Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee, 1999
Penguin Publishing
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140296402
Summary
Winner, 1999 Booker Award
Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University.
Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs.
He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced.
Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie—whom he describes as having hips "as slim as a twelve-year-old’s"—obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts.
In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie’s boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the country. There he struggles to rekindle his relationship with Lucy and to understand the changing relations of blacks and whites in the new South Africa.
But when three black strangers appear at their house asking to make a phone call, a harrowing afternoon of violence follows which leaves both of them badly shaken and further estranged from one another. After a brief return to Cape Town, where Lurie discovers his home has also been vandalized, he decides to stay on with his daughter, who is pregnant with the child of one of her attackers.
Now thoroughly humiliated, Lurie devotes himself to volunteering at the animal clinic, where he helps put down diseased and unwanted dogs. It is here, Coetzee seems to suggest, that Lurie gains a redeeming sense of compassion absent from his life up to this point.
Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 9, 1940
• Where—Cape Town, South Africa
• Education—B.A. (English), B.A. (Math), University of Cape Town; Ph.D., University
of Texas, Austin
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 2003; Man Booker Prize—1983 and 1999
• Currently—lives in Adelaide, Australia
John Maxwell Coetzee is a South African-born novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He relocated to Australia in 2002 and lives in Adelaide where, in 2006, he became an Australian citizen.
In 2013, Richard Poplak of the Daily Maverick described Coetzee as "inarguably the most celebrated and decorated living English-language author." Even before receiving the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, Coetzee had been awarded the Man Booker Prize twice: in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K and in 1999 for Disgrace. Other awards include the Jerusalem Prize, Central News Agency Prize (three times), France's Prix Femina Etranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize.
Early life and academia
Coetze was born in Cape Town, Cape Province, Union of South Africa to Afrikaner parents. His father, Zacharias Coetzee, was an occasional attorney and government employee, and his mother, Vera Coetzee (nee Wehmeyer), a schoolteacher. He is descended on his father's side from 17th-century Dutch immigrants to South Africa and on his mother's side from German and Polish immigrants. The family mainly spoke English at home, but John spoke Afrikaans with other relatives.
Coetzee spent most of his early life in Cape Town and in Worcester in Cape Province (modern-day Western Cape), as recounted in his fictionalised memoir, Boyhood (1997). The family moved to Worcester when he was eight, after his father had lost his government job. He studied mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town where he received two Bachelor of Arts degrees, both with honours: one in English in 1960 and the other in Mathematics in 1961.
In 1962 he relocated to the UK, working as a computer programmer for IBM in London, and ICT (International Computers and Tabulators) in Bracknell. He stayed until 1965. In 1963, while still in the UK, Coetzee was awarded a Master of Arts degree from the University of Cape Town for a thesis on the novels of Ford Madox Ford entitled "The Works of Ford Madox Ford with Particular Reference to the Novels" (1963). His experiences in England were later recounted in Youth (2002), his second volume of fictionalized memoirs.
In 1965 Coetzee won a Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, in the US, where he received his doctorate in 1969. His PhD dissertation, "The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis" (1968), was on computer stylistic analysis of Beckett's works.
In 1968, he began teaching English literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he stayed until 1971. It was at Buffalo that he began his first novel, Dusklands.
Beginning in 1968, he sought permanent residence in the United States, a process that was ultimately unsuccessful due in part to his involvement in anti-Vietnam-War protests. He had been one of 45 faculty members who, in 1970, occupied the university's Hayes Hall and were subsequently arrested for criminal trespass—although charges against the 45 were dropped in 1971.
Coetzee eventually returned to South Africa to teach English literature at the University of Cape Town where, in 1983, he was promoted to Professor of General Literature. From 1999-2001, he was Distinguished Professor of Literature.
He retired in 2002, relocating to Adelaide, Australia, where he was made an honorary research fellow in the English Department of the University of Adelaide.
Man Booker Prize
Coetzee was the first writer to be awarded the Booker Prize twice: first for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and again for Disgrace in 1999. Two other authors have since managed this—Peter Carey (in 1988 and 2001) and Hilary Mantel (in 2009 and 2012).
Summertime, named on the 2009 longlist, was an early favorite to win an unprecedented third Booker Prize for Coetzee. It subsequently made the shortlist, but lost out to the eventual winner Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Coetzee was also longlisted in 2003 for Elizabeth Costello and in 2005 for Slow Man.[
Nobel Prize
Coetzee was the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the fifth African writer to be so honored and the second South African after Nadine Gordimer. When awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy cited the moral nature of Coetzee's work and his "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance."
