The Long and Faraway Gone
Lou Berney, 2015
HarperCollins
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062292438
Summary
Winner-2016 Edgar Award, Best Paperback
In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were brutally killed in an armed robbery. Then a teenage girl vanished from the annual state fair.
Neither crime was ever solved.
Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases continue to echo through the lives of those devastated by the crimes. Wyatt, the one teenage employee who inexplicably survived the movie-theater massacre, is now a private investigator in Las Vegas. A case unexpectedly brings him back to a hometown and a past he's tried to escape—and drags him deeper into the harrowing mystery of the movie-house robbery that left six of his friends dead.
Like Wyatt, Julianna struggles with the past—specifically the day her beautiful older sister, Genevieve, disappeared at the fair. When Julianna discovers that one of the original suspects has resurfaced, she'll stop at nothing to find answers.
As Wyatt's case becomes more complicated and dangerous, and Julianna seeks answers from a ghost, their obsessive quests not only stir memories of youth and first love, but also begin to illuminate dark secrets of the past. Even if they find the truth, will it help them understand what happened and why they were left behind that long and faraway gone summer? Will it set them free—or ultimately destroy them? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1964-65
• Where—Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA
• Education—Loyola University, New Orleans; University of Massachuesetts, Amherst
• Awards—Edgar Award
• Currently—lives in Oklahoma City
Lou Berney is the author of several novels, including November Road (2018), The Long and Faraway Gone (2015), Whiplash River (2012), and Gutshot Straight (2010), as well as a collection of short stories, The Road to Bobby Joe (1991).
His short fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and he has written feature screenplays and created television pilots for, among others, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Focus Features, ABC, and Fox. He teaches in the Red Earth MFA program at Oklahoma City University. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The two key players [Wyatt and Julianna] in Lou Berney's superb regional mystery…suffer from separate but equally crushing cases of survivor guilt…Berney tells both their stories with supreme sensitivity, exploring "the landscape of memory" that keeps shifting beneath our feet, opening up the graves of all those ghosts we thought we'd buried
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review
[T]hat rare literary gem—a dark, quintessentially cool noir novel that is both deeply poignant, and very funny...as hip, hilarious, and entertaining as it is wrenching, beautiful, and ultimately redemptive.
Huffington Post
(Starred review.) Edgar Award–finalist Berney will raise a lump in the throats of many of his readers with this sorrowful account of two people's efforts to come to terms with devastating trauma.... The leads' struggles are portrayed with painful complexity, and Berney, fittingly, avoids easy answers.
(Starred review.) Focused, very insightfully, on love, loss, and memory . . . fully realized creations that readers won’t soon forget. A genuinely memorable novel of ideas.
Booklist
So much to love here...easy to read yet difficult to forget.... Berney is a mighty fine wordsmith whose name should be mentioned more often than it is during discussions of new bright lights in the literary world.
Bookreporter.com
(Starred review.) Twenty-five years after a devastating shooting and the unrelated disappearance of a teenage girl, the survivors of both events struggle to find out what really happened so they can move on with their separate lives.... The novel smartly avoids being coy.... But both characters do achieve their own kind of closure.... A mystery with a deep, wounded heart. Read it.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our LitLovers 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.)
top of page (summary)
A Reunion of Ghosts
Judith Claire Mitchell, 2015
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062355881
Summary
Three wickedly funny sisters . . . One family's extraordinary legacy . . . A single suicide note that spans a century . . .
Meet the Alter sisters: Lady, Vee, and Delph. These three mordantly witty, complex women share their family's apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
They love each other fiercely, but being an Alter isn't easy. Bad luck is in their genes, passed down through the generations. Yet no matter what curves life throws at these siblings—and it's hurled plenty—they always have a wisecrack, and one another.
In the waning days of 1999, the trio decides it's time to close the circle of the Alter curse. But first, as the world counts down to the dawn of a new millennium, Lady, Vee, and Delph must write the final chapter of a saga lifetimes in the making—one that is inexorably intertwined with that of the twentieth century itself.
Unspooling threads of history, personal memory, and family lore, they weave a mesmerizing account of their lives that stretches back decades to their great-grandfather, a brilliant scientist whose professional triumph became the sinister legacy that defines them.
