Paul buys the Chicago Cubs cap...and agrees to play cricket with the Nepali kids in the street.

6. How would you describe Paul's relationships with women, primarily Samantha Santacroce and Connie Plotz. What does he want from them and from their families?

7. Paul tells us, "Everything is always something, but something—and here is the rub—could never be everything. What does he mean?

8. Why doesn't Paul believe in God? He tells us that he would have liked to: "Now there was something that could have been everything better than anything else." Why does he doubt?

9. What are the blog posts and Tweets in Paul's name about? How do they affect Paul? At first he is angry but becomes less and less so as the messages progress—why the change? Why do the posts offend Connie's Uncle Stuart? Are they antisemitic?

10. Who are the Ulms...and the Amalekites...and the Edomites? What is their relationship to the Hebrews in the Bible? The Ulms believe God has commanded them to doubt his existence. How is it possible to doubt the existence of God, who has revealed his existence to you?

11. What were Paul's reasons for not wanting to have children with Connie? SPOILER ALERT: He changes his mind toward the end of the book—why? What revelation does the pregnant patient elicit in Paul? Contrast his reaction to the expectant mother with his reaction to the marketing executive who just earlier had delayed treatment of his three cavities.

12. In what way is the billionaire hedge fund manager Pete Mercer a foil for Paul O'Rourke? How are they similar—and how are they different? SPOILER ALERT: Why does Mercer shoot himself after learning about Mirav Mendelsohn and Arthur Grant? How does Paul react o Mirav's story?

13. What is your reaction to the story of Arthur Grant and his desire to convert to Judaism? Consider how Paul O'Rouke's story parallels (to some degree) Grant's. What about Mirav—why after so many years has she returned to the fold?

14. Is this book religious...or anti-religious? Does Paul end up believing in God or not?

15. How has Paul changed by the end of the book? What do you predict for him?

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

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To the Bright Edge of the World
Eowyn Ivey, 2016
Little, Brown and Co.
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316242851

Summary
An atmospheric, transporting tale of adventure, love, and survival from the bestselling author of The Snow Child, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

In the winter of 1885, decorated war hero Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small band of men on an expedition that has been deemed impossible: to venture up the Wolverine River and pierce the vast, untamed Alaska Territory.

Leaving behind Sophie, his newly pregnant wife, Colonel Forrester records his extraordinary experiences in hopes that his journal will reach her if he doesn't return--once he passes beyond the edge of the known world, there's no telling what awaits him.

The Wolverine River Valley is not only breabbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbthtaking and forbidding but also terrifying in ways that the colonel and his men never could have imagined. As they map the territory and gather information on the native tribes, whose understanding of the natural world is unlike anything they have ever encountered, Forrester and his men discover the blurred lines between human and wild animal, the living and the dead.

And while the men knew they would face starvation and danger, they cannot escape the sense that some greater, mysterious force threatens their lives.

Meanwhile, on her own at Vancouver Barracks, Sophie chafes under the social restrictions and yearns to travel alongside her husband. She does not know that the winter will require as much of her as it does her husband, that both her courage and faith will be tested to the breaking point.

Can her exploration of nature through the new art of photography help her to rediscover her sense of beauty and wonder?

The truths that Allen and Sophie discover over the course of that fateful year change both of their lives--and the lives of those who hear their stories long after they're gone—forever. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 07, 1973
• Where—Alaska
• Education—B.A., Western Washington University
• Currently—lives in Alaska

Eowyn (A-o-win) LeMay Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. Her mother named her after a character from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

Eowyn works at the independent bookstore Fireside Books where she plays matchmaker between readers and books. The Snow Child, her debut novel, appeared in 2012; her second, To the Bright Edge of the World, was published in 2016. Her short fiction appears in the anthology Cold Flashes, University of Alaska Press 2010, and the North Pacific Rim literary journal Cirque.

Prior to her career as a bookseller and novelist, Eowyn worked for nearly a decade as an award-winning reporter at the Frontiersman newspaper. Her weekly articles about her outdoor adventures earned her the Best Non-Daily Columnist award from the Alaska Press Club. Her articles and photographs have been published in the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Magazine, and other publications.

Eowyn earned her BA in journalism and creative writing through Western Washington University's honors program and studied creative nonfiction in University of Alaska Anchorage's graduate program. She is a contributor to the blog 49Writers and a founding member of Alaska's first statewide writing center.

The Snow Child is informed by Eowyn's life in Alaska. Her husband is a fishery biologist with the state of Alaska. While they both work outside of the home, they are also raising their daughters in the rural, largely subsistence lifestyle in which they were both raised.

As a family, they harvest salmon and wild berries, keep a vegetable garden, turkeys and chickens, and they hunt caribou, moose, and bear for meat. Because they don't have a well and live outside any public water system, they haul water each week for their holding tank and gather rainwater for their animals and garden. Their primary source of home heat is a woodstove, and they harvest and cut their own wood.

These activities are important to Eowyn's day-to-day life as well as the rhythm of her year. (From the author's website.) (From .)

Book Reviews
Ivey's characters, without exception, are skillfully wrought and pull the narrative forward with little effort. She does not stoop to blanket depictions of tribal life or Victorian women, and instead has created a novel with all of the fine details that make historical fiction such an adventure to read. Fans of The Snow Child will not be disappointed.
Meganne Fabrega - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Lustrous...Ivey's writing is assured and deftly paced. She presents a pleasing chorus of voices and writing styles in an amalgam of journals, letters, newspaper clippings, greeting cards, official reports and more...The couple's moving love story binds the multilayered narrative together...Ivey's first novel, The Snow Child, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her follow-up act is certain to garner its own accolades as readers discover its many unfolding pleasures.
David Takami - Seattle Times

(Starred review.) An...entrancing, occasionally chilling, depiction of turn-of-the-century Alaska.... In this splendid adventure novel, Ivey captures Alaska’s beauty and brutality, not just preserving history, but keeping it alive.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Ivey not only makes [this novel] work, she makes it work magnificently...The Snow Child (a lovely retelling of an old Russian folk tale), was a runaway hit, an international best seller, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her second work is even better.
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Ivey deftly draws the reader into the perils of the journey...a compelling historical saga of survival.
Booklist

(Starred review.) Ivey's superb second novel is mainly composed of two braided journals. One is by Allen, an Army colonel.... The other is by his wife, Sophie.... Ivey anchors the tale in present-day correspondence between Allen's great-nephew and the curator of a museum to whom he's sent Allen's journals..... Heartfelt, rip-snorting storytelling.
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. Talk about the novel's two primary characters: Col. Allen Forrester and Sophie Forrester. What do you think of them? What kind of leader is Forrester? And Sophie? In what ways does she not conform to the era's expectations for women?

2. How do the letters Allen sends to Sophie differ from his journal entries?

3. Talk about the dangers and hardships Allen and his men face during their journey. As they move deeper into the Alaskan wilderness, how do the men begin to revert to their more primal natures?

4. What role does the raven play in this story? Does it represent evil...or helpfulness...or what?

5. Sophie develops a passion for the burgeoning art of photography. How does photography open up her own journey of self-discovery?

6. Ivey has structured her novel as a story framed at both ends with another story, this one contemporary with our own time, in which Allen's great-nephew wishes to gift the letters and diaries to the Alpine Historical Museum. Why might Ivey used this framing device? What perspective does it lend to Allen and Sophie's story?

7. Discuss the spiritual, and shamanistic practices of the Native Americans who inhabit this land. How does Ivey weave those beliefs into her story? What kind of atmosphere does she create?

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

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To the End of the Land
David Grossman (trans., Jessica Cohen), 2010
Knopf Doubleday
592 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307592972

Summary
From one of Israel’s most acclaimed writers comes a novel of extraordinary power about family life—the greatest human drama—and the cost of war.

Ora, a middle-aged Israeli mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer’s release from army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, she sets out for a hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the “notifiers” who might darken her door with the worst possible news. Recently estranged from her husband, Ilan, she drags along an unlikely companion: their former best friend and her former lover Avram, once a brilliant artistic spirit.

Avram served in the army alongside Ilan when they were young, but their lives were forever changed one weekend when the two jokingly had Ora draw lots to see which of them would get the few days’ leave being offered by their commander—a chance act that sent Avram into Egpyt and the Yom Kippur War, where he was brutally tortured as POW. In the aftermath, a virtual hermit, he refused to keep in touch with the family and has never met the boy.

Now, as Ora and Avram sleep out in the hills, ford rivers, and cross valleys, avoiding all news from the front, she gives him the gift of Ofer, word by word; she supplies the whole story of her motherhood, a retelling that keeps Ofer very much alive for Ora and for the reader, and opens Avram to human bonds undreamed of in his broken world. Their walk has a “war and peace” rhythm, as their conversation places the most hideous trials of war next to the joys and anguish of raising children.

Never have we seen so clearly the reality and surreality of daily life in Israel, the currents of ambivalence about war within one household, and the burdens that fall on each generation anew.

Grossman’s rich imagining of a family in love and crisis makes for one of the great antiwar novels of our time. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 25, 1954
• Where—Jerusalem (Israel)
• Education—University of Jerusalem
• Awards—see below
• Currently—lives on the outskirts of Jerusalem

David Grossman is an Israeli author whose books have been translated into more than 30 languages and won numerous prizes. He is also a noted activist and critic of Israeli policy towards Palestinians. The Yellow Wind, his nonfiction study of the life of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip met with acclaim abroad but sparked controversy at home.

He addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his 2010 novel, The End of the Land. Since that book's publication he has written a children's book, an opera for children and several poems.

Background
David Grossman was born in Jerusalem. He is the eldest of two brothers. His mother, Michaella, was born in Palestine; his father, Yitzhak, emigrated from Poland with his widowed mother at the age of nine. His mother's side of the family were Zionist and poor, his grandfather having paved roads in the Galilee and supplementing his income by buying and selling rugs. His grandmother was a manicurist.

On his father's side was his grandmother who had left Poland after being harassed by police, never before having left the region where she'd been born. Along with her son and daughter she travelled to Palestine where she became a cleaner in wealthy neighbourhoods. Grossman's father was first a bus driver, then a librarian, and it was through him that David—"a reading child"—was able to build up an interest in literature which would later become his career. Grossman recalled: "He gave me many things, but what he mostly gave me was Sholem Aleichem." Aleichem, who was born in Ukraine, is one of the greatest writers in Yiddish, though he is now best known as the man whose stories were the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof. (See LitLovers Reading Guide for Tevye, the Dairyman.)

In 1971, Grossman began his national service working in military intelligence. Although he was in the army when the Yom Kippur war broke out in 1973, he saw no action.

Grossman studied philosophy and theater at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After university, Grossman began working in radio, where he'd once been a child actor, eventually becoming an anchor on Kol Yisrael, Israel's national broadcasting service. In 1988, however, he was sacked for refusing to downplay the news that the Palestinian leadership had declared its own state and, for the first time, conceded Israel's right to exist.

Grossman lives in Mevasseret Zion on the outskirts of Jerusalem. He is married to Michal Grossman, a child psychologist and the mother of his three children, Jonathan, 28, Ruth, 18, and the late Uri.

Politics and activism
Grossman is an outspoken peace activist who is politically left wing.

Initially supportive of Israel's action during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict on the grounds of self defence, on August 10, 2006, he and fellow authors Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua held a press conference at which they strongly urged the government to agree to a ceasefire that would create the basis for a negotiated solution saying:

We had a right to go to war. But things got complicated... I believe that there is more than one course of action available.

Two days later, his 20-year-old son Uri, a staff sergeant in an armoured unit, was killed by an anti-tank missile during an IDF operation in southern Lebanon shortly before the ceasefire. However, Grossman explained that the death of his son did not change his opposition to Israel's policy towards the Palestinians. Although Grossman had carefully avoided writing about politics, in his stories, if not his journalism, the death of his son prompted him to deal with the Israeli-Palestintian conflict in greater detail. This appeared in his latest book To The End of the Land.

Four months after his son's death, Grossman addressed a crowd of 100,000 Israelis who had gathered to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. He denounced Ehud Olmert's government for a failure of leadership and he argued that reaching out to the Palestinians was the best hope for progress in the region.

Of course I am grieving, but my pain is greater than my anger. I am in pain for this country and for what you [Olmert] and your friends are doing to it. About his personal link to the war, Grossman said:

There were people who stereotyped me, who considered me this naive leftist who would never send his own children into the army, who didn't know what life was made of. I think those people were forced to realise that you can be very critical of Israel and yet still be an integral part of it; I speak as a reservist in the Israeli army myself.

Opposition to Israeli Settlements
In 2010 Grossman, his wife, and her family attended demonstrations against the spread of Israeli Settlements. While attending weekly demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah [in east Jerusalem] against Jewish settlers taking over houses in Palestinian neighbourhoods he was assaulted by police. About the incident Grossman said, "we were beaten by the police." When asked by a reporter for the Guardian newspaper about how a renowned writer could be beaten he replied, "I don't know if they know me at all."

Awards and honours
1984—Prime Minister's Prize for Creative Work
2004—Premio Flaiano (Italian)
2004—Bialik Prize for literature (co-recipient)
2007—Emet Prize
2008—Geschwister-Scholl-Preis
2010—Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

On February 2, 2007, Grossman was awarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[Grossman] weaves the essences of private life into the tapestry of history with deliberate and delicate skill; he has created a panorama of breathtaking emotional force, a masterpiece of pacing, of dedicated storytelling, with characters whose lives are etched with extraordinary, vivid detail. While his novel has the vast sweep of pure tragedy, it is also at times playful, and utterly engrossing.... This is one of those few novels that feel as though they have made a difference to the world.
Colm Toibin - New York Times Book Review

Israeli novelist Grossman returns with an epic yet intimate story of an Israeli family and the shadow of war that haunts it. A love triangle between Ora, Avram, and Ilan ends when Avram returns to war, and Ora settles down with Ilan to raise two sons. But when her youngest is called to duty, Ora flees for Galilee, dragging with her Avram, who, deeply scared by his experience as a POW during the Yom Kippur War, has refused contact with her for years. Their shared history poignantly reveals the way conflict, war, and the loss of humanity have traumatized generations of people living in this region. Grossman, whose own soldier son was killed during the writing of this novel, connects a wide-reaching canvas of battles and bombings to the intimate realities of the relationships among family and friends. Although the atmosphere of paranoia and the flood of details can overwhelm, they also connect the reader to the characters so hypnotically that this nearly 600-page literary novel reads like a thriller.
Publishers Weekly

Ora, who has eagerly awaited her son Ofer's release from the Israeli army, is devastated when he voluntarily extends his service; she has a premonition that he will not return alive. To escape what she feels is the inevitable official notification of his death, she decides to undertake a journey planned for the two of them, an adventurous hike in Galilee, a remote mountainous region in northern Israel, telling no one how to contact her. She enlists the company of an old friend and lover, Avram, himself an open war wound, still suffering the ill effects of captivity in a prisoner-of-war camp 20 years earlier. Convinced that talking about Ofer will keep him alive, Ora fills Avram in on her life since Avram's captivity, detailing her relationship with her now-estranged husband, Ilan, the third person in their once three musketeer-like friendship, as well as her childhood and her experience as a mother. Verdict: Glimmers of humanity, life, and hope counterbalance the sense of despair, foreboding, and sadness that permeate this detailed and beautiful chronicle of Ora's, Ofer's, and Avram's lives. A final heartbreaking note from the author makes the story all the more poignant. Highly recommended. —Sarah Conrad Weisman, Corning Community Coll., NY
Library Journal

(Starred review.) [A] powerful meditation on war, friendship, and family. Instead of celebrating her son Ofer’s discharge from the Israeli Army, Ora finds her life turned upside down and inside out when he reenlists and is sent back to the front for a major offensive. ... [T]he toll exacted by living in a land and among a people constantly at war is excruciatingly evident. —Margaret Flanagan
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. What one word would you use to describe the central theme of this novel? Is it a political novel?

2. In an interview, Grossman said about grief, “The first feeling you have is one of exile. You are being exiled from everything you know.” How do both grief and exile figure into this story?

3. Throughout the novel is the notion of tapestry, of threads being woven. What does that tapestry signify?

4. What do you think was Grossman’s intent with the prologue? What did this opening lead you to expect from the rest of the novel? Was it significant to you as a reader, later in the story, to have known these characters as teenagers?

5. On page 21, Ora says, “I’m no good at saving people.” Why does she say this? Is it true?

6. What function does Sami serve in the novel? What do we learn about Ora through her interactions with him?

7. Why does Ora consider Ofer’s reenlistment to be a betrayal? Why do his whispered, on-camera instructions affect her so strongly?

8. Discuss Adam’s assertion that Ora is “an unnatural mother” (page 98). What do you think he means by that? What does Ora take it to mean?

9. On page 134, Ora tells Sami to drive “to where the country ends.” His reply: “For me it ended a long time ago.” What does he mean by that? How does this change your interpretation of the novel’s title?

10. What is the significance of Ofer’s film, in which there are no physical beings, only their shadows?

11. In both Adam and Ofer, the influence of nature vs. nurture seems quite fluid. How is each like his biological father, and how does each resemble the man to whom he is not related by blood?

12. What role does food play in the novel? What does vegetarianism, especially, signify?

13. On pages 284–85, Ora says to Avram, “Just remember that sometimes bad news is actually good news that you didn’t understand. Remember that what might have been bad news can turn into good news over time, perhaps the best news you need.” What is she hoping for here? Does her advice turn out to be accurate?

14. Why does Ora refuse to go back for her notebook? As a reader, could you identify with Ora’s actions? What about elsewhere in the novel?

15. What do we learn about Ora, Ilan, and Ofer through the story of Adam’s compulsive behavior? What is “the force of no” (page 398)?

16. Discuss the significance of whose name Ora draws from the hat. Did she choose that person intentionally? How might the lives of Ora, Ilan, and Avram have been different if the other name were drawn?

17. Why does Ora react so strongly to what happened with Ofer in Hebron? How does it relate to what happened to Avram as a POW? Why does her reaction lead to the implosion of her family?

18. When Ora says to Avram, “Maybe you’ll even have a girl” (page 572), what is she really saying?

19. Discuss the final scene of the novel. What does Avram’s vision signify? Was Ora’s motivation for the hike wrong, as she fears?

20. How did Grossman’s personal note at the end change your experience of the novel? What seems possible for Ora and Avram, and the other characters in the book, at the end of the story?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf, 1927
~300 pp. (Varies by publisher.)

Summary
The novel is one of Woolf's most successful and accessible experiments in the modernist mode, including stream-of-consciousness. The three sections of the book take place between 1910 and 1920 and revolve around various members of the Ramsay family and their guests during visits to their summer residence on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

Section I —"The Window": young James Ramsay fervently hopes to visit the lighthouse on the following day, but while his mother assures him, his father insists they will have to call off the trip due to weather. Various guests and colleagues interact with one another as Mrs. Ramsay attempts to placate all. The story progresses through shifting points of view.

Section II — "Time Passes": an omniscient narrator takes over to inform us about the war and the fates of some of the characters from the first section.

Section III— "The Lighthouse": Mr. Ramsay returns to the family's deserted summer home 10 years after the book's initial events. He and two of his children decide to sail out to visit the lighthouse. While they are gone, Lily Brisco, one of the previous guests, finishes an uncompleted painting. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 25, 1882
• Where—London, England, UK
• Death—March 28, 1941
• Where—near Lewes, East Sussex, England
• Education—home schooling and studies at Cambridge

Born in 1882, the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth and Victorian scholar Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia Stephen settled in 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, in 1904. This house would become the first meeting place of the now-famous Bloomsbury Group—writers, artists, and intellectuals such as E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey who, along with Virginia and her sister Vanessa, shared an intense belief in the importance of the arts and a skepticism regarding their society's conventions and restraints.

Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915 and was followed by Night and Day (1919), Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and The Years (1937).

Woolf is also admired for her contributions to literary criticism in general and to feminist criticism in particular, with A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1937) reflecting the full range of her intellectual vigor, insight, and compassion for the role cast for female artists in the modern world. Additionally, Woolf s diary and correspondence, published posthumously, provide an invaluable window into her world offer-flung relationships and interests, imaginative depth, and creative method.

The victim of a lifetime of mental illness, Woolf committed suicide in 1941. She left behind her a literary legacy, including The Hogarth Press, established with Leonard in 1917, which published not only Woolf's own work but that of an increasingly influential group of innovative writers—including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Katherine Mansfield.

More
Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912, referring to him during their engagement as a "penniless Jew." The couple shared a close bond; in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: "Love-making—after 25 years can’t bear to be separate.... You see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete." The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others.

The ethos of the Bloomsbury group discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Virginia met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson. After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship that lasted through most of the 1920s. In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. It has been called by Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, "the longest and most charming love letter in literature."

After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of an illness at the age of 26.

After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work.

On 28 March 1941, Woolf committed suicide. She put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, then walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Woolf's body was not found until 18 April. Her husband buried her cremated remains under a tree in the garden of their house in Rodmell, Sussex. In her last note to her husband she wrote:

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. (Author bio from Wikipedia and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.)

Book Reviews
Characters and their individual perception are what intrigue Woolf, not plot—and in Lighthouse she gives full rein to her modernist ideas: reality is subjective, life is transient, truth and certainty are unattainable. It is only art that offers an antidote to an ever changing, death-threatening world. What's the significance of the lighthouse? Good question.
A LitLovers LitPick (Oct '08)

Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of modernism in England and must be included with Joyce and Proust in the realization of experiments that have completely broken with tradition.
The New York Times

There are dozens of passages in which the secret revelations of men and women, especialy women, to the trifling events of life are rendered with convincing and elaborate subtlety. To have written them is to have surpassed...almost every contemporary novelist.
Saturday Review

(Audio version.) It's wondrous to listen to a fine reading of a long-loved novel. Leishman makes masterly use of volume, timbre and resonance to distinguish between characters and draw us into the emotional swings and vibrations of the internal musings of each. She creates not a new but a more nuanced reading, following the interwoven streams of consciousness in a British English that lends authenticity to each voice. Leishman swims smoothly through Woolf's sentences that ebb and flow with numerous parenthetical thoughts and fresh images. These passages are interspersed with quick, sharp, simple sentences that gain strength in contrast. Leishman also draws our attention to Woolf's poetic prose: her rhythms and images, her use of hard consonants in monosyllabic words in counterpoint to long, soft, dreamy words and phrases. To The Lighthouse plays back and forth between telescopic and microscopic views of nature and human nature. Mrs. Ramsey is both trapped in and pleased in her roles as wife, mother and hostess. The introspective Mr. Ramsey is consumed with his legacy of long-since-published abstract philosophy. This is a book that cannot be read—or heard—too often.
Publishers Weekly

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for To the Lighthouse:

1. Woolf explores the ways in which people perceive or come to know the world: through intellect and facts or through intuition and feelings. Talk about how the different characters fall into those categories, especially Mrs. Ramsey and Mr. Ramsey; Charles Tansley and Lilly Briscoe. Where do you fall along these lines?

2. Mrs. Ramsey desires unity in her life over fragmentation. How does she express this desire. (Think about her knitting....) At her dinner party that evening, the guests are fractious, their individual desires keeping them separate. How, eventually, does the gathering finally achieve coherence and peace?

3. There is also a desire for permanence, for things to be "immune from change." How is this expressed in the book? Think of what Mrs. Ramsey wishes for, think of bowl of fruit on the dining table, the sea eating away at the land, the night air floating through the house, the change of seasons, Mr. Ramsey's wish for his books, and so on. (Remember that To the Lighthouse was written after World War I, so that author and her readers, even back then, were aware of the horrific change that would take place 4 years after the events in this book. Does that knowledge create a sense of fate...or doom?)

4. What do you think of Mr. Ramsey? Mrs. Ramsey? Why can't or won't Mrs. Ramsey tell her husband she loves him?

5. James yearns to visit the lighthouse—and his parents respond differently to his desiring something so specific. How do they respond...and what do their responses say about them?

6. Ten years later, James sees his lighthouse, but it's not the same. He wonders which vision is the correct one and realizes both are correct. How can that be? What conclusion does he reach?

7. Lily's painting is an attempt to fix the flux of time onto a canvas, to offer a sort of restoration of what is lost through time. How does that play out in this work? Consider memory, as well. Lily, like Mr. Ramsay and his books, is insecure about her painting. How does that change at the end? Why does the book end with Lily and her painting?

8. How do gender roles evidence themselves in this work? How, for instance, does Mrs. Ramsay, in particular, view women's roles vis-a-vis men?

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

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To Tuscany with Love
Gail Mencini, 2014
Capriole Group
392 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781938592003

Summary
Can one college semester abroad change the course of your life?

Bella Rossini, a vivacious college junior, lands in jail overnight with acquaintances whom she mistakes for friends. Shipped off to Tuscany by her mother, Bella is suddenly thrust into living with seven strangers during one life-altering summer.