Public image
Coetzee is known as reclusive, avoiding publicity to such an extent that he did not collect either of his two Booker Prizes in person. According to South African writer Rian Malan...
Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke, or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.
Asked in an email about Malan's comment, Coetzee wrote, "I have met Rian Malan only once in my life. He does not know me and is not qualified to talk about my character."
As a result of his reclusive nature, signed copies of Coetzee's fiction are highly sought after. Recognizing this, he was a key figure in the establishment of Oak Tree Press's First Chapter Series, limited edition signed works by literary greats to raise money for the child victims and orphans of the African HIV/AIDS crisis.
Personal life
He married Philippa Jubber in 1963 and divorced in 1980. The two have a daughter Gisela (1968) and a son Nicolas (1966) from their marriage. Nicolas died in 1989 at the age of 23 in an accident. Coetzee's younger brother, the journalist David Coetzee, died in 2010.
In 2006, Coetzee became an Australian citizen.
Anti-apartheid and racism
During the apartheid era, Coetzee called on the South African government to abandon its apartheid policy. Scholar Isidore Diala has stated that J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Andre Brink were "three of South Africa's most distinguished white writers, all with definite anti-apartheid commitment."
Jane Poyner, in a South African academic journal, argued that Coetzee's 1999 novel Disgrace allegorizes South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Asked about his views on the commission, Coetzee said:
In a state with no official religion, the TRC was somewhat anomalous: a court of a certain kind based to a large degree on Christian teaching and on a strand of Christian teaching accepted in their hearts by only a tiny proportion of the citizenry. Only the future will tell what the TRC managed to achieve.
Following his Australian citizenship ceremony, Coetzee said that...
I did not so much leave South Africa, a country with which I retain strong emotional ties, but come to Australia. I came because from the time of my first visit in 1991, I was attracted by the free and generous spirit of the people, by the beauty of the land itself and—when I first saw Adelaide—by the grace of the city that I now have the honour of calling my home."
When he initially moved to Australia, he had cited the South African government's lax attitude to crime in that country as a reason for the move. That statement led to a spat with Thabo Mbeki, who, speaking of Coetzee's novel Disgrace stated that "South Africa is not only a place of rape." In a 1999 investigation into racism in the media, the African National Congress pointed to Coetzee's novel Disgrace as exploiting racial stereotypes. However, when Coetzee won his Nobel Prize, Mbeki congratulated him "on behalf of the South African nation and indeed the continent of Africa."
Other political concerns
In 2005, Coetzee criticized contemporary anti-terrorism laws as resembling those employed by the apartheid regime in South Africa:
I used to think that the people who created [South Africa's] laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time.
The main character in Coetzee's 2007 Diary of a Bad Year shares similar concerns about the policies of John Howard and George W. Bush.
In recent years, Coetzee has become a vocal critic of animal cruelty, including the modern animal husbandry industry, and advocate for the animal rights movement. Coetzee's fiction has similarly engaged with the problems of animal cruelty and animal welfare, in particular his books Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth Costello and in the short story "The Old Woman and the Cats," which has as its protagonist Elizabeth Costello. He is vegetarian. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/4/2015.)
Novels
Dusklands (1974)
In the Heart of the Country (1977)
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
Foe (1986)
Age of Iron (1990)
The Master of Petersburg (1994)
Disgrace (1999)
Elizabeth Costello (2003)
Slow Man (2005)
Diary of a Bad Year (2007)
The Childhood of Jesus (2013)
Book Reviews
There is more in Disgrace than I can manage to describe here. But let me end by suggesting Coetzee's most impressive achievement, one that grows from the very bones of the novel's grammar. This novel stands as one of the few I know in which the writer's use of the present tense is in itself enough to shape the structure and form of the book as a whole. Even though it presents an almost unrelieved series of grim moments, Disgrace isn't claustrophobic or depressing, as some of Coetzee's earlier work has been. Its grammar allows for the sublime exhilaration of accident and surprise, and so the fate of its characters—and perhaps indeed of their country—seems not determined but improvised. Improvised in the way that our own lives are.... Disgrace surely deserves such recognition [his second Man Booker Prize]. But that may, in time, come to seem among the least of this extraordinary novel's distinctions.
Michael Gorra - New York Times Book Review
It may be that 200 pages have never worked so hard as they do in Coetzee's hands. He's a novelist of stunning precision and efficiency. Disgrace loses none of its fidelity to the social and political complexities of South Africa, even while it explores the troubling tensions between generations, sexes, and races. This is a novel of almost frightening perception from a writer of brutally clear prose.