Funny, heartbreaking, and utterly original, A Reunion of Ghosts is a magnificent novel about three unforgettable women bound to each other, and to their remarkable family, through the blessings and the burdens bestowed by blood. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Rasied—on Long Island, New York
• Education—B.A., Barnard College
• Currently—lives in Madison, Wisconsin
Judith Claire Mitchell is the author of the novels The Last Day of the War (2004) and A Reunion of Ghosts (2015). She teaches undergraduate and graduate fiction workshops at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is a professor of English and the director of the MFA program in creative writing.
She has received grants and fellowships from the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and Bread Loaf, among others. She lives in Madison with her husband, the artist Don Friedlich.). (From the publisher.)
Visit the author's website for a delightful, more personal version of her bio.
Book Reviews
What’s so funny about three sisters bent on committing suicide? Plenty, in the imagination of Judith Claire Mitchell…. Darkly witty.
Dallas Morning News
Mitchell’s plot, which twists in unexpected but believable ways and opens up just when it seems as it the same time—that makes it remarkable.
Columbus Dispatch
Mitchell explores the mixed-blessing bonds of family with wry wit. This original tale is black comedy at its best (Book of the Week).
People
My favourite novel of the year so far…. A literary mash-up of The Virgin Suicides and Grey Gardens. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola are slugging it out for the film rights already.
Sam Baker - Harper's Bazaar.com (UK)
(Starred review.) [T]riumphant...darkly comic prose..... Lady, Delph, and Vee Alter decide to kill themselves..... Moving nimbly through time and balancing her weightier themes with the sharply funny, fiercely unsentimental perspectives...Mitchell’s fictional suicide note is poignant and pulsing with life force.
Publishers Weekly
Lady, Vee, and Delph Alter...have given themselves the "deadline" of late December 1999 to commit suicide. Their reasons are based mostly on that the Alters have miserable luck, stretching back to their great-grandfather.... [T]his serious study of a very odd family has its darkly humorous side. —Andrea Tarr, Corona P.L., CA
Library Journal
For the Alter sisters, living with the guilt of the generations, there is only one way out…. This novel is a carefully crafted, thought-provoking examination of history past and present as seen through the eyes of a complex yet humble family.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [A] memoir that's meant to double as their collective suicide note may not sound like a hilarious premise for a novel, but Mitchell's masterful family saga is as funny as it is aching.... Mitchell's dark comedy captures the agony and ecstasy...with deep empathy and profound wit.... [S]tunning.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How does The Alter Family Tree affect your entry into the novel?
2. Consider each of the sisters—Lady, Vee and Delph—who narrate most of the novel. How are they similar and different? How is their living together healthy? How not?
3. In Chapter 1, the sisters present a "chart" of family suicides and claim that the "tidiness of the rows and columns" help balance the emotional feeling of "life as forever chaotic." Does it? Can organizing and listing difficult experiences make them less powerful?
4. What is potentially valuable or challenging about a family legacy?
5. Heinrich Alter states that "being Jewish is his culture, but being German is his faith." How do the other characters of the novel struggle with being Jews with German ancestry after World War II?
6. As a child, Lenz Alter was "mournful," and bad at most things he tried, yet he eventually wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. How does such a transformation take place?
7. How does the sisters’ humor and love of wordplay and puns balance the sadness and suffering explored in the novel?
8. Consider the structure of the novel, which moves backwards and forwards in time. What are the effects of this?
9. Albert Einstein’s theories about time serve as a way for the sisters to consider their largely unpleasant lives. What did Einstein say about the nature of time? How is that helpful to the sisters?
10. Delph, the youngest sister, at 19 years old, says she’s not interested in "soup," the sisters’ euphemism for romantic and sexual involvement with men. Why isn’t she? Consider Lady’s relationship with Joe Hopper and Vee’s with Eddie Glod.
11. In their wonderings about what might have happened to the father who left them, the sisters find the fantasy of his being killed by their mother the most satisfying and interesting. How might such a drastic fantasy make emotional sense? In what ways might fantasy be helpful in the face of great trauma?
12. What does the sisters' Great Grandmother Iris Emanuel bring to the novel? What’s the value of the letters she writes to chemistry professor Richard Lehrer, even after he has died?
13. The sisters believe they are the last Alters subject to the family curse --- "The sins of the fathers are visited on the sons to the third and fourth generations." What might this Biblical idea mean?