Meet Hope, the sturdy and practical girl, steadfast in her loyalty to her boyfriend; Meghan and Karen, identical twins with an eye for fashion and beauty to match; Stillman, haunted by his hard past, and Phillip, an athlete, both fueled by competition; Lee, by family mandate in pre-med; and Rune, the Hollywood-bound wild child. All add sizzling chemistry and rebellious humor to the mix.

In one whirlwind summer, while uncovering the charms of Italy, they discover both friendship and love. After their summer together, life – and loss – happens. Returning to Tuscany 30 years later, their dreams, anger, secrets and disappointments create an emotional kaleidoscope. Their reunion sends them on a startling collision course that none of them could have predicted.

Set against the allure of Tuscany, with an irresistible fusion of heartbreak and humor, this debut novel, To Tuscany with Love, explores the fear of letting the past determine the future and the power of friendship. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—state of Nebraska, USA
• Education—B.A., Wartburg College; L.L.M, University
of Denver, College of Law
• Currently—lives in Denver, Colorado

Gail Mencini makes her literary debut with To Tuscany with Love (January 7, 2014, Capriole Group) an adult coming-of-age novel set in central Italy.

Born in rural Nebraska, Mencini graduated with honors in 1976 from Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, where she majored in accounting, economics and business administration. She holds a Master of Laws of Taxation degree from the University of Denver College of Law.

Mencini co-owned an accounting firm and practiced for 15 years in public accounting, specializing in tax law related to mergers and acquisitions and real estate. She also spent time in the higher education field, working as an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado and Metro State College, as well as the University of Denver College of Law. She was a repeat speaker at national continuing education seminars and a featured presenter in a real estate conference in the Caribbean.

In 1990 when she married her husband, Mencini became an “instant mother” of three boys plus another son two years later, which opened the doors to becoming a full-time mother and igniting her long-time passion for creative arts, gourmet cooking and traveling.

She went on to become a contributing editor and photojournalist for Buzz in the ‘Burbs, writing monthly cooking columns featuring dinner themes, recipes and complementary wine suggestions. She also served as interim director of marketing for Wine Master Cellars as the company transitioned to new leadership. She has been a member of the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers for nearly 20 years as well as the Pikes Peak Writers for over 10. She most recently joined Author U based in Aurora, Colo.

She writes and cooks in Denver, Colorado, with her husband and family who are always ready to critique her abundance of story ideas and recipes. (From the publisher.)

Visit the author's website.

Book Reviews
Gail Mencini’s debut novel adds the volatility of young love to an enchanting landscape. Bella Rossini’s love triangle, supplemented by the stories of her friends, is a passionate entanglement that complicates the course of her life. … Rewarding elements include the theme of travel as a restorative force; Italy emerges not as a touristic, escapist destination, but as a place with deep significance in the characters’ search for forgiveness and a new sense of direction. … A clear-eyed look at the many ways plans can derail, and at the resilience of those who get back on track. …[An] entertaining account of the realization that old friendships can restart to provide support amid hardship.
ForeWord Reviews

A powerful debut novel that transports readers to the lush Italian countryside and into the lives of these college students on summer holiday in Tuscany. The lies & lust experienced by the characters left me enraptured and flipping pages quickly. The Big Chill -feel type reunion at the end bring it all together and the truth that comes out left me absolutely gob smacked. Highly recommend that you read this with a large glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.
Mandy Brooks - Book People in Austin, TX and Erica Bates - Tattered Cover in Denver, CO

For anyone who loves anything Italian, Gail Mencini's charming "coming of age" debut To Tuscany with Love is an entertaining novel of a small group of college students spending a life-changing summer together discovering love and friendship against the beautiful Italian landscape. The group is reunited in Tuscany thirty years later resulting in an unpredictable set of circumstances. Author Gail Mencini's familiarity with Tuscany is refreshing. Her debut novel leaves the reader considering the importance of friends in one's life as well as the "marks" they've left on one's life during varying ages and stages. Great reading group pick too.
Cynthia Callander - The Vero Beach Book Center, Vero Beach, FL

A fun, poignant story about eight college students' shared experience in Italy and how their youthful idealism and indiscretions affect their adulthoods. Mencini’s debut novel starts in the present day with the middle-aged Bella Rossini receiving an invitation to reunite with people from her past.... An intriguing tale about how people can affect one another long after they part ways.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the goals of each of the characters as they return for their reunion: redemption, forgiveness, retribution, escape, inspiration, opportunity for a new direction, and reuniting with a lost love are all possibilities to contemplate.

2. How do the events during and immediately following their college semester abroad shape Bella’s future?

3. Discuss the reasons why people might stay in relationships that are destructive or unfulfilling.

4. Consider the good and bad life choices the characters make and how that impacts not only them, but also others.

5. Karen and Lee each acted in an inappropriate or "wrong" manner. Discuss how their actions might have helped one or more of their friends in the long run.

6. How do the characters each grow as a person during the course of the novel?

7. For each character, discuss whether the group’s friendship impacted the characters’ individual growth during their semester abroad, later during their reunion, or during both periods of time.

8. Stillman’s childhood molded his future in more than one way. Discuss how his future was shaped by his past, whether you would have made similar choices or not, and why.

9. Consider the varying reactions of the characters to stresses and disappointments in their lives.

10. What specific event or element of each character’s past do they fear will guide their future? (This could be an event, the continued search for an unfulfilled goal, or their previous mistakes.)

11. Consider how the individual characters were positively and negatively impacted by the existence of, or their need for, a family.

12. Compare how the characters’ different backgrounds impacted their lives, goals, and personalities.

13. Consider the importance of friends in your life and how they impact you during different ages.

14. Discuss reunions and your own fears and hopes when attending one.

15. Share your favorite or least favorite reunion story with your group.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Today Will Be Different
Maria Semple, 2016
Little, Brown and Co.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316403436

Summary
A day in the life of Eleanor Flood, forced to abandon her small ambitions and awake to a strange, new future.

Eleanor knows she's a mess. But today, she will tackle the little things.

She will shower and get dressed. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby. She won't swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe.

But before she can put her modest plan into action-life happens. Today, it turns out, is the day Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way into his mother's company.

It's also the day Joe has chosen to tell his office—but not Eleanor—that he's on vacation. Just when it seems like things can't go more awry, an encounter with a former colleague produces a graphic memoir whose dramatic tale threatens to reveal a buried family secret.

Today Will Be Different is a hilarious, heart-filled story about reinvention, sisterhood, and how sometimes it takes facing up to our former selves to truly begin living. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June, 1964
• Where—Santa Monica, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington

Maria Keogh Semple is an American novelist and screenwriter. She is the author of three novels. Her television credits include Beverly Hills, 90210, Mad About You, Saturday Night Live, Arrested Development, Suddenly Susan and Ellen.

Early Life
Semple was born in Santa Monica, California. Her family moved to Spain soon after she was born. There her father, the screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr. wrote the pilot for the television series Batman. The family moved to Los Angeles and then to Aspen, Colorado. Semple attended boarding school at Choate Rosemary Hall, then received a BA in English from Barnard College in 1986.

Film
Her first screenwriting job was in 1992, for the television show Beverly Hills, 90210. She was nominated for a Primetime Emmy, Outstanding Television Series, in 1997 for Mad About You. In 2006 and 2007, she was nominated for a Writer's Guild of America award, for Arrested Development. She appeared in the 2004 David O. Russell film I Heart Huckabees.

Novels
Semple's three novels include Today Will Be Different (2016), Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2012), and This One is Mine (2008). Her books center around women who juggle and struggle with contemporary life: work, family, love, and self-esteem. Critics have referred to her writing as witty, funny, inventive, and even "a little bit screwball" (Washington Post).

She is active in the Seattle literary community, and a founding member of Seattle 7 Writers. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker Magazine. She has also taught fiction writing at the Richard Hugo House.

Personal Life
Semple is in a relationship with George Meyer and has one daughter with him, Poppy. They reside in Seattle. In 2007, a newly discovered species of moss frogs from Sri Lanka was named Philautus poppiae after their daughter, a tribute to Meyer's and Semple's dedication to the Global Amphibian Assessment. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/28/12.)

Book Reviews
Let me say upfront: I couldn’t put the thing down. Today Will Be Different shows us a woman all too many readers will feel an immediate kinship with. Her life teeters on the edge of out-of-control, but she is determined to do things differently. That way, she thinks, she’ll end up with a nice, neat, perfectly-ordered life—one that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.
Cara Kless - LitLovers

[F]unny, smart, emotionally reverberant.... The success of this poetic, seriously funny and brainy dream of a novel...has to do with Maria Semple's range of riffs and preoccupations. All kinds of detalis, painful and perverse and deeply droll, cling to her heroine and are appraised and examined and skewered and simply wondered at. If that's considered a trick, readers of Semple's novel will be overjoyed to fall for it.
Meg Wolitzer - New York Times Book Review

Hilarious [and] heartwarming.... The book follows a restless Eleanor, who sets out to reinvigorate her life, only to be shoved astray by a number of chance setbacks
Dana Getz - Entertainment Weekly

[A] sharp, funny read.... Though Eleanor is snarky, her troubles and growing calamities are engaging.... In the end, the novel wraps up too neatly, but the ride is consistently entertaining.
Publishers Weekly

An introspective look, both comedic and tragic, at attempting to be the best one can be: wife, mother, or sibling. While not as laugh-out-loud funny as Where'd You Go, this book will satisfy fans of Semple and satire. —Stephanie Sendaula
Library Journal

(Starred review.) A day in the life of an enchanting and gifted woman who is almost too frazzled to go on... [F]ew will be indifferent to this achingly funny and very dear book. This author is on her way to becoming a national treasure.
Kirkus Reviews

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Tomorrow
Damian Dibben, 2018
Hanover Square Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781335580290

Summary
A wise old dog travels through the courts and battlefields of Europe and through the centuries in search of the master who granted him immortality.

Tomorrow tells the story of a 217-year-old dog and his search for his lost master.

His adventures take him through the London Frost Fair, the strange court of King Charles I, the wars of the Spanish succession, Versailles, the golden age of Amsterdam and to nineteenth-century Venice.

As he journeys through Europe, he befriends both animals and humans, falls in love (only once), marvels at the human ability to make music, despairs at their capacity for war and gains insight into both the strength and frailties of the human spirit.

With the rich historical vision of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and the captivating canine perspective of A Dog’s Purpose, Tomorrow draws us into a unique century-spanning tale of the unbreakable connection between dog and human. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Damian Dibben is the creator of the internationally acclaimed children's book series the History Keepers, translated into 26 languages in over 40 countries. Previously, he worked as a screenwriter, and actor, on projects as diverse as The Phantom of the Opera and Puss in Boots and Young Indiana Jones. He lives, facing St Paul's Cathedral, on London's Southbank with his partner Ali and dog Dudle (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
A grand sweep of adventure and travel, war and romance—along with a generous amount of face licking — that will have dog lovers enthralled.… Tomorrow offers a rich exploration of love, life and loyalty, in a world whose sensory atmosphere is irresistible.
NPR

(Starred review.) Celebrating the strength of human and animal ties, this compelling and satisfying novel is similar in spirit to Bruce Cameron’s A Dog’s Purpose…. But fans of time travel fiction…will also enjoy this work’s descriptive cultural and historical detail.
Library Journal

Humanity’s foibles and failings are on full display, as well as the more heartfelt and loving moments between people and their dogs. This reads like a memoir but includes a touch of magic.… [A] charmer.
Booklist

The dog's first-person narrative is both a joy and a frustration. The memoirlike story is beautifully rich in perseverance, love, the sweetness of life, and memorable, evocative scents. But the dog's owner and their nemesis …are known only through the dog's limited point of view.
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 TOMORROW … then take off on your own:

1. Other than sheer imagination and fun, why might the author have made the choice of using a dog's perspective to view the passage of human history?

2. (Follow-up to Question 1) What does the dog reveal about the human experience—our hope for peace but propensity for violence; our dual capacity for love and cruelty? What else? Does Champion have different ideas about what he sees as right?

3. Well, dear reader …what IS it about dogs? Were you moved—did your eyes moisten—by the plight of Champion and Sorco?

4. A man tells Champion, "You are the soul of all men." What does he mean?

5. What do you make of Sporco? Jean Zimmerman, in her NPR review, compares him to Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's side-kick. Do you see an analogy?

6. What are the pitfalls of a extra longevity that Valentyne and Champion experience? Does long life have any appeal for you? Would you sip from the cup of jyrh if offered?

7. Has reading Tomorrow added to your knowledge of history?

8. Do the book's shifting time frames enhance the narrative, or do you find them confusing and distracting?

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

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Tomorrow There Will be Apricots
Jessica Soffer, 2013
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
317 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547759265

Summary
This is a story about accepting the people we love—the people we have to love and the people we choose to love, the families we’re given and the families we make. It’s the story of two women adrift in New York, a widow and an almost-orphan, each searching for someone she’s lost. It’s the story of how, even in moments of grief and darkness, there are joys waiting nearby.

Lorca spends her life poring over cookbooks, making croissants and chocolat chaud, seeking out rare ingredients, all to earn the love of her distracted chef of a mother, who is now packing her off to boarding school. In one last effort to prove herself indispensable, Lorca resolves to track down the recipe for her mother’s ideal meal, an obscure Middle Eastern dish called masgouf.

Victoria, grappling with her husband’s death, has been dreaming of the daughter they gave up forty years ago. An Iraqi Jewish immigrant who used to run a restaurant, she starts teaching cooking lessons; Lorca signs up.

Together, they make cardamom pistachio cookies, baklava, kubba with squash. They also begin to suspect they are connected by more than their love of food. Soon, though, they must reckon with the past, the future, and the truth—whatever it might be. Bukra fil mish mish, the Arabic saying goes. Tomorrow, apricots may bloom. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Jessica Soffer earned her MFA at Hunter College, where she was a Hertog Fellow. Her work has appeared in Granta, Vogue and the New York Times, among other publications. Her father, a painter and sculptor, emigrated from Iraq to the US in the late 1940s. She teaches fiction at Connecticut College and lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
This first novel by Jessica Soffer is a work of beauty in words. There is no dead wood in this story; not a word is indispensable. Ms. Soffer is a master artist painting the hidden hues of the human soul. Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is an intelligent work in the vein of Azar Nafisi where the humanity of the characters transcends cultural or national differences and illustrates commonalities."
New York Journal of Books

Soffer's breathtaking prose interweaves delectable descriptions of food with a profoundly redemptive story about loss, self-discovery, and acceptance.
Oprah Magazine

Teenage Lorca, who has been cutting herself since she was six, still can’t win the attention she craves from her beautiful and inaccessible mother, and so she concocts an impossible scheme to save herself from being sent to boarding school: She’ll re-create the best dinner her mother ever ate, featuring an Iraqi dish called masgouf that here is as fraught with significance as Babette’s feast. Lorca is a diligent dreamer, enlisting the help of a bookstore clerk named Blot and cooking lessons from a grieving Iraqi widow. But in this novel of shifting point of views, you want to linger longest with Lorca; both her shortcomings and her desires are so identifiable you can’t help but root for her.
Vogue.com

[A] poignant story of love, acceptance and memory in the unusual pairing of an Iraqi Jewish widow haunted by the daughter she had given away four decades before and a young teen-age girl who yearns to bring satisfaction to her mother by learning to make a dish she seemed to yearn for. The two meet improbably and feed off of each other’s hopes and desires, as well as a over a mouth-watering menu of Iraqi culinary specialties. Beautifully written with a deep understanding of both woman and girl, the book is a first novel for Jessica Soffer, daughter of an Iraqi Jewish artist, whose imagination and versatility bode well for her future."
Moment Magazine

What makes a family? Where do we find our sustenance? Jessica Soffer examines the often debated questions with artful storytelling. She calls on all of our senses to consider the age old issue of nature vs. nurture. But food, laden with history and culture, the legendary path to the heart, is the medium. Mix in a very needy cast of characters and the recipe for a good tale is perfected.
Jewish Book World

Eighth-grader Lorca has been self-harming since she was six years old, lately to deal with pain she feels due to her distant mother [and]...absent father.... Lorca starts taking cooking lessons from Victoria, an Iraqi Jewish woman mourning the recent death of her husband.... Narrated in turn by Lorca and Victoria, with a few appearances from the late [husband], the novel shows their emotional bond developing as each faces uncomfortable truths. While the plot is thin and the prose dense, there are moments of charm and an ending that reveals the story to be more tightly wound than it appears.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) This powerful debut sheds light on the meaning and power of family, whether its members are blood-related or "created" by nonrelatives. Food is what strengthens relationships here.... However, it is not just the love of food but understanding and acceptance that help to make this such a lovely novel.... [A] charming book, which is as hopeful as its title. —Andrea Tarr, Corona P.L., CA
Library Journal

Told in Victoria and Lorca's alternating first-person voices, the character driven novel… offers fully realized, multidimensional characters who invite empathy and compassion.
Booklist

A delectable tale of the families we choose...indeed, we root for all of Soffer’s rich and complex characters.
BookPage

An unhappy teen and a shellshocked widow make a vital connection, though not the one they initially think, in Soffer's somber debut.... The plot twists are too obvious and the characters too predictable for the tentatively hopeful ending to be very persuasive. Well-written and atmospheric, but overdetermined and relentlessly grim.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. When the novel opens, Lorca has just been suspended from school for cutting herself. Why do you think she stole her mother’s paring knife? What is the significance of her doing so?

2. On page 3, Nancy says to Lorca, “I’m a good mother.” It isn’t the only time this sentiment appears in the novel. What is the subtext of this conversation? Discuss the impression you have of these two women as the novel opens and discuss how this impression changes or doesn’t throughout the novel.

3. Why does Lorca’s mother leave New Hampshire and her marriage to return to New York City? She says, “It’s what I have to do for myself…for women everywhere.” (Page 11) Identify elements of the themes of women’s liberation and feminism in the novel.

4. Many characters in the novel suffer from repressed feelings and thoughts, especially Lorca, Nancy, Victoria, and Joseph. Discuss these characters. How do they repress their feelings, and what are the consequences of this?

5. What first gives rise to Lorca’s plan to make her mother masgouf? What does the dish come to represent to Lorca? What does it represent to Nancy, and to Victoria?

6. Compare and contrast the two primary “couples” of the novel: Victoria and Joseph; Nancy and Lorca. How are their relationships similar and how are they different? What parallels can you draw between their respective struggles and suffering? Victoria thinks many times that she has been difficult to love—do you think she’s right? What about Nancy, who seems to attract more love than she can, or wants, to deal with?

7. This novel explores some family dynamics that can be difficult to look at head-on. Discuss the various families, particularly with regard to how people show love and find happiness (or at least attempt to).

8. Lorca hurts herself repeatedly throughout the novel but sometimes tries to repress her urges. Why do you think she starts to resist, and why do you think she ultimately gives in each time? What do you think it means to Lorca to discover her mother may also have been a self-mutilator? Why is this revelation important for your understanding of these two characters?

9. On page 53, Aunt Lou tells Lorca of her mother, “Someone didn’t love her enough. How about cutting her a little slack?” Similarly, Victoria shares on page 72 that she had been nothing to her own family. Victoria gave up her daughter for adoption, while Nancy herself was adopted. Discuss the effect that generations of neglect and the perpetuation of withheld love has on the characters in this novel. Do you think the circumstances justify these characters’ behavior? Do you feel sympathy for them? Why or why not?

10. How does the author use details about Victoria’s and Joseph’s Jewish traditions to show their alienness? Do you think the story would have been significantly different if Victoria and Joseph had been an American couple? What does their history have to do with the events of the novel?

11. None of the relationships in this book are simple. A “third wheel” infringes upon several: Aunt Lou constantly inserts herself between Lorca and Nancy; Dottie constantly inserts herself between Victoria and Joseph; and in a way, Lorca’s self-esteem and self-mutilation get between her and Blot. How do these outside influences adversely or positively affect the primary relationships they orbit? Do you think any relationship truly exists independent of any other? Support your opinion using examples from the novel.

12. When Lorca first arrives at Victoria’s apartment for her cooking class, what does she do that captures Victoria’s heart? In what ways are the two women similar? How do they help heal each other, beginning at this first class?

13. When Victoria talks about giving up her daughter on page 157, she says, “Something, anything, was worlds better than all the nothing that had been.” What is shifting for Victoria in this moment? Who else in the novel might also have said this?

14. Though a minor character, Blot has a tremendous effect on Lorca and suffers from his own painful family history. What do you think he sees in Lorca that she can’t see about herself? Why do you think he takes on her quest for the owners of The Shohet and His Wife so readily?

15. Many characters in the novel keep secrets from one another. How does Joseph’s secret change the contours of his and Victoria’s relationship when she first discovers that he’s been keeping something from her? What about the secrets Lorca keeps from Blot?

16. Did you believe Victoria and Lorca were truly related? Why or why not? If you did, at what point did you begin to suspect the truth? What clues were there that Victoria may have been wrong about Joseph’s secret? When did you begin to suspect the truth about Dottie?

17. From both Joseph’s and Victoria’s perspectives, why does Joseph have his affair with Dottie? What brings him back to Victoria? What would you do in his situation? How do two people driven so far apart by circumstances and choices find a way back to one another? What do you think the author might say to this?

18. Aunt Lou both insinuates and flat-out tells Lorca that she will never earn her mother’s love with her behavior. She harangues her on pages 190 to 191, pointing out that “everything you do is about her…You don’t do anything because you’re afraid you’ll miss her.” Do you think Aunt Lou is right? Why or why not?

19. One could argue that Lorca’s self-mutilation is a way for her to transmute the pain of her mother’s rejection into pleasure, however brief; to feel herself real despite her mother’s disregard. What is it that finally prompts Lorca to get angry at Nancy? What allows her to start healing from a lifetime of pain?

20. A kind of desperate hunger weaves its way throughout the story. Identify and discuss the different characters and what each truly hungers for. Do you think anyone has his or her hunger satisfied by the end of the novel? Why or why not?

21. The novel’s title comes from the Arabic saying, “Bukra fil mish mish.” Tomorrow, apricots may bloom. What does the saying mean, and why do you think the author chose it?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Topeka School
Ben Lerner, 2019
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374277789

Summary
A tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right.

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys" to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world.

Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak.

Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart—who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient—into the social scene, to disastrous effect.

Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity.

It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 4, 1979
• Where—Topeka, Kansas, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University
• Awards—Believer Book Award; Terry Southern Prize
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York

Ben Lerner has been a Fulbright Fellow, a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the 2012 Believer Book Award, and excerpts from 10:04 have been awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize.

He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Lerner’s own arsenal has always included a composer’s feel for orchestration [and] a ventriloquist’s vocal range .… I could say more—about trauma, sex, paradox, magic—but only at the cost of further reducing this irreducible novel, which seeks instead to spread its readers beyond their borders with its fertile intelligence and its even more abundant heart.
Garth Risk Hallberg - New York Times Book Review

[Lerner is] one of the most acclaimed writers in the English-speaking world…. [The Topeka School] is not just a bildungsroman… but a polyphonic portrait of an entire community…. Lerner can get away with writing so many books that are autofictional because a spirit speaks through him—because his language takes on a life of its own.
Becca Rothfeld - Wall Street Journal

An extraordinarily brilliant novel that’s also accessible to anyone yearning for illumination in our disputatious era…. Through the wizardry of Lerner’s prose, this battle of adolescent elocution becomes an emblem for the fiery state of American culture…. Among the myriad miracles of The Topeka School is that it accomplishes so much, captures so much and questions so much about America in fewer than 300 pages.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

Lerner is a dazzlingly intelligent writer, and for anyone looking to understand contemporary America this tale of toxic masculinity, resentful outcasts, rigged high-school debates and political disaster is a good place to start.
Times (UK)

A triumph of ventriloquism…. [Lerner] has written a perfectly weighted, hugely intelligent, entirely entertaining novel that does more than simply mine his childhood or explore what it is to be an author; he has taken on American masculinity, group identity and marginalization, political messaging and generational exchange, and has done so not didactically but generously and with admirable sensitivity."
Times Literary Supplement (UK)

[The Topeka School] is thoroughly, intimidatingly brilliant and absolutely contemporary…. It's funny, and at times, painfully acute…. [Lerner] is a supremely gifted prose stylist, at once theoretical and conversational; he never bores or blathers, and is always limpid. Rather than inviting the reader to look at him or his life, he invites the reader to look through him.
Christine Smallwood - Harper's

Autofiction master Lerner returns with his most expansive novel to date.… Narration from the present-day and interludes hinting at a terrible tragedy add intrigue to this study of polarization and toxic masculinity.
Entertainment Weekly

Loosely plotted but riveting, this novel expertly locates the thread of the anxious present in the memory-stippled past.
Publishers Weekly

[T]his book reintroduces Adam Gordon, narrator of Lerner's… Leaving the Atocha Station. Adam's youth in Topeka, KS, is unveiled,… Readers seeking the wry humor… will find it in short supply here. This exploration of the angst-filled road to manhood is recommended for fans of Jonathan Franzen. —Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Library Journal

(Starred review) Engrossing…. Few writers are so deeply engaged as Lerner in how our interior selves are shaped by memory and consequence…. Autofiction at its smartest and most effective: self-interested, self-interrogating, but never self-involved.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In the novel’s first scene, Adam gives a speech to his high school girlfriend, Amber, without realizing that she’s disappeared (7). Later, Amber recounts abandoning her stepfather’s dinnertime polemic without his noticing (13). What kinds of speaking, and listening, do the two stories introduce? How do they reﬂect conditions of gender and power?