Ron Charles - Christian Science Monitor
Written in deceptively spare prose that lets an eerie story unfold, Disgrace is a revelatory, must-read portrayal of racial fortunes reversed.
USA Today
J.M. Coetzee's new novel Disgrace, which last week won the South African writer his second Booker Prize is an absolute page-turner. It is also profound, rich and remarkable...is destined to be a classic.
New York Post
The most powerful novel this year.
Wall Street Journal
Disgrace is a relentlessly bleak novel.
Boston Sunday Globe
Disgrace is an act of literature...further proof that Mr. Coetzee stands with the very best writers in the world today.
Dallas Morning News
The richness of em>Disgrace lies in the elegant and allegorical role reversals, the spare symbolism of the language and in the characterization. We may not like David Lurie, but in Coetzee's skillful hands we can't dismiss him without pity.
Toronto Globe and Mail
Disgrace is a subtle, multilayered story, as much concerned with politics as it is with the itch of male flesh. Coetzee's prose is chaste and lyrical—it is a relief to encounter writing as quietly stylish as this.
Independent (UK)
The kind of territory J.M Coetzee has made his own.... By this late point in the century, the journey to a heart of narrative darkness has become a safe literary destination.... Disgrace goes beyond this to explore the furthest reaches of what it means to be human: it is at the frontier of world literature.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
Disgrace is at the frontier of world literature
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
Compulsively readable.... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it.... Coetzee's sentences are coiled springs, and the energy they release would take other writers pages to summon.
New Yorker
Disgrace is a gripping tale told with spare pose, steely intelligence and a remarkable degree of tenderness.
Paula Chin - People
A slim novel with a bleak powerful story to tell.... Coetzee writes with a cool, calm lucidity that fends off despair, and his characters find a kind of peace in acceptance, if not hope.
Newsweek
[A] searing evocation of post-apartheid South Africa.... [N]ot a single note is false; every sentence is perfectly calibrated and essential.... The book somehow manages to speak of little but interiority and still insinuate peripheries of things it doesn't touch. Somber and crystalline.
Publishers Weekly
Disgrace is a superbly constructed work of pain and candor, and although it involves events that require the largest generosity, it has as its hero a man gripped by habits of petty selfishness.
Penelope Mesic - Book Magazine
Middle-aged professor David Lurie shuffles numbly through the shifting landscape of postapartheid South Africa.... Winner of the Booker Prize, Coetzee's eighth novel employs spare, compelling prose to explore subtly the stuttering steps one man takes in a new world.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. The novel begins by telling us that "For a man his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well." What can you infer about David Lurie’s character from this sentence? In what ways is it significant, particularly in relation to the events that follow, that he views sex as a "problem" and that his "solution" depends upon a prostitute?
2. Lurie describes sexual intercourse with the prostitute Soraya as being like the copulation of snakes, "lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest." When he decides to seduce his student, Melanie, they are passing through the college gardens. After their affair has been discovered Melanie’s father says that he never thought he was sending his daughter into "a nest of vipers." Lurie has also written a book about Faust and Mephistopheles and explicates for his class a poem by Byron about the fallen angel, Lucifer, whom Lurie describes as being "condemned to solitude." What do you think Coetzee is trying to suggest through this confluence of details? How clearly does Lurie himself understand his behavior? How does his reading of the Byron poem prefigure his own fate?
3. When Lurie shows up unexpectedly at Melanie’s flat, "she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her." Later, he tells himself that it was "not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core." How do you view what happens in this scene? Is it rape?
4. How would you characterize Lurie’s attitude before the academic committee investigating the charges of harassment brought against him? Is the committee justified in asking for more than an admission of guilt? Why does Lurie refuse to assent to the fairly simple demands that would save his job? What consequences, practical and spiritual, follow from this refusal?
5. Lurie claims that in his relationship with Melanie, he was "a servant of Eros" and that his case rests on the rights of desire. On the God who makes even the small birds quiver." Is this an acceptable explanation of his actions? Do you think it is sincere?
6. What parallels do you see between the attack on Lurie and his daughter Lucy and Lurie’s own treatment of Melanie and Melanie’s father? To what extent do you think Coetzee wants us to see Lucy’s rape as a punishment for Lurie’s undesired sexual encounter with Melanie? Is this an instance of the sins of the father being visited upon the child?
7. In the course of the attack, Lurie is burned and blinded, temporarily, in one eye. What symbolic value might attach to these events? In what other ways has Lurie been blind? What significance does fire have for him?
8. Why does Lucy refuse to report her rape? How is her decision related to the changed relations between blacks and whites in post-apartheid South Africa? Why does she accept Petrus’ protection even after he has been implicated in the attack?