14. Albert Einstein’s first wife Mileva talks to Iris about the challenge of being married to genius. How might great intelligence affect intimate relationships like marriage?
15. After the painful loss of Richard Lehrer, Iris passionately instructs her son Richard about surviving: "The worst happens, and people go on." And yet she takes her own life. How might you explain such conflict, such apparent hypocrisy?
16. Both Lenz Alter and Albert Einstein do profound scientific work that eventually provide a force for genocide. To what extent is each responsible? What ethical responsibilities should scientists have?
17. Thinking of both an ad for Lord & Taylor and the horrific image of clothes worn by Jews in concentration camps, Richard thinks "Thank God for the human capacity to hold both kinds of pajamas in our heads at once." What might he mean?
18. At one point Vee mimics and criticizes one of the many academics writing about Lenz and Iris. What is she upset about? To what extent should academic research involve empathy or emotional understanding? What are the limits of studying historic figures and their behavior?
19. After her bilateral mastectomy and chemotherapy, Vee thinks about the "body as narrative," and the "face as biography." In what ways is this true?
20. In the face of Vee’s cancer the sisters claim that repression is a "gift," and of great value. To what extent can such profound pain and fear be "tamp[ed] down"?
21. What is the nature of coincidence? Fate? Carl Jung’s idea of synchronicity?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
World Gone By
Dennis Lehane, 2015
HarperCollins
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060004903
Summary
A psychologically and morally complex novel of blood, crime, passion, and vengeance, set in Cuba and Ybor City, Florida, during World War II, in which Joe Coughlin must confront the cost of his criminal past and present.
Ten years have passed since Joe Coughlin’s enemies killed his wife and destroyed his empire, and much has changed. Prohibition is dead, the world is at war again, and Joe’s son, Tomas, is growing up. Now, the former crime kingpin works as a consigliore to the Bartolo crime family, traveling between Tampa and Cuba, his wife’s homeland.
A master who moves in and out of the black, white, and Cuban underworlds, Joe effortlessly mixes with Tampa’s social elite, U.S. Naval intelligence, the Lansky-Luciano mob, and the mob-financed government of Fulgencio Batista. He has everything—money, power, a beautiful mistress, and anonymity.
But success cannot protect him from the dark truth of his past—and ultimately, the wages of a lifetime of sin will finally be paid in full.
Dennis Lehane vividly recreates the rise of the mob during a world at war, from a masterfully choreographed Ash Wednesday gun battle in the streets of Ybor City to a chilling, heartbreaking climax in a Cuban sugar cane field.
Told with verve and skill, World Gone By is a superb work of historical fiction from one of “the most interesting and accomplished American novelists” (Washington Post) writing today. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 4, 1965
• Where—Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Eckerd College; M.F.A., Florida International University
• Awards—Shamus Award, Best First Novel; Anthony Award; Dilys Award
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts
Dennis Lehane is an American author. He has written several award-winning novels, including A Drink Before the War and the New York Times bestseller Mystic River, which was later made into an Academy Award-winning film.
Another novel, Gone, Baby, Gone, was also adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film. His novel Shutter Island was adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2010. Lehane is a graduate of Florida International University in Miami, Florida.
Personal Life
Lehane was born and reared in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, and continues to live in the Boston area, which provides the setting for most of his books. He spent summers on Fieldston Beach in Marshfield. Lehane is the youngest of five children. His father was a foreman for Sears & Roebuck, and his mother worked in a Boston public school cafeteria. Both of his parents emigrated from Ireland. His brother, Gerry Lehane, who is two and a half years older than Dennis, is a veteran actor who trained at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence before heading to New York in 1990. Gerry is currently a member of the Invisible City Theatre Company.
He was previously married to Sheila Lawn, formerly an advocate for the elderly for the city of Boston but now working with the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office as an Assistant District Attorney. Currently, he is married to Dr. Angela Bernardo, with whom he has one daughter.
He is a graduate of Boston College High School (a Boston Jesuit prep school), Eckerd College (where he found his passion for writing), and the graduate program in creative writing at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He occasionally makes guest appearances as himself in the ABC comedy/drama TV series Castle.