2. Who are the primary voices in the book? Why does the perspective shift between first, second, and third person? How does the italicized, untitled format of Darren’s sections distinguish him from the other characters, and what is the effect of his voice being set apart in this way?

3. The novel serves as "a genealogy of [Adam’s] speech, its theaters and extremes" (142). How are different kinds of speech—including talk therapy, competitive debate, and political discourse—rehearsed and performed in the book?

4. Recalling his affair with Sima, Jonathan says: "Maybe I was a man who sought substitute mothers, then left them like my father" (172). What does the book reveal about parents and children? What do Adam and Jane’s recitations of "The Purple Cow" suggest about the ability to disrupt intergenerational patterns?

5. As Jane describes her fraught public conversation with Sima, she states: "I was both on that stage and back in Brooklyn in the fifties; I was very brieﬂy on the train" (105). Why do several timelines converge in this instance? What genres of time exist in the book?

6. How does Jane recover the memory of her father’s abuse? Why might the book refrain from explicitly portraying the scene on the train?

7. The young Adam "wanted to be a poet because poems were spells" (126). Elsewhere, he experiences the "abstract capacity" of language through freestyle rap, a cultural appropriation of hip hop that also contains "pure possibility" (256). What qualities distinguish poetry from freestyle? What other verbal expressions contain the potential for magic? For oppression?

8. Like Adam, Ben Lerner is a poet from Topeka whose mother is a renowned psychologist and author. In the novel, the adult Adam explicitly wonders: "Why does it feel dangerous to fictionalize my daughters’ names?" (265). How does the book disturb distinctions between fact and fiction?

9. Different technologies mediate the voice: strangers harass Jane via landline; Jonathan records speech-shadowed passages of Sportsmanlike Driving (45); Jane directs the distraught Adam to the safety of a payphone (182); and the trio encounters Adam’s grandfather’s voice through Jonathan’s cassette player (239). How does technology shape the listener’s ability to intercept and alter speech? How do these moments underline the novel’s historical concerns?

10. The title introduces school as a primary setting. What are some of the schools featured, both literal and figurative? How do instruction and indoctrination take place?

11. Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, opens in a museum as Adam Gordon witnesses another visitor’s emotional breakdown, potentially caused by "a profound experience of art." In what ways do visual art and artifice, including Rose’s pilfered painting, Jonathan’s visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Duccio’s Madonna and Child, operate in The Topeka School?

12. How does race inﬂect the novel, from Adam’s freestyle—"a crisis in white masculinity"(127)—to Jason’s recognition of his "ethnic difference" following the September 11 attacks (120), to Jonathan’s memories of his Taipei upbringing? What is the relationship between whiteness and violence?

13. The novel bridges various settings: Jonathan and Jane’s New York, Klaus’ Europe, Adam’s forecasted return to the "vaguely imagined East Coast city from which [his] experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony" (15). How does tension exist between and within places? Does Topeka become a city of "milieu therapy" (54)?

14. The text makes a number of overt and implicit political references: the former senator Bob Dole’s face appears on a stranger’s television screen (12) and Donald Trump’s remarks about his daughter surface during the playground altercation between Adam and another father (270). How do personal stories—of the Gordon family, of Darren’s act of violence—acknowledge or reﬂect the political landscape of the past and present? How do these strains collide, such as when the adult Adam encounters Darren "wearing a red baseball cap, holding his sign in silence" (275)?

15. Does the motif of "the spread" complicate the transcendent possibilities of language? What questions does the novel pose about language’s ability to convey meaning in our contemporary moment? Does the book "spread" its readers with a surplus of allusions, materials, perspectives, and timelines?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Tortilla Curtain
T.C. Boyle, 1995
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140238280

Summary
Men and women with brown faces and strong backs who risk everything to cross the Mexican border and invade the American Dream are the Okies of the 1990s. Two of them, Candido and America Rincon, have come to Southern California and are living in a makeshift camp deep in a ravine, fighting off starvation.

At the top of Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, the two couples and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding. (From the publisher.)

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
In The Tortilla Curtain, Mr. Boyle deftly portrays Los Angeles's Topanga Canyon, catching both its privileged society and its underlying geological and ecological instability. But while the book has heft, its story is slight, and not unfamiliar.... The Tortilla Curtain is a political novel for an age that has come to distrust not only politicians but political solutions, a modernist muckraking novel by an author who sees the muck not only in class structure and prejudice but in the souls of human beings. Yet where the socially engaged novel once offered critique, Mr. Boyle provides contempt.... [But] contempt is a dangerous emotion, luring us into believing that we understand more than we do.
Scott Spencer - New York Times Book Review

This highly engaging story subtly plays on our consciences, forcing us to form, confirm, or dispute social, political, and moral viewpoints. This is a profound and tragic tale, one that exposes not only a failed American Dream, but a failing America.
Janet St. John - Booklist

The inestimably gifted Boyle (The Road to Wellville, 1993, etc.) puts on a preacher's gown and mounts the pulpit to proclaim a hellfire sermon against bigotry and greed—in this rather wan updating of The Grapes of Wrath. If Boyle is to be believed, Los Angeles County has gradually evolved into a kind of minimum-security prison, with the prosperous Anglos living in fear of their lives behind the walls of their suburban security compounds. Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher moved as far from the city as they could, and settled in a tastefully "authentic" tract development just above Topanga Canyon. Au courant to a fault, Kyra brings home the bacon as a hot-shot real estate agent, while Delaney stands in as Mr. Mom—cooking their lowfat meals, seeing after their pets and their son, and writing a monthly column for a nature magazine. Below them, in the Canyon itself, Candido and America Ricon have crossed the Mexican border illegally and seek refuge of their own in the makeshift camp they've erected. Candido meets Delaney at the beginning of the story when Delaney runs him down with his car, and this pretty much establishes the tone of their relations throughout. Candido, as hapless as his namesake in Voltaire, wants only to work and look after his pregnant wife, but he's thwarted on every side by an exasperated white society with no room for him. Implausible circumstances keep bringing Delaney and Candido back to each other, and the tension that builds between them becomes an image of the ferocity that smolders within the city around them—exploding in an apocalyptic climax that combines a brushfire and a riot, with an earthquake thrown in for good measure. A morality play too obvious to be swallowed whole: Boyle's first real lemon so far.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
(Below you'll find discussion questions, as well as background information on US immigration; both are provided by Penguin Group USA, publishers.)

1. At the beginning of the story, Delaney accidentally hits Candido with his car. "For a long moment, they stood there, examining each other, unwitting perpetrator and unwitting victim." How does this encounter set the tone for the events that follow? Does it come full circle in the final scene?

2. The novel is forged on the cultural, social, and financial differences between the Mossbachers and the Rincóns. It alternates between the two couples' points of view, allowing the reader to enter the lives of both families. How does this technique propel the story? Do you feel that you got to know each of the couples equally well? Was the author fair in his portrayal of each of the couples? Is he too harsh in his portrayal of the Mossbachers, as one reviewer suggested?

3. Candido and America crossed the border in search of a better life for themselves and their unborn child. They do not ask for much and are willing to work hard, yet they are constantly met with resistance and failure. There are numerous references to Candido's bad luck. Is he unlucky? Is there anything he could have done to have changed his luck? What does this story say about the American dream?

4. The symbol of the coyote appears throughout the novel and represents illegal Mexican immigrants. In his nature column, Delaney writes, "The coyote is not to blame—he is only trying to survive, to make a living, to take advantage of the opportunities available to him." He concludes the same column by writing, "The coyotes keep coming, breeding up to fill in the gaps, moving in where the living is easy. They are cunning, versatile, hungry and unstoppable." How do these passages reflect Delaney's mixed feelings about illegal immigrants? Is he a hypocrite? As the novel progresses, Delaney's humanistic beliefs give way to racism and resentment, and he directs his rage at all illegal immigrants onto Cándido. When confronted with evidence that Candido is not the vandal at Arroyo Blanco, he destroys it. Why does Delaney need to believe that the vandal is Cándido? How does Delaney evolve from being a "liberal humanist" to a racist?

5. Boundaries—both real and imagined—play a large role in the novel, especially the front gate at Arroyo Blanco Estates. In what other instances do boundaries appear and what do they represent? What roles do the different characters play in constructing these boundaries?

6. In a recent interview Boyle stated, "If it's satire, it has to bite somebody, has to have teeth in it, otherwise it's useless." How does satire affect The Tortilla Curtain and the telling of the story? Is it a successful technique?

7. The novel concludes with Delaney confronting Candido with a gun, followed by a mud slide. In an almost simultaneous moment, Candido realizes his baby is missing and reaches down to offer Delaney a hand. One is a frightening image and the other an act of generosity. How do these contrasting images play off one another? Did the conclusion leave you with a feeling of hope or despair?

8. During an argument with Jack Jardine, Delaney makes the following statement: "Do you realize what you're saying? Immigrants are the lifeblood of this country—and neither of us would be standing here today if it wasn't." In another instance, Jack says to Delaney, "What do you expect, when all you bleeding hearts want to invite the whole world in here to feed at our trough without a thought as to who's going to pay for it, as if the American taxpayer was like Jesus Christ with his loaves and fishes." How do these two sentiments play out in the novel and in the larger issue of immigration?

9. The author stated in the Conversation section of this guide that he feels it is a novelist's job to inhabit people of other races and sexes, for his own understanding of an issue as well as for the reader's. Did The Tortilla Curtain help you to better understand the issue of immigration and the people involved?

10. The author does not offer a solution to the problem of illegal immigration, for which he was praised by several reviewers. Do you think he should have offered a solution?

_______________

Background on U.S. and Immigration

The debate over immigration continues to escalate across the nation, particularly in California, and this sampling of quotations and statistics from various newspapers and magazines sheds light on the issue.

• History suggests that those who truly yearn to come to America and stay will find a way to do it. (Newsweek, August 9, 1993).

• In November 1994, California passed by a 59% to 41% vote Proposition 187, a bill that denies certain social privileges, mainly welfare, public schooling, and non-emergency medical care, to illegal immigrants. (The New York Times, November 11, 1994)

• California hosts about 40% of the nation's estimated 3.4 million illegal immigrants. (Time, November 21, 1994).

• "All Americans...are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.... We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it." (President Clinton, "We Heard America Shouting," Address to Joint Session of Congress, January 25, 1995).

• "Our immigration policy is a measure of who we are as a people. I believe we are a people who draw strength from our diversity and meet our challenges head on. I believe we want and deserve immigration laws that favor those who play by the rules." (Bill Bradley, former U.S. Senator, New Jersey, The New Jersey Record, June 8, 1995).

• About 800,000 people follow the rules and enter the United States legally as immigrants each year. An additional 200,000 to 300,000 come to the country illegally. (San Francisco Chronicle, December 5, 1995).

• Half of illegal immigrants do not cross the borders unlawfully—they enter legally and overstay their visas. (San Francisco Chronicle, March 18, 1996)

(Questions and Background issued by publisher.)

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Tortilla Flat
John Steinbeck, 1935
Penguin Group USA
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140042405

In Brief
Adopting the structure and themes of Arthurian legend, John Steinbeck creates a "Camelot" on a shabby hillside above Monterey on the California coast and peoples it with a colorful band of knights. As he chronicles the thoughts and emotions, temptations and lusts of the "knights", Steinbeck spins a tale as compelling as the famous legends of the Round Table

The story surrounds a group of young jobless men of Mexican descent living on a hilltop in Monterey, California. Kind natured and loyal to one another, they disregard convention, revelling in their idyllic world of poverty. With the advent of World War I, they enlist in a fevor of drunken patriotism, though none of them find their way into combat. They return to Monterey to learn that Danny has been left two houses by his grandfather, which he shares with the group. Thus begin the "adventures," most of which center around acquiring money.

Eventually, Danny, now the leader, becomes disenchanted, and the story takes on darker tones as he attempts to recapture the pleasures of his youth and freedom from responsibility of ownership. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 27, 1902
• Where—Salinas, California USA
• Death—December 20, 1968
• Where—New York, NY
• Education—Studied marine biology at Stanford University,
1919-25
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1940;
Nobel Prize, 1962.

John Ernst Steinbeck, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born in Salinas, California February 27, 1902. His father, John Steinbeck, served as Monterey County Treasurer for many years. His mother, Olive Hamilton, was a former schoolteacher who developed in him a love of literature. Young Steinbeck came to know the Salinas Valley well, working as a hired hand on nearby ranches in Monterey County.

In 1919, he graduated from Salinas High School as president of his class and entered Stanford University majoring in English. Stanford did not claim his undivided attention. During this time he attended only sporadically while working at a variety jobs including on with the Big Sur highway project, and one at Spreckels Sugar Company near Salinas.

Steinbeck left Stanford permanently in 1925 to pursue a career in writing in New York City. He was unsuccessful and returned, disappointed, to California the following year. Though his first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929, it attracted little literary attention. Two subsequent novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To A God Unknown, met the same fate.

After moving to the Monterey Peninsula in 1930, Steinbeck and his new wife, Carol Henning, made their home in Pacific Grove. Here, not far from famed Cannery Row, heart of the California sardine industry, Steinbeck found material he would later use for two more works, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row.

With Tortilla Flat (1935), Steinbeck's career took a decidedly positive turn, receiving the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. He felt encouraged to continue writing, relying on extensive research and personal observation of the human drama for his stories. In 1937, Of Mice and Men was published. Two years later, the novel was produced on Broadway and made into a movie. In 1940, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Grapes of Wrath, bringing to public attention the plight of dispossessed farmers.

After Steinbeck and Henning divorced in 1942, he married Gwyndolyn Conger. The couple moved to New York City and had two sons, Thomas and two years later, John. During the war years, Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Some of his dispatches reappeared in Once There Was A War. In 1945, Steinbeck published Cannery Row and continued to write prolifically, producing plays, short stories and film scripts. In 1950, he married Elaine Anderson Scott and they remained together until his death.

Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 "for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and keen social perception." In his acceptance speech, Steinbeck summarized what he sought to achieve through his works:

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.... Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity of greatness of heart and spirit—gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature...

Steinbeck remained a private person, shunning publicity and moving frequently in his search for privacy. He died on December 20, 1968 in New York City, where he and his family made a home. But his final resting place was the valley he had written about with such passion. At his request, his ashes were interred in the Garden of Memories cemetery in Salinas. He is survived by his son, Thomas. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble, courtesy of the National Steinbeck Center

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

Steinbeck writes with affection about the group that gradually accumulates in Danny's...little wood shacken shack. "The Paisanos," he says, "are clean of commercialism, free of the complicated system of American business, and, having nothing that can be stolen, exploited or mortgaged, that system has not attacked them very vigorously." Mr. Steinbeck tells a number of first-rate stories in his history of Danny's house. He has a gift for drollery...but we doubt if life in Tortilla Flat is as insouciant and pleasant and amusing as Mr. Steinbeck has made it seem.
Fred T. Marsh - New York Times, 10/2/1935

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 Tortilla Flat:

1. To what extent do you admire or disapprove of the Paisanos and their way of life?

2. What might Steinbeck have been getting at? Does he portray the Paisanos as heroes...or not? (Read Steinbeck's preface.) To what degree is this story a commentary on society's materialism?

3. Disucss the character of each of the Paisanos: Danny, Pilon, Pablo, the Pirate, Jesus Maria, and Big Joe. How does each contribute to the overall group—what qualities does each bring to the others? Do you identify with any character—or any of their qualities?

4. At one point, Pilon stops to watch sea gulls soaring in the sky above him. He becomes immersed in the moment and in the appreciation of beauty. Think there might be some sort of thematic concern here? Any ideas?

5. What is at the root of Danny's disenchantment? What motivates him? Do you think he's a tragic figure? Or a martyr of sorts?

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

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Touch
Courtney Maum, 2017
Penguin Random
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735212121

Summary
From the author of the I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, a satirical and moving novel in the spirit of Maria Semple and Jess Walter about a New York City trend forecaster who finds herself wanting to overturn her own predictions, move away from technology, and reclaim her heart.

Sloane Jacobsen is one of the world's most powerful trend forecasters (she was the foreseer of “the swipe”), and global fashion, lifestyle, and tech companies pay to hear her opinions about the future.

Her recent forecasts on the family are unwavering: the world is over-populated, and with unemployment, college costs, and food prices all on the rise, having children is an extravagant indulgence.

So it’s no surprise when the tech giant Mammoth hires Sloane to lead their groundbreaking annual conference, celebrating the voluntarily childless. But not far into her contract, Sloane begins to sense the undeniable signs of a movement against electronics that will see people embracing compassion, empathy, and “in-personism” again.

She’s struggling with the fact that her predictions are hopelessly out of sync with her employer's mission and that her closest personal relationship is with her self-driving car when her partner, the French “neo-sensualist” Roman Bellard, reveals that he is about to publish an op-ed on the death of penetrative sex—a post-sexual treatise that instantly goes viral.

Despite the risks to her professional reputation, Sloane is nevertheless convinced that her instincts are the right ones, and goes on a quest to defend real life human interaction, while finally allowing in the love and connectedness she's long been denying herself.

A poignant and amusing call to arms that showcases her signature biting wit and keen eye, celebrated novelist Courtney Maum’s new book is a moving investigation into what it means to be an individual in a globalized world. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Courtney Maum is the author of the novels Touch (2017) and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You (2014), and the chapbook "Notes from Mexico."

Her short fiction, book reviews, and essays on the writing life have been widely published in outlets such as The New York Times, O Magazine, Tin House, Electric Literature, and Buzzfeed, and she has co-written films that have debuted at Sundance and won awards at Cannes.

Maum graduated from Brown University with a degree in Comparative Literature. She spent several yeaars as a trend forecaster, a fashion publicist, and a party promoter for Corona Extra. Part of that time (five years) she lived in France. She currently works as a product namer for M·A·C cosmetics and other companies from her home in Litchfield County, CT, where she founded the multidisciplinary creative retreat, #TheCabins. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Maum's writing is easy, eager and colloquial…Maum shines when she writes about creativity, the slow burn and then sudden rush of ideas that lead Sloane to change her life. Having new ideas feels like love. We use the same liquid, luminous metaphors for both: lightning, fire, magma, light bulbs. But while love stories are almost mandatory parts of novels (including this one), good writing about creativity is rare. Maum captures that fragile, gratifying, urgent process.
Annalisa Quinn - New York Times Book Review

Touch is an interesting take on what life would be like if we just put down our phones and stepped away from the computer. Maum reminds us to not forget about those who are living and breathing right around us. Because a loving hug, tight squeeze, or simple touch is so much more fulfilling than a text.
Associated Press

At the heart of Maum’s smart, playful, satirical novel is the clash between technology and human interaction. . . . As she demonstrated so well in her previous novel, [Maum] brings astute social observations to relationships, whether workplace or romantic.
National Book Review

A sharp, poignant take on our digitally dependent lives.
Marie Claire

A hilarious workplace send-up and warm-hearted tale of a woman reconfiguring her priorities.
O Magazine

(Starred review.) Maum’s trenchant satirical novel is about the intersection of modern technology and human interaction.… [As] an incisive grasp of where tech and culture meet…[t]he book also captures the mid-life crisis of a woman at the top of her game…perceptive, thought-provoking .
Publishers Weekly

Maum perfectly captures the zeitgeist of our era as technology battles with humanity. Her thought-provoking, humorous book will inspire readers to forgo the electronics and get back to basics as simple as human touch. —Catherine Coyne, Mansfield P.L., MA
Library Journal

(Starred review.) In a work of zealous social critique laced with sexy romantic comedy…Maum’s incisive, charming, and funny novel ebulliently champions the healing powers of touch, the living world, and love in all its crazy risks, surprises, and sustaining radiance.
Booklist

Leave it to a work of fiction—Courtney Maum’s razor-sharp Touch—to bring this vexing issue into focus with compassion and wit.… Maum deftly manipulates [her] tantalizing setup…an entertaining frame for what will continue to be a lively debate.
BookPage

A trend forecaster foresees a solution to the loneliness of this hyperconnected world.… An uncomplicated novel about the complicated relationship between humans and the tech-heavy world.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The theme of premonition—whether through trend forecasting, dreams, or uncanny visions—is central in Touch. Do you believe in the ability to predict the future? If you were a trend forecaster, what predictions would you make?

2. Why does Anastasia become so important to Sloane? What does their relationship say about Sloane’s ability to form connections?

3. Do you think that Sloane’s predictions about the future of human contact are correct? In what ways have you seen (or not seen) a movement against technology in favor of face-to-face interactions in society?

4. How does the death of Sloane’s father inform her decisions in life? Why was she ultimately able to move past his death and connect with her family again?

5. The relationship between Sloane and her sister, Leila, is complex. Discuss its up and downs. Did you find Sloane’s apology to Leila satisfying? What do you think their relationship will be like going forward?

6. What, in your mind, drew Sloane to Roman? Why did they stay together for so long? In what ways did he help—or hinder—Sloane’s career? Did you find him to be a likable character?

7. Why did Roman’s article about the death of penetrative sex prove to be so divisive? Are there ways in which augmented virtual reality can benefit society? In what ways is it frightening?

8. The title of the novel is somewhat open-ended: what does it mean to the different characters? What does the idea of touch embody within the context of the book?

9. The New York City setting is an important element of Touch. How do setting and location affect the characters? Could Sloane’s transformation have occurred in another place? Compare and contrast Sloane’s actions and decisions in her two different home countries.

10. Discuss the final confrontation between Sloane and Dax. What are the pros and cons of each of their arguments? Do you see tech and touch as a dichotomy?

11. Many of the main characters in Touch are mothers—Sloane’s mother, Jin’s mother, and Leila—and Sloane is initially defined by her opposition to parenthood. Discuss the various representations of motherhood in Touch. How do they compare with your own relationships or opinions about parenting?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Touch & Go
Lisa Gardner, 2013
Penguin Group USA
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451465849

Summary
This is my family: Vanished without a trace...
Justin and Libby Denbe have the kind of life you’d find in the pages of a glossy magazine. A beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter. A gorgeous brownstone on a tree-lined street in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. A great marriage, admired by all. A perfect life.

This is what I know: Pain has a flavor...
When investigator Tessa Leone arrives at the crime scene in the foyer of the Denbes’ home, she finds scuff marks on the floor and a million tiny pieces of bright green Taser confetti. The family appears to have been abducted, with only a pile of their cell phones and electronic devices remaining. No witnesses, no ransom demands, no motive. Just a perfect little family, gone.

This is what I fear...
The worst is yet to come... Tessa knows better than anyone that flawless fronts can hide the darkest secrets. Now she must race against the clock to uncover the Denbes’ innermost dealings, a complex tangle of friendships and betrayal, big business and small sacrifices. Who would want to kidnap such a perfect little family? And how far would such a person be willing to go?

This is the truth: Love, safety, family...it’s all touch and go. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• AKA—Alicia Scott
• Birth—ca. 1971-72
• Where—Hillsboro, Oregon, USA
• Education—University of Pennsylvania
• Awards—Best Hardcove (Int'l. Thriller Writers); France's Grand Prix des lectrices
de Elle, prix du policie; Daphne du Maurier Award (Romances Writers of America)
• Currently—lives in New Hampshire

Lisa Gardner is an American author of fiction. She is the author of 30 some novels, including thriller-suspense works such as The Killing Hour, The Next Accident, Catch Me, and most recently Find Her. She also has written romance novels using the pseudonym Alicia Scott. With over 22 million books in print, Lisa is published in 30 countries. Four of her novels have been adapted as TV movies.

Her work as a research analyst for a consulting firm spurred her interest in police procedure, cutting edge forensics and twisted plots—a fascination she parlayed into more than 16 bestselling suspense novels.

Raised in Hillsboro, Oregon, she graduated from the city's Glencoe High School. As of 2007, Gardner lives in New Hampshire. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)

Book Reviews
This no-holds-barred stand-alone...opens with the brutally efficient kidnapping of the Denbe family.... Gardner effectively alternates between the physical and emotional disintegration of the family...and the efforts...to locate the Denbes. The suspense builds as the action races to a spectacular conclusion and the unmasking of the plot’s mastermind.
Publishers Weekly

What does a perfect life look like? On the surface, Justin and Libby Denbe seem to have found it.... The Denbes' lives are turned upside down when they are brutally abducted from their home.... [In a] race to find the Denbes before it’s too late....page-turning suspense...leads to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion. —Cynthia Price, Francis Marion Univ. Lib., Florence, SC
Library Journal

Gardner’s depiction of a woman in the midst of emotional chaos is spot on, as usual, and she proves herself just as capable when it comes to creating intriguing men. Readers will want to see more of Wyatt, just as they grew to appreciate Bobby Dodge in Gardner’s earlier books
Booklist

What does a perfect life look like? On the surface, Justin and Libby Denbe seem to have found it.... The Denbes' lives are turned upside down when they are brutally abducted from their home.... [In a] race to find the Denbes before it’s too late....page-turning suspense...leads to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion. —Cynthia Price, Francis Marion Univ. Lib., Florence, SC.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What was your initial impression of each character of the Denbe family at the beginning of the book? How did those impressions evolve or change throughout the novel?