9. How do you feel about Lucy’s neighbor Petrus? To what extent do you think he was involved in the attack? What are his motives? What are the motives of the attackers? In what ways does Petrus embody the transition South Africa is making between apartheid and democracy? In what sense will Lucy’s child also represent that transition?
10. During a heated argument about whether animals have souls and how they should be treated, Lurie tells his daughter: "As for the animals, by all means let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from the animals. Not higher necessarily, just different. So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution." In what ways does this speech echo the logic of racial oppression and apartheid?
11. Throughout Disgrace, Lurie contemplates writing an opera based on Byron’s last years in Italy. Why is he so drawn to Byron? How does Byron’s situation in Italy resemble Lurie’s own? What ironies do you see in the fact that Lurie composes the music for his opera on a banjo and that he considers including a part for a dog?
12. From virtually the first page to the last, David Lurie suffers one devastating humiliation after another. He loses his job and his reputation. He is forced to flee Cape Town to live with his daughter on her smallholding in the country. There he is beaten and burned and trapped helplessly in the bathroom while his daughter is raped. Finally, he ends up ferrying dead dogs to the incinerator. Is there a meaning or purpose in his suffering? Is he in some way better off at the end of the novel than he was at the beginning? How has he changed?
13. Disgrace is narrated in the present tense, largely through David Lurie’s consciousness, though not in the first person. What effect does this method of narration have on how the story unfolds? How would the novel differ if told in the past tense? At what points do you sense a divergence between Lurie’s view of himself and the narrator’s view of him?
14. In what ways can the events dramatized in Disgrace be seen as a result of South Africa’s long history of racial oppression? What does the novel imply about the larger themes of retribution and forgiveness and reversals of fortune? About the relation between the powerful and the powerless?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Royal We
Heather Cocks, Jessica Morgan, 2015
Grand Central Publishing
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455557103
Summary
I might be Cinderella today, but I dread who they'll think I am tomorrow. I guess it depends on what I do next.
American Rebecca Porter was never one for fairy tales. Her twin sister, Lacey, has always been the romantic who fantasized about glamour and royalty, fame and fortune.
Yet it's Bex who seeks adventure at Oxford and finds herself living down the hall from Prince Nicholas, Great Britain's future king. And when Bex can't resist falling for Nick, the person behind the prince, it propels her into a world she did not expect to inhabit, under a spotlight she is not prepared to face.
Dating Nick immerses Bex in ritzy society, dazzling ski trips, and dinners at Kensington Palace with him and his charming, troublesome brother, Freddie. But the relationship also comes with unimaginable baggage: hysterical tabloids, Nick's sparkling and far more suitable ex-girlfriends, and a royal family whose private life is much thornier and more tragic than anyone on the outside knows.
The pressures are almost too much to bear, as Bex struggles to reconcile the man she loves with the monarch he's fated to become.
Which is how she gets into trouble.
Now, on the eve of the wedding of the century, Bex is faced with whether everything she's sacrificed for love-her career, her home, her family, maybe even herself-will have been for nothing. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan are authors and owners of the blog Go Fug Yourself. The two met when they were working as recappers for the website Television Without Pity, then known as Mighty Big TV. Morgan and Cocks initially created the site as a diversion for themselves and their friends, but it quickly became popular and well known.
Fug Madness
Each March, in an homage to the NCAA "March Madness" Championship, Morgan and Cocks present a tournament featuring those celebrities deemed to have made the worst fashion faux pas in the previous calendar year. Each match-up is presented as a poll in which readers can vote on which celebrity has made "fuglier" fashion choices.
The inaugural 2008 tournament was won by Bai Ling, who defeated Victoria Beckham in the final match. Subsequent winners have included Aubrey O'Day (2009), Amber Rose (2010), Taylor Momsen (2011), Vanessa Hudgens (2012), Justin Bieber (2013), and Miley Cyrus (2014).
The Fug Awards
Morgan and Cocks co-authored The Fug Awards, which features a number of "honors" offered to the worst offenders in celebrity fashion, along with commentary similar to that found on the site. The book was released on February 6, 2008.
Novels
Morgan and Cocks co-authored Spoiled, a young adult novel about what happens when a Midwestern girl learns that her father is actually the most famous movie star in the world, and goes to live with him and her half-sister in Los Angeles. The book was published in 2011. The book's follow-up, Messy was published in 2012.
Morgan and Cocks's first adult novel, The Royal We, said to be loosely based on the courtship between Kate Middleton and Prince William, was published in 2015.