Literary Career
His first book, A Drink Before the War, which introduced the recurring characters Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, won the 1995 Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel. The fourth book in the series, Gone, Baby, Gone, was adapted to a film of the same title in 2007; it was directed by Ben Affleck and starred Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan as Kenzie and Gennaro. Reportedly, Lehane "has never wanted to write the screenplays for the films [based on his own books], because he says he has 'no desire to operate on my own child.'"
Lehane's Mystic River was made into a film in 2003; directed by Clint Eastwood, it starred Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon. The novel itself was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and won the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction, and France's Prix Mystère de la Critique.
Lehane's first play, Coronado, debuted in New York in December 2005. Coronado is based on his acclaimed short story "Until Gwen," which was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly and was selected for both The Best American Short Stories and The Best Mystery Short Stories of 2005.
Lehane described working on his historical novel, The Given Day, as "a five- or six-year project" with the novel beginning in 1918 and encompassing the 1919 Boston Police Strike and its aftermath. The novel was published in October, 2008.
On October 22, 2007 Paramount Pictures announced that they had optioned Shutter Island with Martin Scorsese attached as director. The Laeta Kalogridis-scripted adaptation has Leonardo DiCaprio playing U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, "who is investigating the disappearance of a murderess who escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane and is presumed to be hiding on the remote Shutter Island." Mark Ruffalo played opposite DiCaprio as U.S. Marshal Chuck Aule. Shutter Island was released on February 19, 2010.
Teaching Career
Since becoming a literary success after the broad appeal of his Kenzie and Gennaro novels, as well as the success of Mystic River, Lehane has taught at several colleges. He taught fiction writing and serves as a member of the board of directors for a low-residency MFA program sponsored by Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He has also been involved with the Solstice Summer Writers' Conference at Boston's Pine Manor College and taught advanced fiction writing at Harvard University, where his classes quickly filled up.
In May 2005, Lehane was presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Eckerd College and was appointed to Eckerd's Board of Trustees later that year. In Spring 2009, Lehane became a Joseph E. Connor Award recipient and honorary brother of Phi Alpha Tau professional fraternity at Emerson College in Boston, MA. Other brothers and Connor Award recipients include Robert Frost, Elia Kazan, Jack Lemmon, Red Skelton, Edward R. Murrow, Yul Brynner, and Walter Cronkite. Also in Spring 2009, Lehane presented the commencement speech at Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts, and was awarded an honorary degree.
Film Career
Lehane wrote and directed an independent film called Neighborhoods in the mid 1990s. He joined the writing staff of the HBO drama series The Wire in 2004. Lehane returned as a writer for the fourth season in 2006 Lehane and the writing staff won the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony and the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay for their work on the fourth season. Lehane remained a writer for the fifth and final season in 2008. Lehane and the writing staff were nominated for the WGA Award award for Best Dramatic Series again at the February 2009 ceremony.He served as an executive producer for Shutter Island. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Bibliography
The Kenzie-Gennaro Novels
1994 - A Drink Before the War
1996 - Darkness, Take My Hand
1997 - Sacred
1998 - Gone, Baby, Gone
1999 - Prayers for Rain
2010 - Moonlight Mile
Joe Coughlin Novels
2008 - The Given Day
2012 - Live by Night
2015 - World Gone By
Stand-alones
2001 - Mystic River
2003 - Shutter Island
2006 - Coronado
Book Reviews
World Gone By is…suspenseful, devious, well-constructed and as filled with ethical questions as it is with gangsters. You've been through a lot by the time you finish it, including a few figurative choruses of "Danny Boy.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Lehane is such a master plotter, you needn't have read the previous novels to know exactly who Joe is and where he came from…. [Lehane's] mordant wit entrances readers who want more from a crime novel than endless scenes of stomach-turning violence. Which, by the way, Lehane also delivers, in a tightly coiled narrative…. Plot, wit, violence, colorful characters—what more do you want.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review
Edgar-winner Lehane wraps up the Joe Coughlin saga...in fine fashion.... Lehane's many fans will relish this stunning conclusion to Joe Coughlin's journey.
Publishers Weekly
The closer of Lehane's trilogy featuring his Boston-bred protagonist Joe Coughlin (after 2008's The Given Day and 2012's Live by Night) follows a more mystical path than its predecessors. The book has more literary aspirations as well: it's classified as literary fiction, not crime or historical fiction. —Liz French
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A multilayered, morally ambiguous novel of family, blood and betrayal.... While this seems to lack some of the literary ambition of Lehane's best work, its cumulative thematic power and whip-crack narrative propulsion will enrich the reader's appreciation past the last page. On one level, a very moving meditation on fathers and sons; on another, an illumination of character and fate.