2. In Touch & Go there are two “family units” throughout most of the book, the Denbes and their captors. Do you see any similarities between these two units? Do these groups mirror each other in any way?

3. The Denbe family faces some loaded issues throughout the novel. Do you think that the way they handle these issues in captivity is similar (albeit amplified) to how they would have handled them in their normal life?

4. What did you consider the most torturous aspect of the Denbes' captivity? Physical? Mental?

5. Radar is a complex character. Do you think he redeems himself by helping the Denbes while in captivity?

6. Z is portrayed as a villain with a moral code. Does that make him admirable, or does the fact that he’s adamant about some rules—he always keeps his word—make it more heinous that he’s willing to cross other lines?

7. Do you blame Justin for his family’s situation—both their captivity and their broken nature—or do you see their predicament as a joint effort?

8. Children are a strong theme throughout the book. Tessa is concerned for her daughter as are the Denbes for their daughter, but sometimes the children seem to have more insight than the adults. Do you think Lisa Gardner did this on purpose?

9. Libby Denbe turns to prescription drug use as an escape from her husband’s infidelity. Because of this, is it possible to view Libby as a hero?

10. Many of the characters in this book appear innocent but turn out to be extremely flawed. Which characters (if any) were you surprised by when you found out their darkest secrets?

11. What do you think will happen with Tessa and Wyatt?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Towelhead
Alicia Erian, 2005
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743285124

Summary
It is August, 1990. Saddam Hussein has just invaded Kuwait, and Jasira's mother has bought her daughter a one-way ticket to Texas to live with her strict Lebanese father. Living in a neat model home in Charming Gates, just outside Houston, Jasira struggles with her father's rigid lifestyle and the racism of her classmates, who call her "towelhead."

For the first time, the painful truth hits her: she's an Arab. Her aching loneliness and growing frustration with her parents' conflicting rules drive her to rebel in very dangerous ways. Most disturbingly, she becomes sexually obsessed with the bigoted army reservist next door, who alternately cares for, excites, and exploits her. (From the publisher.)

Towelhead became a 2007 film titled Nothing is Private.

Author Bio
• Birth—1967
• Where—Syracuse, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York, Binghamton;
M.F.A., Vermont College
• Currently—lives in Massachusetts

Alicia Erian is an American author born in Syracuse, New York, to an Egyptian father and American mother. She received a B.A. in English from SUNY Binghamton and a M.F.A. in writing from Vermont College.

A writer of short stories, some of her work has appeared in Zoetrope, Playboy, and the Iowa Review. She has published one collection of short stories; Towelhead is her first novel.

Erian lived in Brooklyn, New York, for a time with ex-husband David Franklin, but now lives in Massachusetts, where she taught creative writing at Wellesley College (2004–2008). She has worked as a film director and screenwriter, and has also attracted interest from Julia Roberts' production company, American Girl Films, as well as Francis Ford Coppola.

Erian's first published work was a collection of short stories titled, The Brutal Language of Love, published in 2001. Each story features a female protagonist and are heartbreaking tales of love and sex, and dilemmas caused by the intertwining of the two.

Alicia Erian's 2005 novel, Towelhead is a coming of age story about a thirteen-year-old girl named Jasira, who is sent from her Euro-American mother's home in Syracuse, New York to live with her Lebanese father in Houston, Texas. The novel has been adapted into a film written and directed by Alan Ball, starring Summer Bishil, Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette, Maria Bello, and Peter Macdissi.

In 2008, Alicia Erian wrote the screenplay for the short film "Hammer and Anvil," which was developed at the Sundance Institute's 2008 January Screenwriters Lab. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Towelhead is the kind of book that attaches unusual reflectiveness to that particular echo of war. Jasira is old enough to know that women sometimes have sex with departing soldiers because these men may never return. But she's too young to know whether, since Mr. Vuoso will not have a combat assignment, he ought to qualify. Ms. Erian gives this gutsy book its full share of such unthinkable questions.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

Erain's gift for conjuring characters is so strong; she has a sophisticated take on people and charts with real precision how and why the human comedy becomes seriously unfunny.
Jeff Giles - New York Times Book Review

War, statutory rape, child abuse, and racism are hardly the stuff of comedy, but in Towelhead, Alicia Erain succeeds in blending this weird and sometimes shocking mix of elements in a funny, poignant, and utterly readable first novel.
Susan Coil - Washington Post

Erian takes a dogged, unflinching look at what happens as a young woman's sexuality blooms when only a predatory neighbor is paying attention. After 13-year-old Jasira is sent to live with her father in Houston ("I didn't want to live with Daddy. He had a weird accent and came from Lebanon"), she finds herself coming of age in the shadow of his old world, authoritarian ideas, which include a ban on tampons (they're for married women, he insists) and a friendship with a boy who's black. Trapped between her father's rigidity and a wider culture that seems without rules, Jasira is left to handle puberty on her own, as well as her budding sexual desire and an ongoing longing for love and acceptance. Her creepy neighbor, Mr. Vuoso, senses her desires, and she responds eagerly to his sexual overtures. His willingness to eroticize her is heightened by how exotic—as well as distasteful—he finds her, a half–Middle Eastern child living in America on the eve of the first Gulf War. He hires Jasira to baby-sit for his son, and it's clear that their relationship will destroy them. The writing is not subtle—indeed, it can be quite clunky—but as a meditation on race, adolescence and alienation, the novel has moments of power.
Publishers Weekly

Sent to the United States by her mother when Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, Jasira must cope with her strict father and the realization that she is an Arab. This full-length debut from a gifted story writer is an in-house favorite.
Library Journal

Jasira's narration is so relentlessly focused on her sexuality and the horrifying abuse she suffers that it becomes hard to read. The historical context—the novel is set before and during the first Gulf War—may be intended as parable, but Jasira's pain consumes the novel so fully that it overwhelms political symbolism. Instead, it is Jasira's straightforward, understated voice that gives power to this.
Booklist

A tedious, fairly moronic take on the pubescent hormone surge, told by a 13-year-old girl. Jasira, prosaically named after Jasir Arafat by her now-divorced Lebanese father and Irish mother, can't help attracting men, with her 34-inch "boobs," so-called by her sexually jealous mother, who sends her to live with her "cheap and bossy" father. But it's even worse in Houston, where Daddy works for NASA and lives in a housing complex with a pool she won't use because of the abundant pubic hair she's embarrassed about, and where Mr. Vuoso, the father of the neighbor boy she baby-sits, gives her a Playboy magazine (she practices masturbation) and comes on to her. Her own father, Rifat, being an old-style Arab, "doesn't like bodies," is horrified by Jasira's incipient womanhood, and forbids her to use tampons or to befriend a black boy from school, Thomas, who genuinely wants to have sex with her. Added tension simmers between Mr. Vuoso, who's a rabidly patriotic military reservist ("towelheads" is his epithet), and Rifat, who bitterly resents the American war machine aimed at the Arabs. The story consists largely of unedited and utterly uninteresting dialogue that goes on and on to demonstrate how Jasira, who seems to have no will of her own, thinks (slowly). Given the meanness around her—from her petty but envious mother; her irascible father, who's prone to strike her; and the manipulative and insulting Mr. Vuoso, her seething crush across the street—she receives little guidance as a sexual creature. Not even the cool and pregnant neighbor Melina, who senses the crisis and gives Jasira the progressive primer Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, is able to protect Jasira from herself—that is, from the explosive sexuality that's entangling her and everyone around her in a kind of gruesome physicality. Storyteller Erian creates a hypnotic effect through her characters' repetitive dumbness—in a first novel that's annoying and memorable.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why does Jasira's mother send her to live with her father? Does her mother feel threatened by Jasira's budding sexuality? Do you think this is common between mothers and daughters? Why does her mother stay with her boyfriend after she finds out about his inappropriate behavior with Jasira?

2. Discuss the ways Jasira's life with her father changes from living with her mother. Is Jasira's father's corporeal punishment appropriate for a 13-year-old? Is corporeal punishment appropriate for children of any age? How much of Jasira's father's punishment style is due to cultural differences? At what point does her father's physical punishment cross over into abuse?

4. As Towelhead unfolds, the Gulf War begins. The characters hold a wide range of opinions about the war. Compare Jasira's father, Mr. Vuoso, and Melina's views about U.S. involvement in the Gulf War. Are the children's opinions (Jasira, Thomas, Zack, and Denise) about the war revealed? How did the people around you react to U.S. involvement in the Gulf War? Was it different from their opinions about the more recent U.S. involvement in war in the Mideast? If yes, how?

5. How does Jasira handle the racism she experiences at school, from her neighbor Zack, and her father and mother when she dates an African-American? Should she have handled it any differently? Compare how she and her boyfriend Thomas react to racism. Why or why not are you surprised by Jasira's father's racism toward Thomas, given that he has experienced racism too? What are the best ways to handle overt (i.e., name-calling) and covert (i.e., nasty looks or aversive behavior)racism? Do you think racism against Arab-Americans will continue to increase?

6. Jasira allows her mother's boyfriend Barry and her neighbor Mr. Vuoso to touch her sexually. She does not seem to think that these grown men's sexual advances are inappropriate. Why do you think this is? What do we know about Jasira's emotional health before and after she moves to Texas?

7. Jasira and Thomas are both 13 years old. Do you think their level of sexual knowledge and activity is "normal" in the United States? How should parents or authority figures handle the subject of teenage sex?

8. Even in the best of circumstances, every parent makes mistakes with their children. Are Jasira's parents "good" parents? Why or why not?

9. Mr. Vuoso gives Jasira a Playboy magazine when he discovers her looking at it. What does this gift reveal about him? Mr. Vuoso has a large collection of Playboy magazines. Do you think his taste for pornography made him prone to rationalizing his behavior with Jasira? Or did he understand what he was doing? Was Mr. Vuoso a child molester, a rapist, or neither? Was his punishment appropriate for what he did?

10. Jasira becomes aroused while looking at the naked women in Playboy. Does this indicate that she may be a lesbian or bisexual? Why or why not?

11. How does Jasira's father's discovery of the Playboy in her room change Jasira's life? What would her life have been like had he not discovered the Playboy?

12. What role does Melina play in Jasira's life? Jasira doesn't feel happy about Melina's pregnancy, and in fact, resents the forthcoming new baby. Why does she feel this way? How does she feel about the baby at the end of the book?

13. Toward the end of Towelhead, Jasira's father and Melina become friends, albeit wary ones. What causes them to bond? Will their friendship last?

14. Though Towelhead primarily focuses on the personal lives of its characters, it also reveals the political climate of 1991. Discuss some of the specific behaviors (i.e., the proliferation of American flags) and feelings about the Mideast that have changed in the United States since then.
(Questions issued by publsher.)

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The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise
Julia Stuart, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385533287

Summary
Balthazar Jones has lived in the Tower of London with his loving wife, Hebe, and his 120-year-old pet tortoise for the past eight years. That’s right, he is a Beefeater (they really do live there). It’s no easy job living and working in the tourist attraction in present-day London.

Among the eccentric characters who call the Tower’s maze of ancient buildings and spiral staircases home are the Tower’s Rack & Ruin barmaid, Ruby Dore, who just found out she’s pregnant; portly Valerie Jennings, who is falling for ticket inspector Arthur Catnip; the lifelong bachelor Reverend Septimus Drew, who secretly pens a series of principled erotica; and the philandering Ravenmaster, aiming to avenge the death of one of his insufferable ravens.

When Balthazar is tasked with setting up an elaborate menagerie within the Tower walls to house the many exotic animals gifted to the Queen, life at the Tower gets all the more interesting. Penguins escape, giraffes are stolen, and the Komodo dragon sends innocent people running for their lives. Balthazar is in charge and things are not exactly running smoothly. Then Hebe decides to leave him and his beloved tortoise “runs” away.

Filled with the humor and heart that calls to mind the delightful novels of Alexander McCall Smith, and the charm and beauty of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise is a magical, wholly original novel whose irresistible characters will stay with you long after you turn the stunning last page. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Rasied—West Midlands, England, UK
• Education—N/A
• Currently—Bahrain

Julia Stuart is an English novelist and journalist. She grew up in the West Midlands, England, and studied French and Spanish. She lived for a period in France and Spain teaching English.

After studying journalism at university, she worked on regional newspapers for six years. She worked for The Independent for eight years. In 2007, she relocated to Bahrain with her husband, who is also a journalist.

Stuart's first novel, The Matchmaker of Périgord, published in 2007, is the story of a barber in decline who decides to open a matchmaking agency in the small French town of Amor-Sur-Belle. The story was inspired by a visit to Périgord. The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise, Stuart's second novel, published in 2010, is the story of Balthazar Jones who lives and works in the Tower of London with his wife and his 120-year-old tortiose. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[The] delightfully zany and touching novel, The Tower, The Zoo, and the Tortoise, by British writer Julia Stuart, has jumped the queue to take readers on a fictional romp through the Tower’s realm…With her deft and charming style, Stuart brings this comic story to a satisfying and heartwarming end.
Washington Post

The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise is the perfect summer confection—feather-light without being feather-brained. Julia Stuart has penned a work that is original and every-page amusing, and she's peopled it with characters that move into your heart.
Denver Post

Julia Stuart's sweet The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise is a blessing, undisguised and undeniable, and apparent from the very first sentence.... Stuart's clever, amusing and touching story rolls along with wit and tenderness. By the time she concludes this tale at once contemporary and timeless, she and her characters—biped and quadruped—have won the reader's heart.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

The Tower of London’s the center of this hilarious love story about Beefeater Balthazar, his wife, their tortoise and their eccentric friends. As Balthazar struggles to save his marriage, the rest of the cast carries on in a charming tangle, and when Balthazar is put in charge of a Tower zoo, hilarity breaks out. Sprinkled with fascinating Tower lore, the book will steal your heart. (4 out of 4 stars.)
People Magazine

A Beefeater, his wife, and their nearly 180-year-old tortoise live in the Tower of London, and if Stuart's deadly charming sophomore novel (after The Matchmaker of Perigord) is any indication, the fortress is as full of intrigue as ever. Balthazar and Hebe Jones lost their son, Milo, to illness three years ago, and while Beefeater Balthazar grieves silently and obsessively collects rainwater in perfume bottles, Hebe wants to talk about their loss openly. Hebe works in the thematically convenient London Underground Lost Property Office, and the abandoned items that reside there (an ash-filled urn, a gigolo's diary, Dustin Hoffman's Oscar) are almost as peculiar as the unruly animals (lovebirds not in love, a smelly zorilla, monkeys with a peculiar nervous tic) in the Tower's new menagerie, given to the queen and overseen by Balthazar. Passion, desperation, and romantic shenanigans abound among the other Tower-dwellers: the Reverend, an erotic fiction writer, has eyes for a bartender, and the Ravenmaster is cheating on his wife with the cook. Though the cuteness sometimes comes across a little thick, the love story is adorabley.
Publishers Weekly

Charming, witty, and heartfelt, Stuart's second novel is even more delightful than her debut, The Matchmaker of Périgord. A perfect suggestion for fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society; highly recommended
Library Journal

[Stuart's novel] is grounded by the moving central love story. This sweet romp will appeal to history buffs.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. While filled with humour, The Tower, the Zoo and the Tortoise has an undercurrent of heartache. Why do you think the author included the tragic element—could the story have survived without it?

2. The novel is strewn with historical anecdotes. Which do you think are true, and which do you think the author made up, if any?

3. Much is made of British humour. Do you think that there is any difference between British and American humour? If so, how is it demonstrated in the book?

4. Explain the correlation between Balthazar’s inability to cry about Milo’s death and his obsession with collecting rain drops.

5. Hebe Jones sarcastically states that “It’s every woman’s dream to live in a castle.” (p. 22) How is this statement not true for Hebe. What do you think is Hebe’s dream?

6. What is the main attraction between Arthur Catnip and Valerie Jennings? How are they a well-suited match?

7. How is the lost safe significant to Hebe and Valerie? Is their any significance to the timing of when the lock is opened?

8. Reverend Septimus Drew seems to be a walking contradiction. Outside of his hidden hobby, what else is surprising/contradictory about his character?

9. All of the characters seem to be in search of something—whether lost love, items, loved ones, or animals. Who do you think is the most fulfilled character in the book, if there is any? Why?

10. Sir Walter Raleigh and many other spirits claim to haunt the Tower. What element do these ghosts add to the book? Is it more spiritual or superstitious?

11. What is the significance of the urn that Hebe finds in London Underground’s Lost Property Office? Why is she so resolved to find its owner?

12. Explain how infidelity affects various characters in the book.

13. How does working in the menagerie make Balthazar feel closer to Milo?

14. What role does Mrs. Cook play in the novel? She is in part responsible for Balthazar’s job at the menagerie—how else has she played an integral role in Hebe and Balthazar’s lives?

15. What role does storytelling and letter writing play in the book? Balthazar won both Hebe and Milo’s hearts with his grand storytelling. Who else from the Tower is a raconteur?

___________________

Quiz-for-Fun: Which character in the novel are you? Answer the following questions and find out who!

1. You are tasked with babysitting your neighbor's new piglets for the weekend when one decides to flee your grasp and head for the hills. What do you do?

a) Call your best friend who works at the local Lost and Found and report a missing mammal.

b) Sit idle. Pigs, regardless of size are too fast to catch.

c) Grab a handful of fruits and veggies from the fridge and head out to lure the piglet back to safety.

d) Grimace and wring your hands as you realize that this animal on the loose has not only delayed your finishing your latest bodice-buster, but also caused you to burn the treacle cake that was baking in the oven.

2. You are invited to visit friends in New York City and have some spare time before you're due to meet them. What do you do while you wait?

a) Stop at Alice's Tea Cup for tea and a scone and then ride the subway through the boroughs looking for items riders have left behind. New Yorkers must have some interesting things to lose, right?

b) Enjoy some shade in Central Park. No need to exhaust yourself in the concrete jungle just yet.

c) Take a leisurely stroll through Central Park Zoo. You've heard there are new chinstrap penguins in the Penguin House!

d) Head to the MTA office to complain about the rat infestation in the subway system.

3. Your boss just gave you the day off of work. How will you spend these precious hours of freedom?

a) Catching up on the latest town gossip with your best friend.

b) Work? I ve been retired for a very long time. Every day is a day off!

c) At the local pub. Every vacation day deserves its own toast!

d) Speed dating. There have to be some eligible singles out there with a comparable penchant for storytelling.

4. You're just headed out of the grocery store when it starts pouring rain and you don't have an umbrella. How do you react?

a) There's no sense in getting upset over a shower. You'll dry off and warm up with some tea when you make it home.

b) Piece of cake. My outerwear is always durable and I could use a good rinse.

c) Rain fascinates you. You don't care if all of your groceries get soggy; you're going to soak up this rain for as long as you can.

d) You pull your coat up over your head and hurry home to make sure the rain isn't driving the field mice indoors.

5. You just won a contest through your local radio station. You've won an all expense paid trip to any city/country of your choice. Where will you go?

a) Santorini, Greece: You love the history and heritage, not to mention the views!

b) The town next door has always intrigued you. You can only carry what's on your back, so the proximity helps you cut down on packing.

c) South Africa: You'll finally be able to see wild animals in their natural habitat.

d) Rome, Italy: You've always wanted to visit the Coliseum and hear stories about its classic battles and gladiator contests.

If you answered mostly . . .

A: You are Hebe Jones! Loyal friend and dedicated employee with an affinity for problem solving.

B: You are Mrs. Cook! The Jones 181-year-old tortoise. The oldest tortoise in the world. Congratulations; you ve earned the right to be lazy.

C: You are Balthazar Jones! Animal lover and collector of rain.

D: You are Reverend Septimus Drew! The Tower's lovelorn chaplain who despises mice and has a secret passion for writing well, you know

(Quiz and questions issued by publisher.)

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The Tragedy of Arthur
Arthur Phillips, 2011
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812977929

Summary
The book's doomed hero is Arthur Phillips, a young man struggling with a larger-than-life father, a con artist who works wonders of deception but is a most unreliable parent.

Arthur is raised in an enchanted world of smoke and mirrors where the only unshifting truth is his father’s and his beloved twin sister’s deep and abiding love for the works of William Shakespeare—a love so pervasive that Arthur becomes a writer in a misguided bid for their approval and affection.

Years later, Arthur’s father, imprisoned for decades and nearing the end of his life, shares with Arthur a treasure he’s kept secret for half a century: a previously unknown play by Shakespeare, titled The Tragedy of Arthur. But Arthur and his sister also inherit their father’s mission: to see the play published and acknowledged as the Bard’s last great gift to humanity.

Unless it’s their father’s last great con.

By turns hilarious and haunting, this virtuosic novel—which includes Shakespeare’s (?) lost King Arthur play in its five-act entirety—captures the very essence of romantic and familial love and betrayal. The Tragedy of Arthur explores the tension between storytelling and truth-telling, the thirst for originality in all our lives, and the act of literary mythmaking, both now and four centuries ago, as the two Arthurs—Arthur the novelist and Arthur the ancient king—play out their individual but strangely intertwined fates. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 23, 1969
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard
• Currently—lives in New York City

Arthur Phillips is an American novelist active in the 21st century. His novels include Prague (2002), The Egyptologist (2004), Angelica (2007), The Song Is You (2009), and The Tragedy of Arthur (2011).

Phillips was born in Minneapolis and received a BA in history from Harvard (1986–90). After spending two years in Budapest (1990–1992), he then studied jazz saxophone for four semesters at Berklee College of Music (1992–93).[2] In his author biography and several interviews he claims to have been a child actor, a jazz musician, a five-time Jeopardy! champion, a speechwriter, and an advertising copywriter for medical devices, and a "dismally failed entrepreneur." He lived in Budapest from 1990 to 1992 and in Paris from 2001 to 2003, and now lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

Before becoming a best-selling novelist, Phillips was (in fact) a five-time champion on Jeopardy! in 1997. In 2005, he competed in the Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions. He won his opening-round game but lost in the second round.

Books
• Prague (2002)
Despite its title, Prague is set almost entirely in Budapest, Hungary, primarily in 1990, with an interlude detailing several previous generations of Hungarian history, from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy through the First and Second World Wars.

The main line of the novel follows a group of young Western expatriates through their lives in Budapest. Interwoven tales produce an ensemble portrait of the expats and their adopted city, just recovering from decades of Communism, fascism, and war. The novel's recurring themes include nostalgia, sincerity and authenticity, and young people's first search for meaning in life. The novel was well received commercially and critically, winning Phillips the 2003 Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for Best First Fiction, as well as other honors.

• The Egyptologist (2004)
The novel is structured as journals, letters, telegrams, and drawings, from several different points of view. The main story is set in 1922 and follows a hopeful explorer who, working near Howard Carter (the man who discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun), risks more and more of his life and savings on an apparently quixotic effort to find the tomb of an apocryphal Egyptian king.

The book was an international bestseller and critical success in more than two dozen countries. US critics noted Phillips's versatility in producing a book so different from his first, and fans of the book included Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, Elizabeth Peters, and Stephen King. Others, however, most notably Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, found the book overlong and confusing.

• Angelica (2007)
Superficially a Victorian ghost story, Angelica won Phillips comparisons to Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Stephen King. King himself praised the book, and the Washington Post opined that it cemented Phillips's reputation as "one of the best writers in America."

In the novel, the same events are retold four times from four different perspectives, each section casting doubt on the version that came before, until the reader is left to sort truth from fantasy on his or her own. Although the novel received extensive critical praise, it was a commercial disappointment.

• The Song Is You (2009)
Phillips's fourth novel tells the story of a middle-aged man's pursuit of a young woman, an Irish pop singer he sees performing in a bar. Kirkus Reviews said, "Phillips still looks like the best American novelist to have emerged during the present decade."

• The Tragedy of Arthur (2011)
This fifth book was shortlisted for the IMPAC International Literary Prize. A faux memoir, the story revolves around a con-man father who convinces his son to sell a hitherto unknown Shakespeare play. Publishers Weekly called it "a tricky project, funny and brazen, smart and playful." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/21/2014.)