Media attention
Go Fug Yourself was named one of Entertainment Weekly's 25 favorite entertainment sites in its June 23, 2006 issue. In 2005 it was named one of the 50 Coolest Websites by Time magazine and one of the Top 100 Best Things of the Year by CBC. It was named one of the 50 Most Powerful Blogs by the UK's Guardian in March 2008. It has also been mentioned in Vanity Fair, Elle, Business Week Online, Harper's Bazaar, Chicago Tribune, and Newsweek, among others. The authors also blog regularly as "The Fug Girls" in New York Magazine. The Fug Girls also appeared on Season Three Episode Five of All on the Line, a Sundance channel series, offering feedback to struggling fashion designer Brooke Rodd. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/2/2015.)
Book Reviews
Smart, funny.... [Cocks and Morgan] write like the pros they've become.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
The characters should all be familiar: the heir to the British throne, his mischievous younger brother, his granny and the pretty commoner he meets in college. But in this version by bloggers Cocks and Morgan (a.k.a. the Fug Girls), the girl is American. Nick and Bex's love story is so fun and dishy, you'll hope for a sequel—with royal babies.
People
In the grand tradition of Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife . . . A breezy, juicy novel that's like The Princess Diaries with fewer made-up countries and more sex-the kind of book you can imagine Pippa sneaking into Kensington Palace.
Entertainment Weekly
Every bit as engrossing as the real Kate and Will.... The pages turn as easily as a tabloid feature on the royal couple-and you'll end up just as obsessed with Bex and Nick as you already are with Wills and Kate.
Glamour
Cocks and Morgan tackled their first dip into mainstream fiction for adults and nailed it. The Royal We is a wonderful tale of young love, peppered with animated characters, difficult hardships and self-discovery
Romance Times Book Reviews
Cocks and Morgan, the bloggers behind Go Fug Yourself, charm readers with this modern-day Cinderella tale.... [T]he authors create their own unique and endearing characters...along with an entertaining cast of characters....[A] sparkling tale. Pure fun.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) The authors hit all the right notes in this funny, smart, emotional tale that will definitely appeal to fans of Jojo Moyes.
Library Journal
[R]oyal watchers will appreciate the craftsmanship that went into fitting the fictional Lyons dynasty into the timeline of the existing monarchy. Some of the details are invented while others are tweaked.... Pages of biting humor and breathtaking glamour rewrite a fairy tale into something more satisfying than a stack of tabloids.
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)
Some obvious starting places for a discussion, however, might be:
1. What did you find humorous in the book?
2. How close to the real royals are the characters in The Royal We? Can you tell which parts of the plot are real in the book...and which are fictional?
3. Does this book touch on any of your own fantasies?
4. If you ever attracted the eye of a prince, would you be willing to give up a large portion of your life to marry into a royal family? Or would you gain more then you lose?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
Winter Stroll
Elin Hilderbrand, 2015
Little, Brown and Co.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316261135
Summary
The Quinn family celebrates their most dramatic Christmas yet in this enchanting sequel to Elin Hilderbrand's bestselling Winter Street.
Christmas on Nantucket finds Winter Street Inn owner Kelley Quinn and his family busily preparing for the holiday season. Though the year has brought tragedy, the Quinns have much to celebrate: Kelley has reunited with his first wife Margaret, Kevin and Isabelle have a new baby; and Ava is finally dating a nice guy.
But when Kelley's estranged wife Mitzi shows up on the island, along with Kevin's devious ex-wife Norah and a dangerously irresistible old fling of Ava's, the Inn is suddenly overrun with romantic feuds, not to mention guests. With jealousy, passion, and eggnog consumption at an all-time high, it's going to take a whole lot more than a Christmas miracle to get the Quinns--and the Inn--through the holidays intact. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-70
• Raised—Collegeville, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Hopkins University; University of Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in Nantucket, Massachuestts
Elin Hilderbrand is an American writer of Summer beach read romance novels, some 20 in all. Her books have been set on and around Nantucket Island where she lives with her husband and three children.
Hilderbrand was born and raised in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. As a child, she spent summers on Cape Cod, "playing touch football at low tide, collecting sea glass, digging pools for hermit crabs, swimming out to the wooden raft off shore," until her father died in a plane crash when she was sixteen. She spent the next summer working—doing piecework in a factory that made Halloween costumes; she promised herself that the goal for the rest of her life would be that she would always have a real summer.
She graduated from Johns Hopkins University and became a teaching/writing fellow at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1993 she moved to Nantucket, took a job as "the classified ads girl" at a local paper, and later started writing.
Her first novels were published by St. Martin's Press. With A Summer Affair, published in 2008, she moved to Little, Brown and Company. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/11/2013.)