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.)
Leaving Berlin
Joseph Kanon, 2015
Atria Books
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476704647
Summary
From the bestselling author of Istanbul Passage—called a "fast-moving thinking man’s thriller" by The Wall Street Journal—comes a sweeping, atmospheric novel of postwar East Berlin, a city caught between political idealism and the harsh realities of Soviet occupation.
Berlin 1948. Almost four years after the war’s end, the city is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture. In the West, a defiant, blockaded city is barely surviving on airlifted supplies; in the East, the heady early days of political reconstruction are being undermined by the murky compromises of the Cold War.
Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured back from exile to add credibility to the competing sectors.
Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. But the politics of his youth have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, he makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin.
But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is killed, and Alex finds himself a wanted man. Worse, he discovers his real assignment—to spy on the woman he left behind, the only woman he has ever loved. Changing sides in Berlin is as easy as crossing a sector border. But where do we draw the lines of our moral boundaries? Betrayal? Survival? Murder?
Filled with intrigue, and the moral ambiguity of conflicted loyalties, Joseph Kanon’s new novel is a compelling thriller and a love story that brings a shadowy period of history vividly to life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1946
• Where—in the state of Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—Harvard University; Cambridge University
• Awards—Edgar Award; Hammet Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Joseph Kanon is an American author, best known for thriller and spy novels set in the period immediately after World War II.
Kanon was born in Pennsylvania and studied at Harvard University and at Trinity College in Cambridge. As an undergraduate, he published his first stories in the The Atlantic Monthly. Later he became editor in chief, CEO, and president of the publishing houses Houghton Mifflin and E. P. Dutton in New York, before he began writing in 1995.
Books
1997 - Los Alamos - Edgar Award for best first novel
1998 - The Prodigal Spy
2001 - The Good German - adapted to film starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett
2005 - Alibi - Hammett Award (International Association of Crime Writers)
2009 - Stardust
2012 - Istanbul Passage
2015 - Leaving Berlin
Kanon is also a recipient of The Anne Frank Human Writers Award for his writings on the aftermath of the Holocaust
Kanon's stories are set in the period between World War II and 1950, and he has often used a real event, such as the Potsdam Conference or the Manhattan Project, as the background for a murder case. His novels are critically acclaimed, and reviewers from the Boston Globe and the New York Times have compared his work with the novels of Graham Greene and John le Carre.
Kanon lives with his wife, the literary agent Robin Straus, in New York City. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/15/2015.)
Book Reviews
Engaging...deftly captures the ambience of a city that’s still a wasteland almost four years after the Nazis’ defeat.... Kanon keeps the story humming along, enriching the main narrative with vignettes that heighten the atmosphere of duplicity and distrust.
New York Times Book Review
Joseph Kanon’s thought-provoking, pulse-pounding historical espionage thriller [is] stuffed with incident and surprise. . . . Mr. Kanon, author now of seven top-notch novels of period political intrigue, conveys the bleak, oppressive, and creepy atmosphere of occupied Berlin in a detailed, impressive manner. . . . Leaving Berlin is a mix of tense action sequences, sepia-tinged reminiscence, convincing discourse and Berliner wit.
Wall Street Journal
Kanon, who writes his novels at the New York Public Library, conjures from there a Berlin of authentic menace and such hairpin turns that Leaving Berlin evokes comparisons to John LeCarre and Alan Furst. Such good company.
New York Daily News
Not for nothing has Kanon – whose previous books include The Good German, which was made into a film starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett, has been compared to the suspense masters Graham Greene and John LeCarre. He’s certainly in the ballpark.
Buffalo News
The old-fashioned spy craft, the many plot twists and the moral ambiguities that exist in all of the characters make Leaving Berlin an intriguing, page-turning thriller.There’s also a star-crossed love story—and an airport farewell—that might remind some readers of Bogie and Bergman. But it’s the author’s attention to historical detail—his ability to convey the sights, sounds and feel of a beaten-down Berlin—that makes this book so compelling.