Book Reviews
Arthur Phillips has found the perfect vehicle for his cerebral talents: his ingenuity; his bright, elastic prose; and, most notably, his penchant for pastiche—for pouring his copious literary gifts into old vessels and reinventing familiar genres…With The Tragedy of Arthur Mr. Phillips has created a wonderfully tricky Chinese puzzle box of a novel that is as entertaining as it is brainy. If its characters are a little emotionally predictable, we don't mind all that much: we're more interested in seeing how the author cuts and sands his puzzle pieces, assembles them into a pretty contraption and then inserts lots of mirrors and false bottoms.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

[T]he novelist's art is a cunning ability to lure the reader into treating counterfeit bills as if they were current. And this particular novel—a fictional memoir posing as a fraudulent introduction to a forged play—is a spectacular instance of the confidence game. It is a tribute to Arthur Phillips's singular skill that his work leaves the reader not with resentment at having been tricked but rather with gratitude for the gift of feigned wonder.
Stephen Greenblatt - New York Times Book Review

I suspect that most readers will greatly enjoy Phillips's easygoing and digressive, if admittedly self-absorbed introduction. Just think of the joyless academic prose that a professional Elizabethan might have produced!…The Tragedy of Arthur, however you view it, shows off a writer at the top of his game.
Michael Dirda - Washington Post

Devious and exhilarating...an irresistible family drama bundled into an exploration of fraud and authenticity.
Wall Street Journal

Wily and witty...an engrossing family saga [with] sparkling and imaginative prose. Shakespeare would applaud a man who does him so proud.
Boston Globe

A circus of a novel, full of wit, pathos and irrepressible intelligence.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

The story of a family that is Shakespearean in several senses.... [The Tragedy of Arthur] contains literary echoes of Nabokov, Stoppard and even...Thomas Pynchon.
San Francisco Chronicle

Their father spends most of [Arthur and his sister Dana's] lives in prison, but when he's about to be released as a frail old man, he enlists Arthur in securing the publication of The Tragedy of Arthur from an original quarto he claims to have purloined from a British estate decades earlier.... It's a tricky project, funny and brazen, smart and playful.
Publishers Weekly

A memoir and a Shakespearean play wrapped into a novel?.... The narrator—a knockoff of the author himself?—relates the obsession of his father and twin sister with the Bard of Avon and the discovery within the family of a hitherto unknown play by none other than.... [T]he narrator pokes wicked fun at the ubiquitous memoir genre.... [I]nspired, original, entertaining writing—deftly delivered here by one of our most talented authors. —Edward Cone, New York
Library Journal

The always-original Phillips has outdone himself in this clever literary romp. Successfully blending and bending genres, he positions himself as a character in a novel that skewers Shakespearean scholarship, the publishing industry, and his own life to rollicking effect.... [Y]ou simply must read the book.... [Phillips] continues to intrigue and amaze. —Margaret Flanagane
Booklist

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Trail of Broken Wings
Sejal Badani, 2015
Amazon Publishing
370 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781477822081

Summary
Nominee, 2015 Goodreads Best Book of the Year.

When her father falls into a coma, Indian American photographer Sonya reluctantly returns to the family she’d fled years before. Since she left home, Sonya has lived on the run, free of any ties, while her soft-spoken sister, Trisha, has created a perfect suburban life, and her ambitious sister, Marin, has built her own successful career.

But as these women come together, their various methods of coping with a terrifying history can no longer hold their memories at bay.

Buried secrets rise to the surface as their father—the victim of humiliating racism and perpetrator of horrible violence—remains unconscious. As his condition worsens, the daughters and their mother wrestle with private hopes for his survival or death, as well as their own demons and buried secrets.

Told with forceful honesty, Trail of Broken Wings reveals the burden of shame and secrets, the toxicity of cruelty and aggression, and the exquisite, liberating power of speaking and owning truth. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
A former attorney, Sejal Badani left the law to pursue writing full time. She was an ABC/Disney Writing Fellowship and CBS Writing Fellowship Finalist.

When not writing, she loves reading, biking along the ocean, traveling and trying to teach her teacup Morkie not to hide socks under the bed (so far she has been completely unsuccessful). Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, and Ed Sheeran are always playing in the background. She would love to speak to book clubs via Skypes. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
There are no maintstream media reviews online for this title. Head to Amazon, Goodreads, and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers talking points to help start your discussion for TRAIL OF BROKEN WINGS … then take off on your own:

1. Trail of Broken Wings is told through four different characters. Whose story, or character, do you find most compelling, and why? The persepctives, however, vary: two use a first-person narration, while two others use a third-person. Why might the author have chosen two differing points of view?

2. Talk about the different ways in which the sisters have responded to, or coped with, their father's abuse.

3. Brent the father is comatose through the book, yet he is possibly the most influential character. Talk about who he is--what we come to learn about him. How have his past actions affected the lives of his wife and daughters? Do you have sympathy for him? Might extenuating circumstances excuse his actions?

4. What does this book suggest about the power of secrets—in a family or in an individual life? What is your personal understanding of why secrets become secrets? Might it be better for some of life's suffering to be kept under wraps—or do you think it's always best to bring them to light, to keep them from becoming "secrets"?

5. To what extent does the past determine the future? Is it possible to ever break free of the past—and if so, how? What does this novel seem to say?

6. What part does trust and love play in healing in Trail of Broken Wings?

7. What is the significance of the book's title, "Trail of Broken Wings"?

8. What do you think of the book's ending? Is it earned? Or is it unrealistic and pat?

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

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Train Dreams: A Novella
Denis Johnson, 2011
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
128 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374281144

Summary
Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions.

Robert Grainer is a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime.

Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—the new novella by the National Book Award-winning author of Tree of Smoke captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1949
• Where—Munich, Germany (of American parents)
• Education—M.F.A., University of Iowa, USA
• Awards—National Book Award; Whiting Writer's Award; Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize
• Currently—lives in Arizona and Idaho, USA

Denis Hale Johnson is an American author who is known for his short-story collection Jesus' Son (1992), his novel Tree of Smoke (2007), which won the National Book Award, his novella, Train Dreams (2011), and The Laughing Monsters (2014). He also writes plays, poetry and non-fiction.

Johnson was born in 1949 in Munich, West Germany. He holds an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he has also returned to teach. He received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1986 and a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction in 1993.

Johnson first came to prominence after the publication of his short story collection Jesus' Son (1992), whose 1999 film adaptation was named one of the top ten films of the year by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Roger Ebert. Johnson has a cameo role in the film as a man who has been stabbed in the eye by his wife.

Johnson's plays have been produced in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Seattle. He is the Resident Playwright of Campo Santo, the resident theater company at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco.

In 2006-2007, Johnson held the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

Johnson lives with his wife, Cindy Lee, in Arizona and Idaho. He has three children, two of whom he homeschooled; in October, 1997 he wrote an article for Salon.com in defense of homeschooling. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
I first read Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams in a bright orange 2002 issue of The Paris Review and felt that old thrill of discovery.... Every once in a while, over the ensuing nine years, I’d page through that Paris Review and try to understand how Johnson had made such a quietly compelling thing. Part of it, of course, is atmosphere. Johnson’s evocation of Prohibition Idaho is totally persuasive.... The novella also accumulates power because Johnson is as skilled as ever at balancing menace against ecstasy, civilization against wilderness. His prose tiptoes a tightrope between peace and calamity, and beneath all of the novella’s best moments, Johnson runs twin strains of tenderness and the threat of violence...it might be the most powerful thing Johnson has ever written.
Athony Doerr - New York Times Book Review

Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is like a long out-of-print B-side, a hard-to-find celebrated work treasured by those in the know that’s finally become available to the rest of us.... Train Dreams is a peculiarly gripping book. It palpably conjures the beauty of an American West then still very much a place of natural wonder and menace, and places one man’s lonely life in that landscape, where he’s at once comfortably at home and utterly lost.
Dan DeLuca - Philadelphia Inquirer

His hero, Robert Grainier, a sometimes logger and sometimes hauler, is as dislocated as any wandering druggy from an earlier Johnson book. And in these logging camps and train towns, Johnson has found a territory as strange and unpredictable as any dystopic landscape of his imagination. In a way, Train Dreams puts me in mind of a late Bob Dylan album: with the wildness and psychedelia of youth burned out of him, Johnson's eccentricity is revealed as pure Americana.
Gabriel Brownstein - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Johnson’s new novella may be his most pared-down work of fiction yet, but make no mistake—it packs a wallop.... Train Dreams is a small book of weighty ideas. It renders the story of America and our westward course of empire in the most beautiful and heartbreaking manner imaginable.... Train Dreams explores what was lost in the process of American growth. Much to his credit, Johnson doesn’t simply posit industry and nature against each other, or science and religion, or even human and animal, but instead looks at how their interactions can transform both. And [Robert] Grainier is there through all of this examination, over the course of his long and sad life, to serve as our witness and maybe even our conscience.
Andrew Ervin - Miami Herald

[A] severely lovely tale.... The visionary, miraculous element in Johnson’s deceptively tough realism makes beautiful appearances in this book. The hard, declarative sentences keep their powder dry for pages at a time, and then suddenly flare into lyricism; the natural world of the American West is examined, logged, and frequently transfigured. I started reading Train Dreams with hoarded suspicion, and gradually gave it all away, in admiration of the story’s unaffected tact and honesty.
James Wood - The New Yorker

Readers eager for a fat follow-up to Tree of Smoke could be forgiven a modicum of skepticism at this tidy volume...but it would be a shame to pass up a chance to encounter the synthesis of Johnson’s epic sensibilities rendered in miniature in the clipped tone of Jesus’ Son.... An ode to the vanished West that captures the splendor of the Rockies as much as the small human mysteries that pass through them, this svelte stand-alone has the virtue of being a gem in itself, and, for the uninitiated, a perfect introduction to Johnson.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) National Book Award winner Johnson (Tree of Smoke) has skillfully packed an epic tale into novella length in this account of the life of Idaho Panhandle railroad laborer Robert Grainer . . . The gothic sensibility of the wilderness and isolated settings and Native American folktales, peppered liberally with natural and human-made violence, add darkness to a work that lingers viscerally with readers.... Highly recommended. —Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll. Northeast, TX
Library Journal

National Book Award-winner Johnson, ever the literary shape-shifter, looks back to America’s expansionist fever dream in a haunting frontier ballad about a loner named Robert Granier.... Johnson draws on history and tall tales to adroitly infuse one contemplative man’s solitary life with the boundless mysteries of nature and the havoc of humankind’s breakneck technological insurgency, creating a concentrated, reverberating tale of ravishing solemnity and molten lyricism. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

Discussion Questions
Introduction (by Amy Clements)

Throughout his award-winning career, Denis Johnson has brought us an endlessly fascinating cast of characters: sinners, saviors, and desperate souls caught in between. In Train Dreams, he presents a provocative portrait of a man who comes to know both excruciating hardship and quiet wonder in the American West in the first half of the twentieth century. A day laborer, Robert Grainier is on the front line in the modernization of the frontier, opening a rugged landscape to railway service, shoulder to shoulder with teams of countless men like him. Their world is divided between those who survive against astounding odds and those who succumb. Grainier is a survivor in all senses of the word: when he loses his young family, he returns to his solitary ways and struggles to make sense of the tragedy, even as he continues to feel the spiritual presence of his wife and daughter.

An epic in miniature, Train Dreams captures a singular chapter in the American story, set in an otherworldly landscape that has the potential to haunt anyone who attempts to subdue it. As we witness history alongside Grainier, we are forced to weigh the human toll against the awe-inspiring arrival of “civilization” as ordinary men eke out a living in extraordinary times. The result is a poignant, illuminating novella from one of the greatest storytellers of his generation.

This guide is designed to enhance your discussion of Train Dreams. We hope that the following questions and topics will enrich your reading of this finely honed tribute to the human experience.

1. What did the incident with the Chinese laborer show us about Robert Grainier and his beliefs regarding human suffering?

2. What made Grainier and Gladys’s marriage special? How was he transformed by his role as a husband and father?

3. What does the novella tell us about the nature of survivors such as Arn Peeples (chapter two) versus those who perish? How do the characters understand death?

4. In chapter three, how was the young Grainier affected by his encounter with half-dead William Haley and the tragic tale of Haley’s niece?

5. What aspects of life in the West stayed the same as Grainier matured and grew old? What aspects of his life were lost to modernization?

6. For Grainier, is solitude a form of solace and peace, or is loneliness painful for him? Is his solitary life appealing to you?

7. What does Kate’s story tell us about Grainier’s capacity for love? Is his community cruel or just naive?

8. In the third chapter, we’re told that Grainier never knew his parents and wasn’t even sure if he had been born in the United States or in Canada. In the absence of a mother and a father, who and what shaped his identity?

9. How does the novella’s spectacular scenery become a character itself? How do the settlers balance the brutality of nature, captured in the horrific wildfire, with their desire to live on a frontier?

10. What does the demise of Kootenai Bob in chapter four say about the relationship between his people and the settlers? What determines who the outsiders are in Grainier’s world?

11. Revisit the story of Peterson, who was shot by his own dog (chapter five). How do humans and animals get along in Train Dreams? What aspects of the animal world, and the spirit world, terrify the settlers the most?

12. Discuss the title. What are the dreamlike qualities of this novella? As Grainier expands the nation’s rail system through his death-defying work, is he transported or trapped?

13. The novella contains many powerful scenes of backbreaking manual labor through which human beings “triumph” over nature. What circumstances drew them to this life? Under what circumstances would you be satisfied with so few creature comforts?

14. Discuss the novella’s closing image. What did the wolf-boy reveal to a crowd of townspeople (including Grainier) who thought they had seen it all?

15. Much of Denis Johnson’s other fiction deals with destructive wars within the self, especially in Jesus’ Son and Tree of Smoke. Does Train Dreams underscore this view of humanity, or is it a departure from Johnson’s previous work?
(Questions issued by publisher...and written by Amy Clements/The Wordshop.)

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The Train to Estelline
Jane Roberts Wood, 2000
University of North Texas Press
209 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781574410785

Summary
"I have longed for a wider world, a great adventure. And now it's here. I'm so happy I can hardly breathe." so ends seventeen-year-old Lucinda Richards' diary entry for August 17, 1911, starting her job as the new school teacher for the White Star school in West Texas. Jane Roberts Wood brings this delightful and affecting epistolary novel a tender touch and a wry sense of humor.

The Lucinda Richards trilogy, spanning the years from 1911 to the 1930s, has a variety of landscapes, characters of all ages and social classes, an overall tenderness that never lapses into sentimentality, and a sense of the comic amidst the tragic.
(From the publisher.)

Train to Estelline (1987) is the first novel of the trilogy; A Place Called Sweet Shrub (1990), the second; and Dance a Little Longer (1993), the third.

Author Bio
Jane Roberts Wood received the Texas Institute of Letters award in 1998 for the Best Short Story, received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study at Yale, as well as a NEA Fellowship. A member of TIL and PEN, she lives with her husband, Dub, in Dallas, Texas. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
This is one of those books that is easy to get into, hard to get out of. Once started, it is nearly impossible to put down. Once put down, it is not easily forgotten.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

I ran [this book] through three generations of readers—mother, wife, and child—and unanimously they read it with pleasure.... Lucy is a young lady you need to know.
F. E. Abernethy - Texas Folklore Society

Written in 1993, 1990, and 1987, respectively, these novels are known as the Lucy Richards trilogy in honor of their central character. Spanning the years from 1911 to 1931, the story follows Lucy's life as a young school teacher in west Texas through marriage, childbirth, and the Great Depression. Through all the hardships, her indomitable spirit wins out. Good stories with a strong woman in the lead.
Library Journal

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Train to Estelline:

1. The Train to Estelline is an epistolary novel—told through letters and diary entries. Why might Jane Roberts Wood have decided to use this format to tell her story? What, if any, advantages does it have over a first- or third-person narrative? (Consider, for instance, what Lucy reveals in her diary vs. what she writes in her letters.)

2. How would you describe Lucy as a character. Why is she so eager to accept her new teaching position? She is leaving her family, her mother in particular, at a difficult time. What obligations does she—or does she not—have toward her family?

3. Talk about Lucy's description of the Texas landscape, its flora and fauna, and how it changes as she views it through her train window. If you are from Texas, is that landscape very different today?

4. On page 9, Lucy watches a road grader as it smoothes a dirt road. In what way does she compare its work to her future job as a teacher?

5. What is it about Bob Sully that so attracts Lucy's attention and admiration? She has already decided that he is the one she wants to marry—is this a basis for a strong, lasting relationship?

6. How does Lucy's excitement about her adventure change when she arrives at the Dawsons? How does she view poverty and its impact on the human spirit?

7. Why does Lucy decide to save Carlos? Talk about her beautiful description (page 39) of how "that boy's sorrow seemed to fill and overflow the well." Toward the end, Carlos departs with his family, and Lucy says, "So Carlos has become a wanderer again. Did he always know that this was his destiny?" What do you think? What do you think might happen to Carolos and his family? Will he continue to read, do you think?

8. Josh Arnold speaks of the importance of water to the region. How is reverence for water reflected in the culture? What does Josh see as the future of the region through its use of water? Using the luxury of hindsight, was he correct in his predictions?

9. Lucy moves in with the Constables. How do they, especially Christobel and her healing knowledge, differ from the Dawsons? What different aspects of Texas early settlement might the two families represent? What do you make of the rumors circulating about the Costables' thievery. Does Josh believe seem to them? Does the possibility of the rumors' truth alter your view of them?

10. Talk about the two men in Lucy's life: Bob Sully and Josh Arnold. What do you think of them?

11. Why is Lucy disappointed by the Christmas party at the Sully's? What was she hoping for? What also does she notice at the party?

12. Comment on Christobel's advice to Lucy: "be careful what you want. Sometimes a young girl...does not always know." What is Christobel suggesting?

13. Discuss the incident of Petey and Lucy's shawl. When Christobel eventually finds him in Boston, how and why has he changed?

14. What is Lucy's view of women and their power or lack of it? (See page 100.)

15. When Berl Monday leaves the message that his mother has died, Lucy feels guilt, believing she could have done more to help. How responsible is Lucy for her death?

16. Are you sympathetic with Katie's dilemma? Does that make her betrayal of Lucy less heinous in your eyes? At one point, after their auto accident, Katie tells Lucy, "I was counting on Cable"...meaning what? Were there other clues along the way...or were you (along with Lucy) caught off guard?

17. Are you satisfied with the way the first part of this trilogy ends? What do you predict might happen in the second part? Are you inspired to read the next two installments—A Place Called Sweet Shrub and Dance a Little Longer?

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

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The Traitor's Wife
Allison Pataki, 2014
Howard Books
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476738604

Summary
A riveting historical novel about Peggy Shippen Arnold, the cunning wife of Benedict Arnold and mastermind behind America’s most infamous act of treason.

Everyone knows Benedict Arnold—the Revolutionary War general who betrayed America and fled to the British—as history’s most notorious turncoat. Many know Arnold’s co-conspirator, Major John Andre, who was apprehended with Arnold’s documents in his boots and hanged at the orders of General George Washington.

But few know of the integral third character in the plot: a charming young woman who not only contributed to the betrayal but orchestrated it.

Socialite Peggy Shippen is half Benedict Arnold’s age when she seduces the war hero during his stint as military commander of Philadelphia. Blinded by his young bride’s beauty and wit, Arnold does not realize that she harbors a secret: loyalty to the British. Nor does he know that she hides a past romance with the handsome British spy John Andre.

Peggy watches as her husband, crippled from battle wounds and in debt from years of service to the colonies, grows ever more disillusioned with his hero, Washington, and the American cause. Together with her former love and her disaffected husband, Peggy hatches the plot to deliver West Point to the British and, in exchange, win fame and fortune for herself and Arnold.

Told from the perspective of Peggy’s maid, whose faith in the new nation inspires her to intervene in her mistress’s affairs even when it could cost her everything, The Traitor’s Wife brings these infamous figures to life, illuminating the sordid details and the love triangle that nearly destroyed the American fight for freedom. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1984
• Raised—Garrison, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois

Allison Pataki is an American author and journalist and the daughter of former governor of New York, George Pataki (served 1995-2006). She was raised in Garrison, New York, across the Hudson River from West Point Military Academy, and later majored in English at Yale University. She met her husband David Levy during her sophomore, and the two married in June 2012.

Pataki has written several historical novels: The Traitor's Wife: The Woman Behind Benedict Arnold and the Plan to Betray America (2014), The Accidental Empress (2015), Sisi: Empress on Her Own (2016), and Where the Light Falls: A Novel of the French Revolution (2017), which she co-authored with her brother Owen.

In addition to historical fiction, Allison has written for ABCNews.com, The Huffington Post, FoxNews.com, Travel Girl, and other media outlets. In 2016 she wrote an article for the New York Times detailing her family's experience with traumatic brain injury and the road to recovery.

In 2015, Pataki co-founded reConnect Hungary, an educational and social immersion program for young adults of Hungarian heritage, who are born in the U.S. or Canada, to gain a better understanding of their Hungarian heritage. hh(Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/15/2017.)

Book Reviews
Through the eyes of a fictional lady’s maid, the historical figures of Peggy Arnold and her husband, Benedict—yes, the traitor—come to life in this debut historical novel.... Clara and her fellow servants, who embody the spirit of the everyday patriot citizen, are written with detail and depth.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) A young lady's maid is witness to Benedict Arnold and his wife's treachery in this fictional account set during the American War for Independence.... Those familiar with U.S. history may already know how Arnold's saga unfurls, but the author's interpretation of events offers fresh perspective, plenty of intrigue and a host of interesting, multidimensional characters.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Before moving to Philadelphia, Clara spent her entire life on a farm in the Pennsylvania countryside. How does Clara’s identity evolve throughout her years of service to Peggy and Benedict Arnold? What character traits does Clara retain? Discuss which characters have the greatest impact on Clara’s growth and development.

2. Why does Clara take a nearly instant dislike to Major John Andre? Why is she relieved when the Judge and Mrs. Shippen refuse to allow Peggy to attend the Meshianza? Compare the way Andre treats Peggy with how Caleb treats Clara.

3. Clara is flattered at “having so quickly become her lady’s confidante and friend” (page 119). Does Peggy sincerely consider Clara a friend, or is Clara misreading her mistress? Why does Clara so desperately crave Peggy’s approval, and even friendship? At what point does this begin to shift?

4. Discuss the theme of loyalty in the novel. What drives the different characters’ allegiances? Who is the most loyal character?

5. “I hate the man, and I always will,” says Peggy of Benedict Arnold (page 146). Why then does she begin pursuing him the first time they meet? Does she truly come to care about him, or is it all an act?

6. What is your view of Benedict Arnold? Trace his evolution from ardent patriot to turncoat. Do you think he would have committed treason without Peggy’s influence? Why or why not? Discuss both his and Peggy’s motivations for aiding the British.

7. “My husband knows how to win on the battlefield. It’s all brute strength and fighting. But spy work is different—it requires poise, and self-control, and grace. It’s like a delicate dance. And if anyone knows how to dance, it’s me,” says Peggy (page 326). Which traits make Peggy better suited for espionage than Arnold? Why does the couple freely discuss their plans in front of Clara? Is it because they trust her not to reveal their secrets or, as Clara believes, because they find her invisible?

8. When Arnold’s treachery is revealed, he immediately flees and leaves Peggy behind. Given the circumstances, are his actions justifiable in any way? Why doesn’t Peggy hold it against him? Share whether or not you were surprised that Peggy was able to so easily convince George Washington and his companions of her innocence.

9. Does Clara intentionally or unintentionally help the Arnolds commit treason by cracking Andre’s code and translating the clandestine correspondence? Does her role make Clara partly to blame? What would you have done if you were in her position?

10. At one point in the story, Clara laments that she is not the master of her own fate. How do she and Caleb take charge of their future, both individually and as a couple? Discuss Clara’s warring emotions of impotency and desperation to intervene in the Arnolds’ plot.

11. When Clara confides in Mrs. Quigley about the Arnolds’ plotting, why is the older woman so quick to dismiss her claims? When Mrs. Quigley later understands exactly what’s happening, why does she still advise against Clara and Caleb taking action to stop the Arnolds? Explore how Mrs. Quigley’s response to the news differs from Caleb’s response to the news. Does either of them understand Clara’s position and perspective?

12. Examine the character of George Washington. Why does the novel open on the morning of his visit? What does George Washington mean to Benedict Arnold? To Peggy Arnold? To the servants like Hannah, Caleb, Clara, or the Quigleys? Discuss whether George Washington’s disapproval was the impetus for Arnold to agree to treason.

13. How does Clara use tactics she learned from observing her mistress to achieve her freedom from Peggy? What gives Clara the strength and courage to stand up to the imposing Peggy? Would Clara actually have reported Peggy’s guilt, or was it a bluff?

14. When news comes that Arnold successfully escaped, why is Clara relieved he won’t hang for his crimes? Why does she promise to keep quiet about Peggy’s role in the plot?

15. In what ways did The Traitor’s Wife give you new insights into the Revolutionary War? What, if anything, did you learn that surprised you?
(Questions by the publisher.)