Book Reviews
The Quinn family returns in this sequel to the best-selling Winter Street. Their inn on the lovely island of Nantucket, MA, is flourishing again, and the family has mostly recovered from the drama of last Christmas. However, the holiday season seems to be a magnet for...all kinds of strife and uncertainty.
Library Journal
In a sequel to last year's holiday novel Winter Street, Hilderbrand improves on the first by delving deeper into the emotional lives of the Quinn clan.... In this standalone sequel to Elin Hilderbrand's popular Winter Street, new and renewed prospects threaten to be nullified at Nantucket holiday get-togethesr by old feuds and uninvited guests. A richly unpredictable holiday fiction.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
See Me
Nicholas Sparks, 2015
Grand Central Publishing
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455520619
Summary
See me just as I see you . . .
Colin Hancock is giving his second chance his best shot. With a history of violence and bad decisions behind him and the threat of prison dogging his every step, he's determined to walk a straight line.
To Colin, that means applying himself single-mindedly toward his teaching degree and avoiding everything that proved destructive in his earlier life. Reminding himself daily of his hard-earned lessons, the last thing he is looking for is a serious relationship.
Maria Sanchez, the hardworking daughter of Mexican immigrants, is the picture of conventional success. With a degree from Duke Law School and a job at a prestigious firm in Wilmington, she is a dark-haired beauty with a seemingly flawless professional track record.
And yet Maria has a traumatic history of her own, one that compelled her to return to her hometown and left her questioning so much of what she once believed.
A chance encounter on a rain-swept road will alter the course of both Colin and Maria's lives, challenging deeply held assumptions about each other and ultimately, themselves. As love unexpectedly takes hold between them, they dare to envision what a future together could possibly look like...until menacing reminders of events in Maria's past begin to surface.
As a series of threatening incidents wreaks chaos in Maria's life, Maria and Colin will be tested in increasingly terrifying ways. Will demons from their past destroy the tenuous relationship they've begun to build, or will their love protect them, even in the darkest hour?
Rich in emotion and fueled with suspense, See Me reminds us that love is sometimes forged in the crises that threaten to shatter us...and that those who see us for who we truly are may not always be the ones easiest to recognize. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 31. 1965
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Notre Dame
• Currently—lives in New Bern, North Carolina
Nicholas Charles Sparks is an American novelist, screenwriter and producer. He has published some 20 novels, plus one non-fiction. Ten have been adapted to films, including Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe, Dear John, The Last Song, The Lucky One, and most recently The Longest Ride.
Background
Sparks was born to Patrick Michael Sparks, a professor of business, and Jill Emma Marie Sparks (nee Thoene), a homemaker and an optometrist's assistant. He was the middle of three children, with an older brother and a younger sister, "Dana", who died at the age of 33 from a brain tumor. Sparks said that she is the inspiration for the main character in his novel A Walk to Remember.
His father was pursuing graduate studies at University of Minnesota and University of Southern California, and the family moved a great deal, so by the time Sparks was eight, he had lived in Watertown, Minnesota, Inglewood, California, Playa del Rey, California, and Grand Island, Nebraska, which was his mother's hometown during his parents' one year separation.
In 1974 his father became a professor of business at California State University, Sacramento teaching behavioral theory and management. His family settled in Fair Oaks, California, and remained there through Nicholas's high school days. He graduated in 1984 as valedictorian from Bella Vista High School, then enrolled at the University of Notre Dame under a full track and field scholarship. In his freshman year, his team set a record for the 4 x 800 relay.
Sparks majored in business finance and graduated from Notre Dame with honors in 1988. He also met his future wife that year, Cathy Cote from New Hampshire, while they were both on spring break. They married in 1989 and moved to New Bern, North Carolina.
Writing career
While still in school in 1985, Sparks penned his first (never published) novel, The Passing, while home for the summer between freshman and sophomore years at Notre Dame. He wrote another novel in 1989, also unpublished, The Royal Murders.
After college, Sparks sought work with publishers or to attend law school, but was rejected in both attempts. He then spent the next three years trying other careers, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling dental products by phone and starting his own manufacturing business.
In 1990, Sparks co-wrote with Billy Mills Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding. The book was published by Random House sold 50,000 copies in its first year.
In 1992, Sparks began selling pharmaceuticals and in 1993 was transferred to Washington, DC. It was there that he wrote another novel in his spare time, The Notebook. Two years later, he was discovered by literary agent Theresa Park, who picked The Notebook out of her agency's slush pile, liked it, and offered to represent him. In October 1995, Park secured a $1 million advance for The Notebook from Time Warner Book Group. The novel was published in 1996 and made the New York Times best-seller list in its first week of release.