Ft. Worth Star Telegram
Galloping and compulsive…. I can’t imagine anyone putting it down…. Admirably atmospheric, the picture of the ravaged Berlin excellently done…. An enjoyable thriller, high-class entertainment.
Allen Massie - Scotsman
An unforgettable picture of a city wrecked by defeat and riddled withbetrayal. Brilliant.
Kate Saunders - (London) Times
Kanon brings the hardships and moral decay of post-war Berlin to lifein glorious detail, ratcheting up the suspense as Meier tries to escape the netclosing in on all sides. Absorbing.
Sunday Express (UK)
There's too much backstory and the period details sometimes bog down the narrative, but once all the pieces are in place the story hits its stride. Kanon likes to wrestle with the moral dimensions of spying (a la le Carre)—and what's more, he's very good at it.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) A pleasure from start to finish, blending literary finesse with action, this atmospheric historical thriller will appeal not only to Kanon's many fans but to those who enjoy Alan Furst, Philip Kerr, and other masters of wartime and postwar espionage fiction. —Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson
Library Journal
Kanon, like Alan Furst, has found a landscape and made it his own. In fact, the two writers make outstanding bookends in any collection of WWII fiction, Furst bringing Paris just before and during the war to vivid life, and Kanon doing the same for Berlin in its aftermath.
Booklist
[E]xplores the grave moral complexities of life in Soviet-controlled East Berlin.... [T]he atmosphere is so rich, the characters so well-drawn and the subject so fascinating.... Another compelling, intellectually charged period piece by Kanon, who works in the shadows of fear as well as anyone now writing.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When the Allies agreed to a joint occupation of Germany and its capital, the arrangement was expected to be temporary, an interim step toward a demilitarized neutral Germany. But four years later, the time of Leaving Berlin, we see those lines of occupation hardening into permanent borders that would last for forty years. What happened in these first four crucial postwar years?
2. On page 38, Willy tells Alex that the Communists were claiming the "moral high ground." What did they think justified this? Why was the East so successful in attracting exiled cultural figures? Were there ideological as well as practical reasons?
3. Soon after Alex learns that his former lover Irene is the mistress of a Soviet State Security official, she admits that she only sleeps with Markovsky to ensure her own safety. How does Irene’s pragmatism distinguish her from others in the novel? Do you think she was changed by the war, or is she fundamentally the same person now living in different circumstances?
4. The community of exiles returning to Germany in the novel revolves largely around the historical figure Bertolt Brecht and his production, Mother Courage and Her Children. Yet Alex remains slightly critical of the dramatist’s pretentions throughout, mentioning at one point that "what Brecht had really been in exile from all these years was not Berlin, but the twenties, with their tart, almost thrilling nihilism" (79). Is this a fair criticism? How large a role do you think self-interest played in Brecht’s decision to return? How had exile changed him?
5. Each of the American spies Alex encounters is taken aback by his natural talent for espionage. How might Alex’s profession as a novelist inform his ability to manipulate both American and Soviet intelligence?
6. Markovsky notes with pleasure how rubble from Nazi Germany’s ruins are repurposed to build "a new city right on top of the old one" (172). How do Kanon’s descriptions of ruins throughout the novel confirm or refute Markovsky’s ideas of renewal?
7. On page 218, Fritsch’s film pitch brings Alex back to "California, a producer pointing at him with a cigar, rewriting the world." Where else does the novel show the blurring of the lines between journalism, art, and propaganda? Are any of the writers or radio producers in the novel free from having their work used as propaganda?
8. When Alex travels with Roberta Kleinbard to Oranienburg in order to see her imprisoned husband, the Russian guard sneers that her name is Jewish. "Nothing had changed," Alex claims, "new uniforms" (252). In what ways is the Soviet administration in East Berlin similar to the Nazi regime? In what ways is it fundamentally different?
9. When Markus’s mother is released from the Russian camps after her sentence for "counterrevolutionary statements" is commuted, he reacts to her return with confusion and dismay. Why is he unable to embrace her? Is he afraid of his own emotions, or simply hardened to the point where he doesn’t feel? Or is it a more complicated response?
10. When Irene asks Alex if he loves her, as they prepare to say goodbye, he responds, "I do [. . .] But I can see you better now. All of you. Erich. Elsbeth. You. Before I just saw what I wanted to see." (368). What has changed in Alex that allows him now to see reality instead of a more comforting illusion? In what ways does Irene, too, now see Alex more clearly?