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Trans-Sister Radio
Chris Bohjalian, 2000
Knopf Doubleday
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375705175

Summary
Set in the village of Bartlett, Vermont, Trans-Sister Radio tells the story of four people who are drawn into a complicated tangle of relationships—relationships that will profoundly change each of them.

When Allison, grade-school teacher and divorced mother of a teenage daughter, meets Dana, she feels she's at the beginning of an intense, ideal romance.

But Dana reveals that he's always felt himself to be a woman and plans to have the surgery that will make that feeling a reality, and soon Allison's love for Dana and her perception of herself is severely tested. She grapples with the fact that she might not be able to love Dana in a woman's body.

She worries whether her teaching career will survive the scandal that living with a transsexual in a small New England town is sure to cause. She wonders what effect the situation will have on her relationship with her daughter, Carly, and how her ex-husband, Will, is going to view the situation.

Allison stands by Dana through the surgery and recovery period, enduring the opprobrium of the local community and a growing unease about her own sexual identity. Threatening notes left in her school mailbox, obscene graffiti scrawled on her front door, pressure from the school board to take a leave of absence, and a local petition about teacher morality all contribute to making Allison and Dana's relationship both a public issue and a private ordeal.

Even Will and Carly become increasingly involved in Allison and Dana's predicament, and when they decide to air a program on transsexualism for Vermont Public Radio, they bring both clarity to the issue and a new set of changes for everyone involved.

Written with empathy and extraordinary insight, Trans-Sister Radio explores the uncertain terrain of gender identity, sexual preference, and the entire range of pleasures, confusions, and sacrifices that love demands. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—White Plains, New York, USA
• Education—Amherst College
• Awards—Anahid Literary Award, 2000; New England Book Award, 2002
• Currently—lives in Lincoln, Vermont

Christopher Aram Bohjalian, who goes by the pen name Chris Bohjalian, is an American novelist. Bohjalian is the author of 15 novels, including New York Times bestsellers Midwives, Secrets of Eden, The Law of Similars, Before You Know Kindness, The Double Bind, Skeletons at the Feast, and The Night Strangers.

Bohjalian is the son of Aram Bohjalian, who was a senior vice president of the New York advertising agency Romann & Tannenholz. Chris Bohjalian graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In the mid-1980s, he worked as an account representative for J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York.

He and his wife lived in a co-op in Brooklyn until March 1986, when the two were riding in a taxicab in which the driver refused to let them out of the car for 45 minutes, ignoring all traffic lights and stop signs. Around midnight, the driver dropped them off at a near-deserted street in front of a crack house, where the police were conducting a raid and Bohjalian and his wife were forced to drop to the ground for their protection. The incident prompted the couple to move from Brooklyn; Bohjalian said, "After it was all over, we just thought, "Why do we live here?" A few days later, the couple read an ad in The New York Times referencing the "People's Republic of Vermont," and in 1987 the couple moved to Lincoln, Vermont.

Early career
After buying their house, Bohjalian began writing weekly columns for local newspaper and magazine about living in the small town, which had a population of about 975 residents. The Concord Monitor said of Bohjalian during this period, "his immersion in community life and family, Vermont-style, has allowed him to develop into a novelist with an ear and empathy for the common man." Bohjalian continued the column for about 12 years, writing about such topics as his own daily life, fatherhood and the transformation of America. The column has run in the Burlington Free Press since 1992. Bohjalian has also written for such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine.

Bohjalian's first novel, A Killing in the Real World, was released in 1988. Almost two decades after it was released, Bohjalian said of the book, "It was a train wreck. I hadn't figured things out yet." His third novel, Past the Bleachers, was released in 1992 and adapted as a Hallmark Channel television movie in 1995.

In 1998, Bohjalian wrote his fifth book, Midwives, a novel focusing on rural Vermont midwife Sibyl Danforth, who becomes embroiled in a legal battle after one of her patients died following an emergency Caesarean section. The novel was critically acclaimed and was selected by Oprah Winfrey as the October 1998 selection of her Oprah's Book Club, which helped push the book to great financial success. It became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. Victoria Blewer has often described her husband as having "a crush" on the Sybil Danforth character. In 2001, the novel was adapted into a Lifetime Movie Network television film starring Sissy Spacek in the lead role. Spacek said the Danforth character appealed to her because "the heart of the story is my character's inner struggle with self-doubt, the solo road you travel when you have a secret."

Later career
Bohjalian followed Midwives with the 1999 novel The Law of Similars, about a widower attorney suffering from nameless anxieties who starts dating a woman who practices alternative medicine. The novel was inspired by Bohjalian's real-life visit to a homeopath in an attempt to cure frequent colds he was catching from his daughter's day care center. Bohjalian said of the visit, "I don't think I imagined there was a novel in homeopathy, however, until I met the homeopath and she explained to me the protocols of healing. There was a poetry to the language that a patient doesn't hear when visiting a conventional doctor." The protagonist, a father, is based in part on Bohjalian himself, and his four-year-old daughter is based largely on Bohjalian's daughter, who was three when he was writing the book., Liz Rosenberg of The New York Times said the novel shared many similarities with Midwives but that it paled in comparison; Rosenberg said, "Unlike its predecessor, it fails to take advantage of Bohjalian's great gift for creating thoughtful fiction featuring characters in whom the reader sustains a lively interest." Megan Harlan of The Boston Phoenix described it as "formulaic fiction" and said Bohjalian focused too much on creating a complex plot and not enough of complex characterizations. The Law of Similars, like Midwives, made the New York Times bestsellers list.

He won the New England Book Award in 2002, and in 2007 released "The Double Bind," a novel based on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

In 2008, Bohjalian released Skeletons at the Feast, a love story set in the last six months of World War II in Poland and Germany. The novel was inspired by an unpublished diary written by German citizen Eva Henatsch from 1920 to 1945. The diary was given to Bohjalian in 1998 by Henatsch's grandson Gerd Krahn, a friend of Bohjalian, who had a daughter in the same kindergarten class as Bohjalian's daughter. Bohjalian was particularly fascinated by Henatsch's account of her family's trek west ahead of the Soviet Army, but he was not inspired to write a novel from it until 2006, when he read Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, Max Hastings' history of the final years of World War II. Bohjalian was struck not only by how often Henatsch's story mirrored real-life experiences, but also the common "moments of idiosyncratic human connection" found in both. Skeletons of the Feast was considered a departure for Bohjalian because it was not only set outside of Vermont, but set in a particular historical moment.

His 2010 novel, Secrets of Eden, was also a critical success, receiving starred reviews from three of the four trade journals (Booklist, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly), as well as many newspapers and magazines. It debuted at # 6 on The New York Times bestseller list.

His next novel, The Night Strangers, published in 2011, represents yet another departure for Bohjalian. The is both a gothic ghost story and a taut psychological thriller.

He has written a weekly column for Gannett's Burlington Free Press since February 1992 called "Idyll Banter." His 1,000th column appeared in May 2011.

Personal comments
In a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview, Bohjalian offered up these personal comments:

I was the heaviest child, by far, in my second-grade class. My mother had to buy my pants for me at a store called the "Husky Boys Shop," and still she had to hem the cuffs up around my knees. I hope this experience, traumatizing as it was, made me at least marginally more sensitive to people around me.

I have a friend with Down syndrome, a teenage boy who is capable of remembering the librettos from entire musicals the first or second time he hears them. The two of us belt them out together whenever we're driving anywhere in a car.I am a pretty avid bicyclist. The other day I was biking alone on a thin path in the woods near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, and suddenly before me I saw three bears. At first I saw only two, and initially I thought they were cats. Then I thought they were dogs. Finally, just as I was approaching them and they started to scurry off the path and into the thick brush, I understood they were bears. Bear cubs, to be precise. Which is exactly when their mother, no more than five or six feet to my left, reared up on her hind legs, her very furry paws and very sharp claws raised above her head in a gesture that an optimist might consider a wave and guy on a bike might consider something a tad more threatening. Because she was standing on a slight incline, I was eye level with her stomach—an eventual destination that seemed frighteningly plausible. I have never biked so fast in my life in the woods. I may never have biked so fast in my life on a paved road.

I do have hobbies—I garden and bike, for example—but there's nothing in the world that gives me even a fraction of the pleasure that I derive from hanging around with my wife and daughter.

He lives with his wife and daughter in Lincoln, Vermont, where he is active in the local church and the Vermont theater community—always off-stage, never on.

Writing style

Bohjalian novels often focus on a specific issue, such as homelessness, animal rights and environmentalism, and tend to be character-driven, revolving around complex and flawed protagonists and secondary characters. Bohjalian uses characteristics from his real life in his writings; in particular, many of his novels take place in fictional Vermont towns, and the names of real New Hampshire towns are often used throughout his stories. Bohjalian said, "Writers can talk with agonizing hubris about finding their voices, but for me, it was in Vermont that I discovered issues, things that matter to me." His novels also tend to center around ordinary people facing extraordinarily difficult situations resulting from unforeseen circumstances, often triggered by other parties. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
In the convolutions of human frailties and the confounding enigma of love, [Bohjalian's] tale brings to bear issues that transcend the bounds of gender: image, loneliness, yearning, and, most of all, the human capacity for change.... It bears his hallmark: ordinary people in heartbreaking circumstances behaving with grace and dignity. He accomplishes this in plaintive prose that speaks directly to the heart.
San Francisco Chronicle

Trans-Sister Radio is a controversial, highly original novel about a lot more than gender issues and sexual orientation. It is about the precarious dance on the checkerboard of sex. It is about life choices, lifestyle, tolerance and intolerance, and, above all, a commitment to love. Some might consider the resolution an equivocation, but this book is impossible to put down.
Carol Memmott - USA Today

Set your dial to Trans-Sister Radio for a thoughtful and provocative read, and when you want more after you finish, tune into Bohjalian's earlier books, which are as wel written.
BUST Magazine - Nancy E. Young

The bestselling author of Midwives continues his tradition of incorporating social issues into his moving narratives. Transsexuality goes mainstream in this Scarlet Letter for a softer, gentler but more complicated age. Allison Banks—42 years old, heterosexual, long divorced, mother of a college student and a grade school teacher in a picturesque Vermont village—meets single, attractive, attentive, 35-year-old Dana Stevens when she takes his film class at a nearby college. Early on in the relationship, Dana confesses that he has always believed he was female, though he desires women, too—and he is soon to undergo a long-planned sex change operation. Despite this revelation, and despite her reservations, Allison invites Dana to move in with her, and they have great sex right up until the night before the operation in Colorado, where Allison has loyally accompanied Dana for post-op and moral support. On their return to Vermont, he—now physically and emphatically "she"—continues to share Allison's bed and her house, though nothing can be the same as it was. Allison's ex-husband, Vermont Public Radio president Will, now her good friend, and their daughter, Carly, cope well with the situation, but the close-knit community is less understanding. Questions of what constitutes community tolerance are explored here, but the novel's central focus is on the definition of sex and gender in the characters' personal lives. Allison, Dana, Carly and Will express their views in alternating first person chapters, and transcripts from a fictional NPR All Things Considered series on Dana and her operation provide additional narrative background. Gender is central to who we are, Bohjalian concludes, but not perhaps to who we love. Sex, on the other hand, expresses who we are. Bohjalian's sometimes simplistic characterizations diminish the emotional impact of the novel, and his abundant research on gender dysfunction often gives the book a curiously flat, documentary quality. Nevertheless, Bohjalian humanizes the transsexual community and explains the complexities of sex and gender in an accessible, evenhanded fashion, making a valuable contribution to a dialogue of social and political import.
Publishers Weekly

In Bohjalian's latest novel, the best-selling author of Midwives and The Law of Similars uses his extraordinary gifts for storytelling and character development to delve into further controversial areas--the acceptance (or not) of transsexuals in today's society and the endless complexities that gender adds to our lives. Alison Banks meets and falls in love with Dana Stevens just a few months shy of his appointment with a surgeon to transform himself into a female. As Alison struggles with her own feelings about their relationship, the two must also deal with increasingly hostile reactions in the small Vermont town where she teaches sixth grade. As in his earlier novels, Bohjalian is a master at exposing the emotions of a highly charged situation and carefully dissecting controversy. Trans-Sister Radio goes a long way toward normalizing a situation nowhere near normal for many people today. Recommended for all adult fiction collections. —Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland, OR
Library Journal

(Audio version.) A compelling and often disturbing novel, Trans-Sister Radio challenges all of our assumptions about gender, relationships, and sexuality. A powerful secret literally transforms four lives: Allison Banks, a sixth grade teacher; Will, her ex-husband and president of a local Vermont Public Radio station; their teenage daughter Carly; and Dana Stevens, a college instructor who falls in love with Allison. The structure of the book is essential for understanding the (r)evolution of emotions that occur with the complex issues Bohjalian explores through private lives made very public. The four voices, performed by Kymberli Colbourne, alternate to reveal their own separate struggles and to create a metamorphosis that is central to the story. A demanding work that is often graphic, always gentle, and full of wisdom and surprising humor. Recommended for adult audiences. —Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. What stereotypes or common misconceptions about transsexuals does Trans-Sister Radio challenge? How is it able to reveal the reality beneath the stereotypes?

2. Trans-Sister Radio is alternately narrated by Carly, Will, Allison, and Dana. What effect does Bohjalian achieve by telling the story through four narrators rather than one? How do these differing perspectives shape and control our reactions to the story?

3. As he contemplates Dana's surgery, Will asserts, "You simply couldn't, it seemed to me, change a biological imperative" [p. 143], while Dana says that being born in a man's body was a "howling chromosomal error" [p. 48]. Does the novel seem to favor either of these points of view? Is it possible for chromosomes to make an "error"? Is there a "biological imperative" that determines gender? What ethical and social dilemmas arise with our increasing scientific ability to manipulate nature?

4. Why do Dana's parents oppose his sex-change surgery? What aspects of Dana's becoming a woman concern them most? What prevents them from understanding Dana's deeper need to become a woman?

5. After Dana's reassignment surgery, she visits a young woman who is about to undergo the same procedure and is racked with worry about how her father, a football coach and mountain climber, will react. Dana tells her: "He hasn't climbed a mountain anywhere near as tall as the one you have to get here. Never in his life has he done anything as difficult as you have. Never" [p. 209]. What are the difficulties—emotional, practical, social—Dana and other transsexuals must confront? In what ways does the novel take readers inside those struggles?

6. Why does a large part of the Bartlett community object to Allison living with a transsexual? Why do even liberal parents, who at least theoretically have no objection to gay marriage, draw the line at transsexualism? Are their fears understandable and justifiable? What are they based on?

7. Sally Warwick, Allison's eleven-year-old student who masterminds the class's cross-dressing curtain call, explains that she got one of the boys to go along with her plan because he had a crush on her. "You see, when you think someone's cute, you do really weird stuff" [p. 297]. In what ways is this statement a commentary on the novel as a whole? What does it suggest about the nature of love? Why is Sally's innocent perspective on cross-dressing especially disarming?

8. In discussing transsexualism with her mother, Carly says, "we all want to cross over a lot more than we realize. We all want to be...other" [p. 272]. Is she right? Why would we want to be something "other" than what we are?

9. How does Will go from being a person who regards Dana as "not normal" and sex-change surgery as a mutilation, to someone who not only accepts Dana but falls in love with her? What are the stages in this process? What moments draw him closer to Dana?

10. Looking back on their relationship, Allison feels she has been used by Dana: "She'd needed someone to take care of her during transition, she'd needed a woman to tutor her in the finer points of my gender. She'd seen the way I'd fallen in love with her when she was my male professor, and taken advantage of me" [p. 312]. Is Allison right about Dana's motives? Has Dana deliberately deceived and manipulated her? Why doesn't he tell her of his plans at the beginning of their relationship?

11. The airing of the VPR interviews with Dana, Allison, and their opponents is a turning point for everyone in the novel. What effect does this program have on Dana and Allison's relationship? On Will? On those who consider Dana a "pervert"? What is the novel suggesting about the role of information in changing public opinion about sexual and gender issues?

12. Near the end of the novel, Carly seems to endorse a complete sexual relativism, where gender and sexual preference don't matter at all: "Let's face it: In reality, it's all just about muscle spasms that feel really good" [p. 341]. Is this an accurate view of human sexuality? To what extent does socialization determine sexual preference and gender behavior? Is Carly's thinking liberating or does it open the door to a confusing sexual free-for-all?

13. Dana undergoes a sex-change operation, but in fact all of the main characters in Trans-Sister Radio experience important changes. In what ways are Will, Allison, and Carly different at the end of the novel than they were at the beginning?

14. When Glenn Frazier confronts Allison with the parents' concerns, Allison says, "Who lives with me is none of Richard Lessard's business." Glenn replies, "That's not true. You teach his daughter. He pays your salary" [p. 115]. To what extent do these opposing positions mask larger anxieties—about privacy, sexuality, education, morality—in America today?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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TransAtlantic
Colum McCann, 2013
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812981926

Summary
In the National Book Award–winning Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann thrilled readers with a marvelous high-wire act of fiction that The New York Times Book Review called “an emotional tour de force.”

Now McCann demonstrates once again why he is one of the most acclaimed and essential authors of his generation with a soaring novel that spans continents, leaps centuries, and unites a cast of deftly rendered characters, both real and imagined.

Newfoundland, 1919. Two aviators—Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown—set course for Ireland as they attempt the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, placing their trust in a modified bomber to heal the wounds of the Great War.

Dublin, 1845 and ’46. On an international lecture tour in support of his subversive autobiography, Frederick Douglass finds the Irish people sympathetic to the abolitionist cause—despite the fact that, as famine ravages the countryside, the poor suffer from hardships that are astonishing even to an American slave.

New York, 1998. Leaving behind a young wife and newborn child, Senator George Mitchell departs for Belfast, where it has fallen to him, the son of an Irish-American father and a Lebanese mother, to shepherd Northern Ireland’s notoriously bitter and volatile peace talks to an uncertain conclusion.

These three iconic crossings are connected by a series of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history. Beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, who crosses paths with Frederick Douglass, the novel follows her daughter and granddaughter, Emily and Lottie, and culminates in the present-day story of Hannah Carson, in whom all the hopes and failures of previous generations live on. From the loughs of Ireland to the flatlands of Missouri and the windswept coast of Newfoundland, their journeys mirror the progress and shape of history. They each learn that even the most unassuming moments of grace have a way of rippling through time, space, and memory.

The most mature work yet from an incomparable storyteller, TransAtlantic is a profound meditation on identity and history in a wide world that grows somehow smaller and more wondrous with each passing year. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1965
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Awards—Pushcart Prize; Rooney Prize; Hennessy Award for
   Irish Literature; Irish Independent Hughes and Hughes/
   Sunday Independent Novel of the Year; Ireland Fund
   of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award;
   Deauville Festival of Cinema Literary Prize; named French
   Chevalier des arts et lettres; inducted into Ireland's
   Aosdana
• Currently—lives in New York City

Colum McCann is an Irish writer of literary fiction—two collections of short stories and several novels, most recently TransAtlantic (2013). He is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Hunter College, New York and a regular visitor to the European Graduate School.

McCann's fiction has been published in 35 languages. His novels include Songdogs (1995), This Side of Brightness (1998), Dancer (2003), Zoli (2006), Let the Great World Spin (2009), and TransAtlantic (2013). He has written for numerous newspapers and periodicals, including the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Times (of London), Irish Times, Granta, and La Repubblica. His short story "Everything in this Country Must" was made into a short film directed by Gary McKendry. It was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005.

Early and private life
McCann was born in Dublin and studied journalism in the former College of Commerce in Rathmines, now the Dublin Institute of Technology He began his career as a reporter for the Irish Press, and had his own column and byline by the age of 21.

In 1986 he arrived in the United States with the purpose of writing a novel. He soon found that he was lacking the life experience to undertake such a project, so he took a bicycle tour across North America for the next 18 months, collecting many of the experiences that he later said influenced his fiction, especially the wide range of voices and backgrounds of his characters.

He settled in Texas from 1988 until 1991 where he worked as a wilderness guide in a program for juvenile delinquents in Texas, and completed his B.A in the University of Texas. In 1992 he married Allison Hawke and moved to Japan, where the McCanns lived for a year and a half. He and his wife then moved to New York where they currently reside with their three children, Isabella, John Michael, and Christian.

Major works
McCann's 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin uses the true story of Philippe Petit as a "pull-through metaphor" and weaves together a powerful allegory of 9/11. The novel has won numerous honours, notably the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2010, McCann and musician Joe Hurley cowrote a song-cycle—“The House That Horse Built (Let the Great World Spin)”—based on the character of Tillie.

On 16 June 2009, McCann published a Bloomsday remembrance of his long-deceased grandfather, whom he met only once, and of finding him again in the pages of James Joyce's Ulysses.

McCann's 2013 novel Transatlantic tells the intertwined stories of Alcock and Brown (the first non-stop transatlantic fliers in 1919), the visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland in 1845/46, and the story of the Irish peace process as negotiated by Senator George Mitchell in 1998. The book fuses these stories with fictional narratives of women spanning the course of two centuries. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/22/2013.)

Book Reviews
In 1919, two British veterans pilot a Vickers Vimy from Newfoundland to Ireland.... In 1845, escaped American slave Frederick Douglass comes to Ireland at the start of the famine on a speaking tour.... In 1998...American Senator George Mitchell brokers the Good Friday Peace Accords. Darting in, past, and through these stories are generations of women...with sons lost to the civil wars of both continents. This is what interests McCann: lives made amid and despite violence; the hidden braids of places, times, and people.... While each story is interesting, the threads between them...aren’t pulled taut enough by shared meaning.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) A masterful and profoundly moving novel that employs exquisite language to explore the limits of language and the tricks of memory.... [A]udacious in format (hopscotching back and forth across an ocean, centuries, generations)... [McCann] interweaves historical and fictional truth.... The novel's narrative strategy runs deeper than literary gamesmanship, as the blurring of distinctions between past and present, and between one side of the ocean and the other, with the history of struggle, war and emancipation as a backdrop, represents the thematic thread that connects it all.... A beautifully written novel, an experience to savor.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In this novel, Colum McCann writes about four men: Jack Alcock, Teddy Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Senator George Mitchell. Were you familiar with any or all of these figures before reading TransAtlantic? Did what you learn about them surprise you? Do you find their journeys thematically linked?

2. As Alcock and Brown fly across the Atlantic they have several close calls, including a moment when their plane spins out of control and a rough landing, all in the fierce cold and damp. Do you think anyone could, nowadays, make the same sort of journey they did? Why or why not? What sorts of physical challenges remain for adventurers and explorers?

3. Douglass forms relationships with several women in the novel: we see him write home to his wife, Anna, but he also indelibly shapes the maid Lily and becomes friends with Isabel Jennings. What do you think draws these very different people together? How do these small threads eventually create a tapestry?

4. Why do you think Lily follows Douglass to America? What does she hope to find there? Does this novel confront the impossibility of the American dream?

5. Book One is not chronological: after Alcock and Brown’s flight in 1919, we travel back to Douglass’s tour of Ireland in 1845, and then move forward once more to 1998 and Mitchell. How would your reading of the novel change if this section were differently arranged? What would happen to the novel if the sections concerning the women were woven directly into the stories of the men?

6. In the third section of the book, McCann takes us into the mind of Senator George Mitchell during the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland. What do you know about the Irish “Troubles”? How does Mitchell’s story enrich or change what you already knew?

7. The novel is structured so we meet the four men, seemingly unrelated, first—and then learn that women connected to all of them are multiple generations of one family. Why do you think McCann structures TransAtlantic in this way? What do the very male first half of the book and the very female second half tell us about men, women, and how we legislate history?

8. Lily loses most of the men she loves—the father of her first son, Tad; her sons, Tad, Adam, and Benjamin; and her husband, Jon. What do you think gives her the strength to continue on and become a successful merchant? Do you admire her? What does this say about the role of women in history?

9. In the course of TransAtlantic we see many technologies—to which we’re well accustomed today—at the moments they were still new, including airplanes, cameras, and automobiles. What does the novel tell us about these devices and how they bring people together (and tear people apart)?

10. There are two civil wars in the novel: the American Civil War, in which Lily loses her son, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which takes Lottie’s grandson, Hannah’s son. What does TransAtlantic show us about war? Who are its victims?

11. Why do you think Hannah leaves the letter behind with her hosts?

12. Some of the characters in the novel are based on real figures; others are entirely fictional. Is it easy to tell the two apart? How do these sets of characters illuminate one another? McCann has said in interviews that “the real is often imagined,” and “the imagined is often real.” What do you think he means by this?

13. The novel begins with an Eduardo Galeano quote that ends, “the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.” Why do you think McCann chose to open TransAtlantic this way? How do you see the stories in the novel—“the time that was”—relating to today, “the time that is”?

14. As its title suggests, TransAtlantic is about Ireland and North America, and the ideas and people that cross between the two. What do you feel makes this international relationship special? What draws families and individuals back and forth between these countries?