With the success of his first novel, he and Cathy moved to New Bern, NC. After his first publishing success, he began writing his string of international bestsellers.
Personal life and philanthropy
Sparks continues to reside in North Carolina with his wife Cathy, their three sons, and twin daughters. A Roman Catholic since birth, he and his wife are raising their children in the Catholic faith.
In 2008, Entertainment Weekly reported that Sparks and his wife had donated "close to $10 million" to start a private Christian college-prep school, The Epiphany School of Global Studies, which emphasizes travel and lifelong learning.
Sparks also donated $900,000 for a new all-weather tartan track to New Bern High School. He also donates his time to help coach the New Bern High School track team and a local club track team as a volunteer head coach.
In addition to track, he funds scholarships, internships and annual fellowship to the Creative Writing Program (MFA) at the University of Notre Dame. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[A] made-for-Hollywood storyline; the brooding hero in the pouring rain. Look no further than Nicholas Sparks. Stylist Sparks is more than just a bestselling author of romantic fiction though, he's a pop culture phenomenon.
Irish Independent
An absorbing page-turner packed with the beachside lifestyle detail that is [a] Sparks hallmark.
Daily Mail
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
After Alice
Gregory Maguire, 2015
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060548957
Summary
A magical new twist on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Lewis’s Carroll’s beloved classic.
When Alice toppled down the rabbit-hole 150 years ago, she found a Wonderland as rife with inconsistent rules and abrasive egos as the world she left behind. But what of that world? How did 1860s Oxford react to Alice’s disappearance?
In this brilliant work of fiction, Gregory Maguire turns his dazzling imagination to the question of underworlds, undergrounds, underpinnings—and understandings old and new, offering an inventive spin on Carroll’s enduring tale. Ada, a friend of Alice’s mentioned briefly in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is off to visit her friend, but arrives a moment too late—and tumbles down the rabbit-hole herself.
Ada brings to Wonderland her own imperfect apprehension of cause and effect as she embarks on an odyssey to find Alice and see her safely home from this surreal world below the world. If Eurydice can ever be returned to the arms of Orpheus, or Lazarus can be raised from the tomb, perhaps Alice can be returned to life. Either way, everything that happens next is “After Alice.” (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 9, 1954
• Where—Albany, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York, Albany; M.A., Simmons College; Ph.D., Tufts
University
• Currently—lives near Boston, Massachusetts
Gregory Maguire is an American novelist. Most famously, he is the author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West; Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister; After Alice; and more than 30 other novels for adults and children.
Education
Maguire, born and raised in Albany, New York, is the middle child of seven. Schooled in Catholic institutions through high school, he received a B.A. in English and Art from the State University of New York at Albany, an M.A. in Children's Literature from Simmons College, and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Tufts University. His doctoral thesis was about English-language fantasy written for children between 1938 and 1988.
Early career
Maguire was 24 when, in 1978, he published his first novel for children. He has since published more than 20 books for young people and, alongside his creative work, has devoted much of his professional life to literacy and literature education.
In 1979, Maguire began teaching at Simmons College, where he became co-director at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children's Literature. He remained at Simmons until 1986.
In 1987, he co-founded a nonprofit educational charity, Children's Literature New England, Inc., and served as co-director for twenty-five years.
Children's novels
Starting with that first book in 1978, The Lightning Time, Maguire has published over 20 books for young readers, including his well-known "The Hamlet Chronicles." That seven book series includes Seven Spiders Spinning (1994), Six Haunted Hairdos (1997), Five Alien Elves (1998), Four Stupid Cupids (2000), Three Rotten Eggs (2002), A Couple of April Fools (2004), and One Final Firecracker (2005). Though he is best known as a fantasy writer, Maguire has also written picture books, science fiction, realistic and historic fiction.
Adult novels
In 1995, Maguire turned to adult novels with the first book of his "Wicked Years" series: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995). That book transforms the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its 1939 film adaption into the misunderstood green-skinned Elphaba Thropp. The novel became the blockbuster Broadway musical Wicked and, at its height, had nine companies running simultaneously around the world.
Next in "The Wicked Years" line-up came Son of a Witch (2005), A Lion Among Men (2008), and Out of Oz (2011).
Maguire's other adult novels, most of which were also inspired by classic children's tales, include Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999), Lost (2001), Mirror, Mirror (2003), and After Alice (2015), which was published on the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Other
Maguire is an occasional reviewer for the New York Times Book Review. He has contributed and performed original material for NPR's All Things Considered and has lectured widely around the world on literature and culture.
In addition to his writing, Maguire has been a board member of the National Children's Book and Literacy Alliance. He has also served on boards at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Board of Associates of the Boston Public Library, and the Concord Free Press, among others.