11. After all the subterfuge Alex uses to protect himself, Irene, and Erich in East Germany, he passes the Brandenburg Gate and enters West Berlin without ceremony. In a decade’s time the Berlin Wall would have blocked Alex’s unimpeded passage, and Kanon takes care to describe his protagonist’s path down the Luisenstrasse so that his footsteps trace the fated border. How does this retrospective knowledge impact the meaning of the last paragraph of the book?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Harder They Come
T.C. Boyle, 2015
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062349378
Summary
A powerful, gripping novel that explores the roots of violence and anti-authoritarianism inherent In the American character.
Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people—an aging ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son's paranoid, much-older lover—as they careen toward an explosive confrontation.
On a cruise to Central America, seventy-year-old Sten Stensen unflinchingly kills an armed robber menacing a busload of tourists. The reluctant hero is relieved to return home to Fort Bragg, California—only to find that his delusional son, Adam, has spiraled out of control.
Adam has become involved with Sara, a hardened member of a right-wing anarchist group that refuses to acknowledge the laws of the state. Adam's senior by some fifteen years, she becomes his protector and inamorata. As Adam's mental state fractures, he becomes increasingly delusional until a schizophrenic breakdown leads him to shoot two people. On the run, he takes to the woods, spurring the biggest manhunt in California history.
As T.C. Boyle explores a father's legacy of violence and his powerlessness in relating to his equally violent son, he offers unparalleled insights into the American psyche. Inspired by a true story, The Harder They Come is a devastating and indelible novel from a modern master. (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
[S]tunning…. The Harder They Come…is very much a showcase for all of Mr. Boyle's storytelling talents. It's gripping, funny and melancholy, and opens out from the miseries of a father and his troubled son into a resonant meditation on the American frontier ethos and propensity for violence—a dramatic novelistic rendering, in many ways, of the scholar Richard Slotkin's pioneering studies on the mythology of the American West…. From the novel's thrilling set piece of a start…to its pensive conclusion, The Harder They Come is a masterly—and arresting—piece of storytelling, arguably Mr. Boyle's most powerful, kinetic novel yet.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
The Harder They Come…takes on the paranoia of the far-right sovereign citizen movement and off-the-grid/mountain-man survivalism, as well as more mainstream American notions of independence. This could easily have been an opportunity for a writer of Boyle's comic gifts to go full-tilt satirical, but Boyle takes a darker and more restrained approach. He has written a compelling, complex and intimate novel about three particular people in a specific time and place, a novel that tells us something unnerving about certain precincts of the American Now.
Dana Spiotta - New York Times Book Review
Boyle has long been one of the most exciting and intelligent storytellers in the United States. His upcoming novel describes a mentally ill young man involved with a group of violent anarchists.
Washington Post
This new work of fiction from Boyle presents a fractured threesome: a 70-year-old ex-Marine, his troubled son and the son’s older girlfriend-a right-wing anarchist. A dark novel, The Harder They Come explores violence and the American psyche.
Houston Chronicle
T.C. Boyle again explores his favorite territory, the American psyche, in a gripping novel about an aging Vietnam vet and his mentally unstable son, out in April.
Tampa Bay Times
The latest from a prolific and acclaimed novelist, The Harder They Come is a family saga that maps the relationships between the three people at its heart, as their potent mix of violence and paranoia urges them toward tragedy.
Huffington Post
Boyle's...hypnotic narrative probes the complexities of heroism, violence, power, and resistance.... Written with both clarity and compassion, each of the novel’s characters inhabits a rich and convincing private world.... [and] their haunting stories illuminate the violent American battle with otherness.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) A paranoid survivalist....retreats to a deep-woods bunker with his weapons where his shooting of a perceived "alien" will set off a massive manhunt. Verdict: ...Boyle tellingly explores the anger, paranoia, and violence lurking in the shadowlands of the American psyche. A powerful and profoundly unsettling tale. —Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA
Library Journal
Violence corrodes the ideal of freedom in an ambitious novel that aims to illuminate the dark underbelly of the American dream.... Adam and Sten function more as types and symbols than individuals, though Boyle remains a master at sustaining narrative momentum as the sense of foreboding darkens and deepens.
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.)