15. What is the function of the Prologue of the novel, set in 2012? How does it frame the novel? How does it tie in with the last line of the book? What is McCann suggesting about the circularity of human experience?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Transcendent Kingdom
Yaa Gyasi, 2020
Knopf Doubleday Publishing
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525658184

Summary
Yaa Gyasí's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.

Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction.

Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed.

Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.

Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief—a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasís phenomenal debut. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1989-1990
• Where—Ghana
• Raised—Huntsville, Alabama, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Award—National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Berkeley, California

Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in Berkeley, California. Her debut novel, Homegoing, was published to wide acclaim in 2016, as was her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom in 2020. (From the publisher.)

Read Slate's interview with Yaa Gyasi. It's far more encompassing than we can do here!

Book Reviews
[T]he African immigrants in this novel exist at a certain remove from American racism, victims but also outsiders, marveling at the peculiar blindnesses of the locals.… [B]rilliant.… Transcendent Kingdom trades the blazing brilliance of Homegoing for another type of glory, more granular and difficult to name.
Nell Freudenberger - New York Times Book Review

Laser-like.… A powerful, wholly unsentimental novel about family love, loss, belonging and belief that is more focused but just as daring as its predecessor, and to my mind even more successful…. [Transcendent Kingdom] is burningly dedicated to the question of meaning…. The pressure created gives her novel a hard, beautiful, diamantine luster.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal

A book of blazing brilliance… of profound scientific and spiritual reflection that recalls the works of Richard Powers and Marilynne Robinson…. A double helix of wisdom and rage twists through the quiet lines.…Thank God, we have this remarkable novel.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

A stealthily devastating novel of family, faith and identity that’s as philosophical as it is personal.… It’s bravura storytelling by Gyasi, so different in scope, tone and style from her 2016 debut Homegoing. That, too, was brilliant literature, as expansive as Transcendent Kingdom is interior…. The range Gyasi displays in just two books is staggering.
USA Today

(Starred review) [M]eticulous, psychologically complex…. Gyasi’s constraint renders the emotional impact of the novel all the more powerful…. At once a vivid evocation of the immigrant experience and a sharp delineation of an individual’s inner struggle, the novel brilliantly succeeds on both counts.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review) Though it's a departure from her gorgeous historical debut, Homegoing, Gyasi's contemporary novel of a woman's struggle for connection in a place where science and faith are at odds is a piercingly beautiful tale of love and forgiveness. —Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Library Journal

(Starred review) Despite compounding challenges and tragedies, Gyasi never allows Gifty to devolve into paralyzing self-absorption and malaise. With deft agility and undeniable artistry, Gyasi’s latest is an eloquent examination of resilient survival.
Booklist

(Starred review) Gyasi’s wise second novel pivots toward intimacy.…Nowhere does Gyasi take a cheap shot. Instead, she writes a final chapter that gives readers a taste of hard-won deliverance. In a quietly poignant story, a lonely woman finds a way to be less alone
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. How do Gifty and her mother use prayer differently throughout their lives, and especially after Nana’s death? What variations of prayer do the two women discover in the novel?

2. How does Gifty approach the moral predicament of running her science experiments on mice? What elements of her faith and sense of connection to God’s creations are evident in how she treats the mice?

3. Consider the stigmas surrounding addiction, especially opioid addiction, the rates of which are exploding in today’s society. What other stigmas and expectations was Nana responding to by not asking for help to deal with his addiction, and others not doing more to help?

4. In what ways does Gifty take on the role of caretaker for those in her life? Who, if anyone, takes care of Gifty?

5. Gifty admits that she values both God and sciences as lenses through which to see the world that both "failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning" (198). Why does she have to lead with the caveat that she "would never say [this] in a lecture or a presentation or, God forbid, a paper"? How does the extreme belief in science mimic the faith of the religious zealots she turned away from?

6. What messages do Gifty and Nana hear about the intersection of race and poverty in their youth church meetings? How do the siblings respond to the conflation of the two—and what does the assumption that African countries are impoverished or need saving by missionaries suggest about the colonial power dynamic engrained in our society?

7. Gifty refers to her relationship with her mother as an "experiment." Are there similarities in the way Gifty approaches her work and her relationship with her mother? How did the separate events of losing the Chin Chin Man and Nana’s death affect their relationship? Throughout the course of their lives, how does Gifty determine whether or not her and her mother are "going to be ok" (33)?

8. Throughout the book, Gifty struggles to find a sense of community in places where people traditionally find it (school, work, family, church, etc.). What life experiences shape her understanding of community? In what ways does this affect her ability to build relationships with the people in her life (Anna, Raymond, Katherine, Han)?

9. Explore the idea of humans as the only animal "who believed he had transcended his Kingdom" (21). How does this idea influence Gifty’s relationship with science? With religion?

10. Describe the difference between Gifty’s connection to Ghana and her connection to Alabama. In what ways does she feel connected to her Ghanaian ancestry?

11. How does Gifty feel when she overhears congregants gossiping about her family? How does this experience influence her relationship with the church? With her family? With God?

12. Gifty privately considers her work in the lab as holy—"if not holy, then at least sacrosanct (p. 92)." Explain her reasoning, and why she chooses not to discuss this feeling with anyone.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Transcription
Kate Atkinson, 2018
Little, Brown and Company
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316176637

Summary
A thrilling new novel from the bestselling author of Life After Life

In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage.

Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying.

But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past forever.

Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat.

A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence.

Transcription is a work of rare depth and texture, a bravura modern novel of extraordinary power, wit and empathy. It is a triumphant work of fiction from one of the best writers of our time. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—York, England, UK
• Education—M.A., Dundee University
• Awards—Whitbread Award; Woman's Own Short Story Award; Ian St. James Award; Saltire Book of the Year Award; Prix Westminster
• Currently—lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Kate Atkinson was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature which she failed at the viva stage. During her final year of this course, she was married for the first time, although the marriage lasted only two years.

After leaving the university, she took on a variety of miscellaneous jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, Yorkshire for a time, before moving to Edinburgh, where she taught at Dundee University and began writing short stories. She now lives in Edinburgh.

Writing
She initially wrote for women's magazines after winning the 1986 Woman's Own Short Story Competition. She was runner-up for the Bridport Short Story Prize in 1990 and won an Ian St James Award in 1993 for her short-story "Karmic Mothers," which she later adapted for BBC2 television as part of its Tartan Shorts series.

Atkinson's breakthrough was with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award, ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins biography of William Ewart Gladstone. The book has been adapted for radio, theatre and television. She has since written several more novels, short stories and a play. Case Histories (2004) was described by Stephen King as "the best mystery of the decade." The book won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster.

Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, and the surprising twists and plot turns. Four of her novels have featured the popular former detective Jackson Brodie—Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News (2008), and Started Early, Took My Dog (2010). She has shown that, stylistically, she is also a comic novelist who often juxtaposes mundane everyday life with fantastic magical events, a technique that contributes to her work's pervasive magic realism.

Life After Life (2013) revolves around Ursula Todd's continual birth and rebirth. Janet Maslin of the New York Times called it "a big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways that underscore its author's fully untethered imagination."

A God in Ruins (2015), the companion book to Life After Life, follows Ursula's brother Todd who survived the war, only to succumb to disillusionment and guilt at having survived.

Atkinson was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to literature. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[A] suspenseful novel… enlivened by its heroine’s witty, sardonic voice as she is transformed from an innocent, unsophisticated young woman into a spy for Britain’s MI5 during WWII.… [A] transportive, wholly realized historical novel.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review) [S]uperb…. With a fascinating cast of characters, careful plotting, and lyrical language in turns comical and tragic, Atkinson's complex story carefully unveils the outer demands and inner conflicts that war inflicts on people. A delight. —Penelope J.M. Klein, Fayetteville, NY
Library Journal

(Starred review) Atkinson never fails to take us beyond an individual's circumstances to the achingly human, often-contradictory impulses within. [T]his is a wonderful novel about making choices, failing to make them, and living, with some degree of grace, the lives our choices determine for us.
Booklist

(Starred review) [A] sort of demystified thriller… [with] intrigue …[and] surprises.… The deepest pleasure …is the author's language. As ever, Atkinson is sharp, precise, and funny.… Another beautifully crafted book from an author of great intelligence and empathy
Kirkus Reviews

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The Translation of Love
Lynne Kutsukake, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385540674

Summary
An emotionally gripping portrait of post-war Japan, where a newly repatriated girl must help a classmate find her missing sister.

After spending the war years in a Canadian internment camp, thirteen-year-old Aya Shimamura and her father are faced with a gut-wrenching choice: Move east of the Rocky Mountains or go “back” to Japan

Barred from returning home to the west coast and bitterly grieving the loss of Aya’s mother during internment, Aya’s father signs a form that enables the government to deport them.

But war-devastated Tokyo is not much better. Aya’s father struggles to find work, compromising his morals and toiling long hours.

Meanwhile Aya, born and raised in Vancouver, is something of a pariah at her school, bullied for being foreign and paralyzed when asked to communicate in Japanese. Aya’s alienation is eventually mitigated by one of her principal tormenters, a willful girl named Fumi Tanaka, whose older sister has mysteriously disappeared.

When a rumor surfaces that General MacArthur, who is overseeing the Occupation, might help citizens in need, Fumi enlists Aya to compose a letter asking him to find her beloved sister.

The letter is delivered into the reluctant hands of Corporal Matt Matsumoto, a Japanese American serving with the Occupation forces, whose endless job is translating the thousands of letters MacArthur receives each week. Matt feels an affinity toward Fumi but is largely powerless, and the girls decide to take matters into their own hands, venturing into the dark and dangerous underside of Tokyo’s Ginza district.

Told through rich, interlocking storylines, The Translation of Love mines this turbulent period to show how war irrevocably shapes the lives of people on both sides—and yet the novel also allows for a poignant spark of resilience, friendship, and love that translates across cultures and borders to stunning effect. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1951-52
• Where—Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Education—M.A., University of Toronto
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Ontario

Lynne Kutsukake, a third-generation Japanese-Canadian, was born in Toronto, Ontario. She earned a master's degree in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto and studied Japanese literature in Japan, eventually becoming a librarian in Toronto.

Her short fiction has appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, Dalhousie Review, Windsor Review, and Ricepaper. She wrote the short story, "Mating," a finalist for the 2010 Journey Prize, while taking a writing class at the University of Toronto. The Translation of Love, her first novel, appeared in 2016. The author lives in Toronto. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Lynne Kutsukake, a third-generation Japanese-Canadian and first-time novelist, conjures the voices of [an] agonized time with graceful simplicity.... The plainness of Kutsukake’s prose can verge on threadbare, with patches of earnest research peeking through, but these lapses are balanced by moments of indelible poignancy.
Janice P. Nimura - New York Times Book Review

[A]lthough the stakes are never quite high enough for the novel to gather significant momentum, many scenes pack an emotional punch and are enhanced by the author’s clarity and restraint.... The Translation of Love offers rich insights into an underreported period in history, despite holding some of its subject matter at arm’s-length. Certainly, there is plenty to suggest that Kutsukake’s next novel can deliver on the promise of this one.
Trilby Kent - Toronto Globe and Mail

Kutsukake is an accomplished writer, adroitly handling the dark effects of discrimination, hunger, poverty, and disease after the war.... [A]n engaging and compelling read.
Asian Review of Books

(Starred review.) Kutsukake’s moving debut novel focuses on the intertwining stories of several protagonists in post–World War II Tokyo.... Kutsukake’s story is consistently engaging, though a smattering of unlikely plot points can be distracting. The result is a memorable story of hope and loneliness with a cathartic ending.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) This poignant first novel is set in postWorld War II Japan during the American occupation. Told from multiple viewpoints, it is a story of nationality and identity, family and friendship, love and loss.... [A] fresh perspective on life in postwar Japan. —Catherine Coyne, Mansfield P.L., MA
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Kutsukake skillfully weaves these characters’ varied perspectives together to create a vivid and memorable account of ordinary people struggling to recover from the devastations of war.
Booklist

(Starred review.) Emotionally rich without turning saccharine, twisting without losing its grounding in reality, Kutsukake's novel is classic historical fiction at its best. A vivid delight chronicling a fascinating—and little-discussed—chapter in world history.
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. Discuss the devastation of the war and its effects on the survivors who are caught between a painful past and an uncertain future.

2. How are the Japanese treated by their American occupiers? How prevalent is discrimination of the Japanese towards Americans and the Americans toward Japanese? What do you make of the treatment, for instance, of Aya at the hands of her classmates?

3. Five different voices make up this novel. Do you find one more compelling or sympathetic than others?

4. Why do their relatives resent Aya and her father's move to Toykyo?

5. Talk about Matt's presence in Tokyo. Consider the irony of his internment in America—where he was considered a foreign threat—and his position now among the ranks of the victors. Where do his sense of identity and his sympathies lie?

6. What do the letters to General MacArthur reveal about the state of the Japanese and their society? When one letter writer asks, "how should a man live?" what were your thoughts?

7. What do you make of Sumiko, who was raised to be "proper," but who feels the thrill of escaping convention to flirt with danger in a dance hall? Why does Matt decide to help Fumi find her?

8. What does the book's title, "The Translation of Love," mean in the context of the story?

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

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The Travelling Cat Chronicles
Hiro Arikawa, 2015; U.S., 2018 (trans., Philip Gabriel)
Penguin Publishing
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451491336

Summary
A life-affirming anthem to kindness and self-sacrifice, The Travelling Cat Chronicles shows how the smallest things can provide the greatest joy.

We take journeys to explore exotic new places and to return to the comforts of home, to visit old acquaintances and to make new friends. But the most important journey is the one that shows us how to follow our hearts…

An instant international bestseller and Indie Bestseller, The Travelling Cat Chronicles has charmed readers around the world. With simple yet descriptive prose, this novel gives voice to Nana the cat and his owner, Satoru, as as they take to the road on a journey with no other purpose than to visit three of Satoru's longtime friends. Or so Nana is led to believe…

With his crooked tail—a sign of good fortune—and adventurous spirit, Nana is the perfect companion for the man who took him in as a stray. And as they travel in a silver van across Japan, with its ever-changing scenery and seasons, they will learn the true meaning of courage and gratitude, of loyalty and love. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 9, 1972
• Where—Kochi, Japan
• Education—Sonoda Women's University
• Awards—Dengeki Novel Prize
• Currently—lives in Japan

Hiro Arikawa is a well-known Japanese "light novelist" (Japanese for young adult novels) who has published than a dozen books, including two series: "The SDF" (Self-defense forces) series and "The Library" series. Arikawa was born in Kochi, Japan and attended the Sonoda Women's University, a private women's college in Amagasaki, Japan.

Although considered a light novelist, Arikawa's books—from her second work onwards—have been published as hardbacks and stand alongside more literary works. Her 2006 light novel Toshokan Sensō (The Library War) was named as Hon no Zasshi's number one for entertainment for the first half of 2006, and came 5th in the Honya Taishō for that year, competing against standard adult novels. Two of her works were adapted to film in 2015 and 2016.

Arikawa won the 10th annual Dengeki Novel Prize for new writers for Shio no Machi (Wish on My Precious) in 2003, and the book was published the following year. It was praised for its love story between a heroine and hero divided by age and social status, and for its depiction of military structures.

Arikawa first came to the attention of English-language readers with her 2015 bestseller, The Travelling Cat Chronicles. The work was published in the U.S. in 2018 with solid reviews and brisk sales. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/28/2018.)

Book Reviews
Anyone who has ever unashamedly loved an animal will read this book with gratitude, for its understanding of an emotion that ennobles us as human beings, whether we value it or not.
Lynne Truss - Guardian (UK)

It’s the wisdom and stoicism of the feline narrator that makes this book such an engaging read. Like Alison Jean Lester’s recent Yuki Means Happiness, it provides a fascinating insight into Japanese culture and traditions, but ultimately it doesn’t matter that it’s about a man and a cat. Like Of Mice and Men or The Kite Runner, Arikawa’s central concern is friendship and the things we’ll do for the people, or animals, that we love.
Irish Times

Continues the Japanese tradition of folkloric tales that celebrate simple values such as self-sacrifice and friendship. It has the warmth, painterly touch, and tenderness of a Studio Ghibli film—and is a delight to read.
Financial Times (UK)

I doubt many readers—as cynical and hardened as they may—will get through it dry-eyed.
NPR

The book's greatest strength is that it allows its readers to experience vicarious happiness even as a sense of impending loss begins to creep through the pages.
NPR

[Arikawa’s] book stands out within the world of cat literature …and it’s a world worth exploring.
Time

But as simple as both the premise and prose of The Travelling Cat Chronicles, it’s a novel that will leave your heart both comfortably full and utterly raw.
Bustle

Nana, a stray cat adopted by 30-something Satoru Miyawaki, narrates this lovely tale… [A] touching novel of a brave cat and his gentle, wise human will resonate with lovers of animal tales, quiet stories of friendship, and travelogues alike.
Publishers Weekly

Despite its seeming simplicity, the novel contains surprising depth. Arikawa artfully portrays Nana's "catness," … [pairing him] with the gentle soul of Satoru…. Gentle, soft-spoken, and full of wisdom.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The Travelling Cat Chronicles exemplifies the idea that life isn’t about the destination; it’s about the journey. How do both Satoru and Nana show us that life is what we make of it?

2. Friendships come and go, as we all know. Yet friendships are everlasting in this book, despite the years that go by without any contact. Do you think this is true in real life? Aided by social media and how fast communication is now—via e-mail, chat programs, and text messages—have you reached out to someone you were close to many years ago but were no longer in touch with? Did this book make you want to reach out to someone?

3. The idea of being saved is a theme in this book—whether it’s Nana literally being saved from homelessness and hunger by Satoru, or Satoru feeling saved by Nana as Nana brought love into his life. Is there someone in your life, a furry friend or a person, who has saved you?

4. Japanese culture is predominant in the book. Were there aspects of the culture you found particularly fascinating, especially in regard to how Japanese people love their cats? Do you find that the same is true in America?

5. Both Nana and Satoru hold strong memories of enjoying nature together during their travels. Why was it important for Satoru to share these experiences with Nana? What did Nana learn from them?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1881-82
Dover Thrift
160 pp. (varies by publisher)
ISBN-13: 9780486275598

Summary
Masterfully crafted, Treasure Island is a stunning yarn of piracy on the fiery tropic seas—an unforgettable tale of treachery that embroils a host of legendary swashbucklers, from honest young Jim Hawkins, to sinister, two-timing Israel Hands, to evil incarnate, blind Pew.

But above all, Treasure Island is a complex study of good and evil, as embodied by that hero-villain Long John Silver, the merrily unscrupulous buccaneer-rogue whose greedy quest for gold cannot help but win the heart of every soul who ever longed for romance, treasure, and adventure. (From the Simon & Schuster edition.)

. . . .

Life changes for Jim Hawkins the day a mysterious sailor walks into his father's inn. The sailor, Billy Bones, possesses a secret which is in hot demand. As Jim discovers when Billy Bones dies, the secret is actually a map which indicates the whereabouts of some hidden treasure—and people are willing to kill for it.

The much sought-after treasure map falls into the hands of Jim, and he embarks on an adventure to find legendary riches. Little does he know that it will be a voyage fraught with numerous and unknown dangers. On a ship full of pirates, all out for their own personal gain, Jim realizes that very few can be trusted. But will the murderous crew get what they want? Or will Jim outwit them to recover the buried treasure?

Robert Louis Stevenson's tale, full of action and adventure, has entertained readers for well over a hundred years. This graphic novel adaptation brings to life a fascinating story that can be enjoyed by young and old alike. (From the Random House edition.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November, 13 1850
• Where—Edinburg, Scotland, UK
• Death—December 3, 1894
• Where—Vailima, Samoan Islands
• Education—J.D., University of Edinburg

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the 26 most translated authors in the world. His works have been admired by many other writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Conan Doyle, Cesare Pavese, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins."

Formative years
Stevenson was born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson in Edinburgh, Scotland to Margaret Isabella Balfour (1829–1897) and Thomas Stevenson (1818–1887), a leading lighthouse engineer. Lighthouse design was had been the family profession for two generations. His mother's father was a minister of the Church of Scotland at nearby Colinton, and Stevenson spent the greater part of his boyhood holidays in his house. Stevenson once wrote:

Now I often wonder what I inherited from this old minister. I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them.

Stevenson inherited a tendency to coughs and fevers; indeed, illness would be a recurrent feature of his adult life, leaving him extraordinarily thin. Contemporary views were that he had tuberculosis, but more recent views are that it was bronchiectasis or even sarcoidosis.

An only child, strange-looking and eccentric, Stevenson found it hard to fit in when he was sent to a nearby school at age six, a problem repeated at age eleven when he went on to the Edinburgh Academy. In any case, his frequent illnesses often kept him away from his first school, and he was taught for long stretches by private tutors. He compulsively wrote stories throughout his childhood. His father paid for the printing of Robert's first publication at sixteen, an account of the covenanters' rebellion which was published on its two hundredth anniversary, The Pentland Rising: A Page of History, 1666.

In 1867 Stevenson entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering. He showed from the start no enthusiasm for his studies and devoted much energy to avoiding lectures. Each year during vacations, Stevenson travelled to inspect the family's engineering works—yet he enjoyed the travels more for the material they gave for his writing than for any engineering interest.

In April 1871 Stevenson notified his father of his decision to pursue a life of letters although he agreed to study Law (again at Edinburgh University) for the sake of financial security. But Stevenson was moving away from his upbringing. His dress became more Bohemian; he already wore his hair long, but he now took to wearing a velveteen jacket. More importantly, he had come to reject Christianity, leading to a long period of dissension with both parents.

Early career
In late 1873, on a visit to a cousin in England, Stevenson met Sidney Colvin, who became his literary adviser and the first editor of Stevenson's letters after his death.

Stevenson was soon active in London literary life, becoming acquainted with many of the writers of the time, including Leslie Stephen, the editor of the Cornhill Magazine (and Virginia Woolf's father). Stephen in turn would introduce him to a more important friend, William Ernest Henley—an energetic and talkative man with a wooden leg., Henley became a close friend and occasional literary collaborator, until a quarrel broke up the friendship in 1888. He is often seen as the model for Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

In November 1873 Stevenson's health failed, and he was sent to the French Riviera to recuperate. He returned in better health in April 1874 and settled down to his studies, but he returned to France several times after that, becoming a member of the artists' colonies and visiting galleries and theaters. In July 1875 he qualified for the bar, but although his law studies would influence his books, he never practised law. All his energies were now spent in travel and writing.

Marriage
In 1876, on a canoe trip through Belgium and France, he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American who had come to France with her children—as a separation from her American husband. Although Stevenson returned to Britain shortly after this first meeting, Fanny apparently remained in his thoughts, and he wrote an essay, "On falling in love," for the Cornhill Magazine. They met again early in 1877 and became lovers. Stevenson spent much of the following year with her and her children in France.

Fanny returned to San Francisco, California, in 1878, and a year later Stevenson he set off to join her. From New York City he travelled overland by train to California (later writing about it in The Amateur Emigrant), a trip that broke his health. He was near death when he arrived in Monterey, California, where some local ranchers nursed him back to health.

In December 1879, Stevenson recovered and continued to San Francisco, where he lived on as little as forty-five cents or less a day to support himself in his writing. After another bout of illness, with Fanny now divorced and nursing him back to health, his father cabled him money.

Fanny and Robert were married in May, 1880, although, as he said, he was "a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom." With his new wife and her son, Lloyd, he travelled north of San Francisco to Napa Valley, and spent a summer honeymoon at an abandoned mining camp on Mount Saint Helena. He wrote about this experience in The Silverado Squatters.

He met Charles Warren Stoddard, co-editor of the Overland Monthly and author of South Sea Idylls, who urged Stevenson to travel to the South Pacific, an idea which would return to him years later. But in August 1880 he returned to Britain with Fanny and her son Lloyd where, with Fanny's charm and wit, he reconciled with his family.

Europe and the U.S.
For the next seven years, between 1880 and 1887, Stevenson searched in vain for a place suitable for his health, summering in England and Scotland. In the wintertime, he traveled to France where, for a time, he enjoyed almost complete happiness. "I have so many things to make life sweet for me," he wrote, "it seems a pity I cannot have that other one thing—health."

In spite of his ill health, he produced the bulk of his best-known work during these years: Treasure Island, his first widely popular book; Kidnapped; Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde," the novella which established his wider reputation; The Black Arrow; and two volumes of verse, A Child's Garden of Verses and Underwoods. In Skerryvore, Scotland, he gave a copy of Kidnapped to his friend and frequent visitor Henry James.

When his father died in 1887, Stevenson felt free to follow the advice of his physician to try a complete change of climate, and he started with his mother and family for Colorado. But after landing in New York, they decided to spend the winter at Saranac Lake, New York, in the Adirondacks at a cure cottage now known as Stevenson Cottage. During the intensely cold winter Stevenson wrote some of his best essays, including "Pulvis et Umbra," began The Master of Ballantrae, and began planning a cruise to the southern Pacific Ocean for the following summer.