Personal
Maguire met the American painter Andy Newman in 1997, and in 1999 they adopted the first of their three children. Two others followed in 2001 and 2002. Maguire and Newman were married in June 2004, shortly after gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts. Maguire and his family were featured on Oprah, and he was the subject of a New York Times Magazine profile by Alex Witchel. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/29/2015.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) [T]houghtful and disconcertingly memorable.... Maguire frequently pulls back from the action to offer a larger perspective as characters struggle to discover who and what they are—and, most importantly, why they are.... [A]a feast for the mind.
Publishers Weekly
What happened above after Alice fell down the rabbit hole into Wonderland?... [C]lever and philosophical, on the Lewis Carroll classic. [Some] readers may find the slow build up of action and wrenching jumps between the two disconnected settings, one in stilted 19th-century language and the other in the nonsense of Wonderland, a bit too high a barrier to keep them reading. —Nancy H. Fontaine, Norwich P.L., VT
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Continuing his tradition of rewriting fairy tales with an arch eye and offbeat point of view, Maguire turns his attention to Lewis Carroll and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.... A brilliant and nicely off-kilter reading of the children's classic, retrofitted for grown-ups—and a lot of fun.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Had you read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll before reading Gregory Maguire’s After Alice? If not, are you curious to go back and read (or reread) it?
2. Had you read any of the author’s earlier revisionist fairy tales, such as Mirror Mirror or Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister? Why do you think readers find these revamped classic stories so appealing?
3. Ada is said to have “lived with a sense of disappointment and failure, thanks to her misshapen form, suffered from a flat dream-life, one that seemed poorly differentiated from waking hours.” How much do you think Ada’s brace affected her personality? Once she fell down the rabbit hole, why do you think this was one of the first things she shed? How is she different without it?
4. In Chapter 14, we learn that “a story in a book has its own intentions, even if unknowable to the virgin reader, who just lollops along at her own pace regardless of the author’s strategies, and gets where she will.” What are the intentions of After Alice? Did it differ from your own?
5. After falling down the rabbit hole, one obstacle after another presents itself as Ada searches for her friend, Alice. A bird tells Ada, “All who descend meet reproach.” How so?
6. Ada’s story alternates with that of Lydia, Alice’s sister, who is charged with finding the two young girls. Did you favor reading one section over another?
7. How is Ada different from her friend, Alice? How is Lydia similar to her sister?
8. What do you think is the significance of Mr. Clowd having such a prominent visitor as Charles Darwin?
9. What was the purpose of Josiah Winter and his young charge, Siam, in the story? Were you surprised that Lydia felt jealous that Mr. Winter might pay more attention to the hapless governess, Miss Armstrong? Do you think there was something else behind her cruel treatment of the harried governess? What do you think of Miss Armstrong’s opinion of Ada’s disability?
10. Gregory Maguire’s earlier book WICKED, a fresh take on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was adapted into one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time. How do you think After Alice would fare as a musical?
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11. In Wonderland, Ada is aghast at the Queen’s careless uprooting of the roses: “My,” said Ada, laying the dead rose upon the peaty moss. “Life is a very cheap thing here.” And the aforementioned blossom replies, “Cheap and dear all at once,” said the Rose from her grave. “That’s the thing. You’ll figure it out sooner than later.” How does this sentiment apply to Ada’s and Alice’s life back in Oxford?
12. Miss Armstrong and Mr. Clowd have a discussion of mortality over tea, and the governess highlights a quote from Emerson on the nature of faith and grief, and how the strength of one’s beliefs should shore them against any loss they should encounter. Mr. Clowd counters with “Perhaps Emerson’s comment is wrong. Perhaps we are meant and made to shift our beliefs. If it is a choice between being consistent or being willfully blind.” Do you agree?
13. After finally finding Alice, Ada decides to follow the White Queen’s advice and “go through the ceiling” to make her ascent back home: “She felt a sudden rage. The ascent of the human creature ---one has to fight to be born, after all. She bashed against the glass with every ounce of her might. She would break through, she would. So she did, being a child with more force of intention that she’d previously allowed herself to acknowledge.” What do you think the author is saying here with this mode of returning to the real world?
14. Were you surprised that Ada did not encounter Alice until almost the very end?
15. At the end of the novel, Darwin tells Mr. Winter, “If separate species develop skills that help them survive, and if those attributes are favored which best benefit the individual and its native population, to what possible end might we suppose has arisen, Mr. Winter, that particular capacity of the human being known as the imagination?” What did you think Darwin meant with this statement?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)