Journey to the Pacific
In June 1888 Stevenson chartered the yacht Casco and set sail with his family from San Francisco. The sea air and thrill of adventure for a time restored his health, and for nearly three years he wandered the eastern and central Pacific, stopping for extended stays at the Hawaiian Islands, where he spent much time with and became a good friend of King Kalakaua. He spent time in the Gilbert Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand and the Samoan Islands.

During this period he completed The Master of Ballantrae, composed two ballads based on the legends of the islanders, and wrote "The Bottle Imp." He preserved the experience of these years in his various letters and in his In the South Seas (published posthumously), an account of the 1888 cruise and a second in 1889.

In April 1890, Stevenson sailed for his third and final voyage among the South Seas islands. While Stevenson intended to write another book of travel to follow the earlier In the South Seas, it was Fanny who eventually published her journal of their third voyage.

Last years
In 1890 Stevenson purchased 400 acres (1.6 km²) in Upolu, an island in Samoa. Here he established his estate in the village of Vailima. He took the native name Tusitala (Samoan for "Teller of Tales", i.e. a storyteller). His influence spread to the Samoans, who consulted him for advice, and he soon became involved in local politics. He was convinced of the incompetence of the European officials appointed to rule the Samoans and, after many futile attempts to resolve the matter, published A Footnote to History. This was such a stinging protest against existing conditions that it resulted in the recall of two officials, and Stevenson feared for a time it would result in his own deportation.

In addition to building his house, clearing his land, and aiding the Samoans in numerous ways, he found time to work at his writing. He completed The Beach of Falesa, Catriona (titled David Balfour in the USA), The Ebb-Tide, and the Vailima Letters during this period.

Even so, he grew depressed, wondering if he had exhausted his creative vein. With each fresh attempt, the best he felt he could write was "ditch-water." He feared that he might once again become a helpless invalid, but he rebelled against the idea:

I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse—ay, to be hanged, rather than pass again through that slow dissolution.

Then, with a sudden return of his old energy, he began work on Weir of Hermiston, believing it to be the best work he had done—"so good it frightens me," he is reported to have exclaimed. Of his life, overall, he was convinced that...

Sick and well, I have had splendid life of it, grudge nothing, regret very little...take it all over, damnation and all, would hardly change with any man of my time.

On December 3, 1894, Stevenson was straining to open a bottle of wine when he suddenly collapsed. He died within a few hours, most likely of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was forty-four years old.

The Samoans insisted on surrounding his body with a watch-guard during the night and on bearing their "Tusitala" upon their shoulders to nearby Mount Vaea. There they buried him on a spot overlooking the sea. Stevenson had always wanted his "Requiem" inscribed on his tomb:

Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Beloved by the Samoans, Stevenson's tombstone epigraph was translated into a Samoan song of grief, known and sung in Samoa to this day. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/4/2013.)

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

Climb aboard for the swashbuckling adventure of a lifetime. Treasure Islandhas enthralled (and caused slight seasickness) for decades. The names Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins are destined to remain pieces of folklore for as long as children want to read Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous book. With it's dastardly plot and motley crew of rogues and villains, it seems unlikely that children will ever say no to this timeless classic.
Amazon Editors Review

What I didn't anticipate was the power of Stevenson's prose. His ability to bring everything vividly to life is still astonishing. It was probably the first time for me that reading became as exciting as messing about. The pirate has a dangerous glamour to him, a degenerate dandyism, something, once I was in my teens, that I would admire in people like David Bowie.
Jake Arnott - Author

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

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

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Treasure Island:

1. Jim is probably around 12 or 13 years of age, a naive and impetuous boy. How does he change during the novel to achieve a level of maturity and perspective? Can you find some examples of how he vacillates between the worlds of childhood and adulthood?

2. How would you describe Jim as a narrator? Why might Stevenson have chosen a boy to tell the story rather than, say, Dr. Livesey or Squire Trelawney? What does Jim's narration bring to our understanding—and enjoyment—of the tale?

3. What do you think of Long John Silver? Is he thoroughly evil, a stock villain? Or is he something more complicated? Does he possess any semblance of nobility? Many readers have considered him the most story's most compelling character. What do you think?

4. Both Captain Smollett and Long John Silver lead teams of men. How do their leadership abilities differ from one another? What do their styles suggest about their characters?

5. Jim sees Dr. Livesey as a good man...but not a grand one. Why? How do you see Livesey?

6. Talk about role models, one of the central ideas of the novel. Who best serves as an inspiration for Jim as a pattern for his life? What aspects of Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawney does Jim admire? What about Long John Silver—does he offer any kind of a role model for Jim?

7. How might Ben Gunn stand as a cautionary example of someone too long separated from civilizing influences of society?

8. Talk about the presence of flags in Treasure Island. What is their symbolic significance to the story?

9. Discuss the role of greed in Treasure Island—a book all about unfettered desire. How does greed motivate the different characters...and how does finding the treasure affect them? What is Jim's attitude toward the treasure at the end of the book? Why do the gold coins evoke nightmares rather than pleasurable dreams? Why does he have no desire to return for the silver that was left behind?

10. Why would Stevenson reveal his characters' religious sides near the end of the adventure?

11. Why does Jim wish Long John Silver happiness in the last paragraphs of the novel?

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

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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith, 1943
HarperCollins
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060736262

Summary
Through it is often categorized as a coming-of-age novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is much more than that. Its richly-plotted narrative of three generations in a poor but proud American family offers a detailed and unsentimental portrait of urban life at the beginning of the century.

The story begins in 1912, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where eleven-year-old Francie Nolan and her younger brother, Neeley, are spending a blissful Saturday collecting rags, paper, metal, rubber, and other scrap to sell to the junk man for a few pennies. Half of any money they get goes into the tin can bank that is nailed to the floor in the back corner of a closet in their tenement flat. This bank, a shared resource among everyone in the family, is returned to time and again throughout the novel, and becomes a recurring symbol of the Nolan's self-reliance, struggles, and dreams.

Those dreams sustain every member of the extended Nolan family, not just the children. Their mother Katie scrubs floors and works as a janitor to provide the family with free lodging. She is the primary breadwinner because her husband Johnny, a singing waiter, is often drunk and out of work. Yet there is no dissension in the Nolan household. Katie married a charming dreamer and she accepts her fate, but she vows that things will be better for her children. Her dream is that they will go to college and that Neeley will become a doctor. Intelligent and bookish, Francie seems destined to fulfill this ambition—Neeley less so.

In spite of (or perhaps because of) her own pragmatic nature, Francie feels a stronger affinity with her ne'er-do-well father than with her self-sacrificing mother. In her young eyes, Johnny can make wishes come true, as when he finagles her a place in a better public school outside their neighborhood. When Johnny dies an alcohol-related death, leaving behind the two school-aged children and another on the way, Francie cannot quite believe that life can carry on as before. Somehow it does, although the family's small enough dreams need to be further curtailed.

Through Katie's determination, Francie and Neeley are able to graduate from the eighth grade, but thoughts of high school give way to the reality of going to work. Their jobs, which take them for the first time across the bridge into Manhattan, introduce them to a broader view of life, beyond the parochial boundaries of Williamsburg. Here Francie feels the pain of her first love affair. And with determination equal to her mother's, she finds a way to complete her education. As she heads off to college at the end of the book, Francie leaves behind the old neighborhood, but carries away in her heart the beloved Brooklyn of her childhood. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 15, 1896
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Death—January 17, 1972
• Where—Chapel Hill, North Carolina
• Education—University of Michigan (non-degree student)
• Awards—Rockefeller Fellowship and the Dramatist Guild
Fellowship

Betty Smith, the daughter of German immigrants, grew up poor in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. After stints writing features for newspapers, reading plays for the Federal Theater Project, and acting in summer stock, Smith moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina under the auspices of the W.P.A. While there in 1943, she published A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, her first novel. Smith's other novels include Tomorrow Will be Better (1947), Maggie-Now, (1958) and Joy in the Morning (1963). She also had a long career as a dramatist, writing one-act and full-length plays for which she received both the Rockefeller Fellowship and the Dramatist Guild Fellowship. She died in 1972. (From the publisher.)

More
Betty Smith was an American author, born in Brooklyn, New York to German immigrants. She grew up poor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. These experiences served as the framework to her first novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which was published in 1943.

Having married early George H. E. Smith, a fellow Brooklynite, she moved with him to Ann Arbor, Michigan, while he pursued his law degree at the University of Michigan. At this time, she gave birth to two girls and waited until they were in school so she could complete her higher education. Although Smith had not finished high school, the university allowed her to enroll in classes anyway. There she honed her skills in journalism, literature, writing, and drama, winning a prestigious Hopwood Award. She was a student in the classes of Professor Kenneth Thorpe Rowe.

In 1938 she divorced her George Smith and moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she married Joseph Jones in 1943. It was at this time that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was published. She teamed with George Abbott to write the book for the 1951 musical adaptation of the same name. Throughout her life, Smith worked as a dramatist, receiving many awards and fellowships including the Rockefeller Fellowship, the Dramatists Guild Fellowship, and the Hopwood Award for her work in drama. (From Wikipedia.)

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

What saves the book from reaching a saccharine tipping point is Smith's sharp-eyed perceptions that strike home with stunning regularity.
A LitLovers Litpick (Jan '08)

A profoundly moving novel, and an honest and true one. It cuts right to the heart of life... If you miss A Tree Grows in Brooklyn you will deny yourself a rich experience.... It is a poignant and deeply understanding story of childhood and family relationships. The Nolans lived in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn from 1902 until 1919.... Their daughter Francie and their son Neely knew more than their fair share of the privations and sufferings that are the lot of a great city's poor. Primarily this is Francie's book. She is a superb feat of characterization, an imaginative, alert, resourceful child. And Francie's growing up and beginnings of wisdom are the substance of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
New York Times

Discussion Questions
1. In a particularly revealing chapter of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Francie's teacher dismisses her essays about everyday life among the poor as "sordid," and, indeed, many of the novel's characters seem to harbor a sense of shame about their poverty. But they also display a remarkable self-reliance (Katie, for example, says she would kill herself and her children before accepting charity). How and why have our society's perceptions of poverty changed—for better or worse—during the last one hundred years?

2. Some critics have argued that many of the characters in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn can be dismissed as stereotypes, exhibiting quaint characteristics or representing pat qualities of either nobility or degeneracy. Is this a fair criticism? Which characters are the most convincing? The least?

3. Francie observes more than once that women seem to hate other women ("they stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman"), while men, even if they hate each other, stick together against the world. Is this an accurate appraisal of the way things are in the novel?

4. The women in the Nolan/Rommely clan exhibit most of the strength and, whenever humanly possible, control the family's destiny. In what ways does Francie continue this legacy?

5. What might Francie's obsession with order—from systematically reading the books in the library from A through Z, to trying every flavor ice cream soda—in turn say about her circumstances and her dreams?

6. Although it is written in the third person, there can be little argument that the narrative is largely from Francie's point of view. How would the book differ if it was told from Neeley's perspective?

7. How can modern readers reconcile the frequent anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiments that characters espouse throughout the novel?

8. Could it be argued that the main character of the book is not Francie but, in fact, Brooklyn itself?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Tree of Smoke
Denis Johnson, 2007
Macmillan Picador
624 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312427740

Summary
Winner, 2007 National Book Award—Fiction

Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon.com, Salon, Slate, National Book Critics Circle, Christian Science Monitor...

Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA—engaged in Pschological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. (From the publisher.)

Johnson was born in 1949 in Munich, West Germany. He holds an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he has also returned to teach. He received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1986 and a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction in 1993.

Johnson first came to prominence after the publication of his short story collection Jesus' Son (1992), whose 1999 film adaptation was named one of the top ten films of the year by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Roger Ebert. Johnson has a cameo role in the film as a man who has been stabbed in the eye by his wife.

Johnson's plays have been produced in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Seattle. He is the Resident Playwright of Campo Santo, the resident theater company at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco.

In 2006-2007, Johnson held the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

Johnson lives with his wife, Cindy Lee, in Arizona and Idaho. He has three children, two of whom he homeschooled; in October, 1997 he wrote an article for Salon.com in defense of homeschooling. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Mr. Johnson not only succeeds in conjuring the anomalous, hallucinatory aura of the Vietnam War as authoritatively as Stephen Wright or Francis Ford Coppola, but he also shows its fallout on his characters with harrowing emotional precision.... Bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and Tree of Smoke is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop. It comes with the armor and accoutrements of a Major Novel: big historical theme (Vietnam), semi-mythical cultural institution (military intelligence), long time span (1963-70, with a coda set in 1983) and unreasonable length (614 pages), all of which would be off-putting if this were not, in fact, a major novel, and if Johnson's last big book hadn't been the small collection of eccentric and addictive short stories called Jesus’ Son (1992). Tree of Smoke is a soulful book, even a numinous one...and it ought to secure Johnson's status as a revelator for this still new century.
Jim Lewis - New York Times Book Review

To write a fat novel about the Vietnam War nearly 35 years after it ended is an act of literary bravado. To do so as brilliantly as Denis Johnson has in Tree of Smoke is positively a miracle. This novel makes large demands on the reader: to submit to its length, to its disorienting language and structure, to the elusive and shattering experience of its characters, and finally to its sheer ambition to be definitive an encompassing novel for the Vietnam generation. It is a presumptuous book, in other words, and you may resist for the first several hundred pages. But it will grab you eventually, and gets inside your head like the war it is describing—mystifying, horrifying, mesmerizing. Johnson, a poet, ex-junkie and adventure journalist, has written a book that by the end wraps around you as tightly as a jungle snake.
David Ignatius - Washington Post

There is so much going on in Tree of Smoke, and so many levels of symbolism, that it is hard to do the story justice here.... Johnson brings his talents as a poet to bear, especially when describing the jungles and cities of Asia.
David Hellman - San Francisco Chronicle

Denis Johnson’s apocalyptic, doom-and-grace ridden Vietnam novel has a lot of fire in its belly.... If Johnson has a signature theme throughout his work, it's a kind of quasi-mystical redemption on the other side of the abyss; his gorgeous prose and willingness to go deep have led the way through the scarily lightless corridors of his fiction.
Gail Caldwell - Boston Globe

For a reader with stamina, the rewards come steadily. Johnson is a fine stylist of the world of soulful disaster. The phrase "tree of smoke," as he presents it, is the literal translation from the Hebrew of the pillar in Exodus. This time—in these pages—that pillar of smoke leaves us to a dark, dark vision of a promised land.
All Things Considered - National Public Radio

Is this our last Vietnam novel? One has to wonder. What serious writer, after tuning in to Johnson's terrifying, dissonant opera, can return with a fresh ear? The work of many past chroniclers—Graham Greene, Tim O'Brien, the filmmakers Coppola, Cimino and Kubrick, all of whom have contributed to our cultural "understanding" of the war—is both evoked and consumed in the fiery heat of Johnson's story. In the novel's coda, Storm, a war cliche now way gone and deep in the Malaysian jungle near Thailand, attends preparations for a village's sacrificial bonfire (consisting of personal items smashed and axed by their owners) and offers himself as "compensation, baby." When the book ends, in a heartbreaking soliloquy from Kathy (fittingly, a Canadian) on the occasion of a war orphan benefit in a Minneapolis Radisson, you feel that America's Vietnam experience has been brought to a closure that's as good as we'll ever get.
Publishers Weekly

This major Vietnam novel depicts the era's distinctive psychedelic brutality, the ineptitude of the U.S. military effort, and the otherworldly theater of the "intelligence" operations surrounding the politics of the war. Skip Sands is starting out in the hazy world of the CIA under the tutelage of his uncle, Col. F.X. Sands, a veteran of World War II and many years of mercenary covert actions. They are involved in an assassination in the Philippines, where the novel begins in November 1963, and then move on to Vietnam. There, the Colonel sets up an undercover situation for Skip. Whether the Colonel is a rogue agent gone over the edge is open to question. Down at the bottom of the command chain are the brothers Houston, Bill Jr. and James, members of the alcoholic, sociopathic underclass of rural and Bible Belt America last seen in Johnson's Angels. It is these characters with whom the author seems truly in touch. Moving chronologically, the novel proceeds into the late Sixties, when the war seems not so much lost as running down on the political, military, and cultural energy powering it earlier. Ugly and fascinating, with many shattering scenes, this long work may seem familiar to fans of Apocalypse Now but is nevertheless gripping. Recommended for all fiction collections.
Library Journal

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

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

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The Trespasser
Tana French, 2016
Penguin Publishing
464pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670026333

Summary
In bestselling Tana French’s newest “tour de force,”* being on the Murder squad is nothing like Detective Antoinette Conway dreamed it would be.

Her partner, Stephen Moran, is the only person who seems glad she’s there. The rest of her working life is a stream of thankless cases, vicious pranks, and harassment. Antoinette is savagely tough, but she’s getting close to the breaking point.

Their new case looks like yet another by-the-numbers lovers’ quarrel gone bad. Aislinn Murray is blond, pretty, groomed to a shine, and dead in her catalogue-perfect living room, next to a table set for a romantic dinner. There’s nothing unusual about her—except that Antoinette’s seen her somewhere before.

And that her death won’t stay in its neat by-numbers box. Other detectives are trying to push Antoinette and Steve into arresting Aislinn’s boyfriend, fast. There’s a shadowy figure at the end of Antoinette's road. Aislinn's friend is hinting that she knew Aislinn was in danger. And everything they find out about Aislinn takes her further from the glossy, passive doll she seemed to be.

Antoinette knows the harassment has turned her paranoid, but she can’t tell just how far gone she is. Is this case another step in the campaign to force her off the squad, or are there darker currents flowing beneath its polished surface? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—Vermont, USA
• Education—B.A., Trinity College (Dublin)
• Awards—Edgar Award, Macavity Award, Barry Award
• Currently—lives in Dublin, Ireland

Tana French is an Irish novelist and theatrical actress. Her debut novel In the Woods (2007), a psychological mystery, won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards for best first novel. She is a liaison of the Purple Heart Theatre Company and also works in film and voiceover.

French was born in the U.S. to Elena Hvostoff-Lombardi and David French. Her father was an economist working in resource management for the developing world, and the family lived in numerous countries around the globe, including Ireland, Italy, the US, and Malawi.

French attended Trinity College, Dublin, where she was trained in acting. She ultimately settled in Ireland. Since 1990 she has lived in Dublin, which she considers home, although she also retains citizenship in the U.S. and Italy. French is married and has a daughter with her husband.

Dublin Murder Squad series
In the Woods - 2007
The Likeness - 2008
Faithful Place - 2010
Broken Harbor - 2012
The Secret Places - 2014
The Trespasser - 2016

Stand-alone mystery
The Witch Elm - 2018
(Bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/2/2014.)

Book Reviews
One of Ms. French's great strengths has always been the keen insight with which she endows her characters and the coy distance at which she keeps them from the reader. Her books would be mysterious even if they didn't involve outright murders. The people in them keep secrets, imperceptibly change, create facades, hide motives and, as she illustrated so brilliantly in Faithful Place, even fool their own families about matters of life or death for decades. That remains the most stunning of her books, but this new one is a tour de force, too…The Trespasser is brisk but not breathless. It would be a pity if Ms. French raced through such beautifully conceived and executed material…When you read Ms. French—and she has become required reading for anyone who appreciates tough, unflinching intelligence and ingenious plotting—make only one assumption: All of your initial assumptions are wrong. This author drops just enough breadcrumbs through her book to create trails that lead away from whatever the detectives' conventional wisdom happens to be, and she doesn't follow up on them until she's good and ready.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

It has become increasingly clear that U.S.-born, Dublin-based Tana French is the most interesting, most important crime novelist to emerge in the past 10 years. Now, with the publication of her sixth novel, The Trespasser, it’s time to recognize that French’s work renders absurd the lingering distinction between genre and literary fiction—the notion that although crime novels might be better plotted and more readable, only literary fiction, supposedly blessed with superior writing, characterizations and intellectual firepower, deserves the respect of serious readers.
Patrick Anderson - Washington Post

There’s more than a little of the noir about Tana French’s latest, The Trespasser. Set, like her previous thrillers, among the detectives of Dublin’s murder squad, perhaps it (hard-)boils down to the fact that her protagonist this time, detective Antoinette Conway, manages to fizz with contempt for the world around her, bristle with toughness and sink regularly into poetic gloom all at the same time.
Alison Flood - Guardian (UK)

There's nothing standard about French's approach to crime fiction, which plays the form much like a jazz musician improvising on a standard. Even when the outlines of the mystery seem familiar…she finds a way to get at enriching themes and powerful emotional truths in fresh and surprising ways.
Chicago Tribune

As in all of the author's work, meaning lurks beneath every quip and glance. French not only spins a twisty cop tale, she also encases it in meticulous prose, creating a read that is as elegant as it is dark.
Associated Press

French is less adept than usual, however, in weaving in her main characters’ backstories. The underlying themes of loyalty and how far one should go to protect a person are what makes this entry worthy of French’s prodigious talents, though Conway isn’t her best conduit.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) French's interconnected first-person novels easily stand alone, but consuming them in order gives readers the pleasure of seeing characters they've come to know through others' eyes. [For] readers who crave tightly plotted, character-driven crime fiction. —Stephanie Klose
Library Journal

[T]he investigation is impeded by their own murder squad. But why? It's not just because the guys think Conway has a stick up you know where. Respect is owed to French for making her interrogation scenes good enough to really spike your blood pressure, but the magic of previous installments is missing.
Kirkus Reviews

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

GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?

4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?

5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.

Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
Are they plausible or implausible?
Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?

6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?

7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?

Is the conclusion probable or believable?
Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
Perhaps it's too predictable.
Can you envision a different or better ending?

8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?

9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?

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

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Tressa
Barbara T. Cerny, 2011
Strategic Book Publishing
294 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781631353406

Summary
Driven from her Irish home to the shores of New York, Tressa must face not only the demons of her past but somehow follow her dreams.

Escaping an abusive husband and the tragic loss of her newborn child, Tressa O'Daire leaves her home of Dublin, Ireland, for the unknown shores of New York City. There, she finds work in the powerful Langley family as a nurse-maid to a baby girl. The Langleys allow Tressa, a master baker by trade, to use their baking oven and she starts a business and a new life.

Ethan Langley, crippled in a riding accident that left him bound to a wheel chair, has spent the last eight years in his room escaping the embarrassment to his family and the hatred of his brother, Heaton. The only bright spot in his life is his sister, Sarah; until a certain Irish baker arrives and turns his life upside down.

Their very lives are threatened when the head of the Langley household dies unexpectedly leaving the business and family fortune to Heaton. As Heaton and his wife, Victoria, bring the family to the brink of ruination, Tressa and Ethan must save whatever they can, including the budding love between them.

Book Reviews
Tressa is a beautiful person who is sensitive to all the relationships around her. She is gutsy enough to start her own business, foresighted enough to plan her future and sensitive enough to care for the less fortunate. Ethan was an equal partner. Though crippled at an early age he was the motivation behind her actions. He too comes out as a strong character as he moves out of his father’s house and makes his own living. He could have depended on Tressa, but he chose to make a life of his own. The best part I loved was the relationship between them. A sweet understand, a camaraderie which encouraged the goodness in each other.
Rubina Ramesh - The Book Club

A nicely written historical romance, with a great heroine. I loved Tressa’s perseverance to do something different than what was expected of women at the time. Her relationship with the servants and younger Langley siblings was entertaining, and I thought she was quite ingenious in finding solutions to her problems. I almost wanted more. It kept me reading to the very last page.
Heather Osborne - Readers' Favorite

A wonderful and compelling storyline that drags the reader into it and makes you want to keep reading right to the very end. There are lots of twists and turns, agonies and ecstasies, and wins and losses.
Veta Lynne Murray, Editor - Muse It Up Publishing

Discussion Questions
1. Tressa is set in the late 1700's early 1800s. Does this time period work best for this story? Could this story happen today?

2. Tressa is a master baker. Very rare for that time period. Did it add to or detract from the story? How?

3. Ethan is handicapped. What do you think of a romantic hero in a wheelchair? Would you be attracted to a man/woman in a wheelchair?

4. In many romance novels, the two main characters fall into bed and love immediately. Is this realistic for the time period? How about for today? Do you like a quick fall then some conflict, or a slow build with the conflict?

5. Tressa starts her own business under the tutelage of Big Mo. She is Irish—very prejudiced against in that time period. Would this really have happened?

6. The author’s favorite statements in the book—“Ethan might have a broken body, but there was nothing broken about his deep and undying love for this Irish woman. In one evening, she proved to him beyond a shadow of a doubt that his manhood was not limited to one region of his body, and that making love was a total body experience.” Is making love a total body experience?

7. If you were writing the ending of Ethan and Tressa’s story, what would it be?

8. What did you think of Tressa’s relationship with Sarah? Was it appropriate? Why/why not?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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