Three Brothers
Peter Ackroyd, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385538619
Summary
Rapier-sharp, witty, intriguing, and mysterious: a new novel from Peter Ackroyd set in the London of the 1960s.
Three Brothers follows the fortunes of Harry, Daniel, and Sam Hanway, a trio of brothers born on a postwar council estate in Camden Town. Marked from the start by curious coincidence, each boy is forced to make his own way in the world—a world of dodgy deals and big business, of criminal gangs and crooked landlords, of newspaper magnates, backbiters, and petty thieves.
London is the backdrop and the connecting fabric of these three lives, reinforcing Ackroyd's grand theme that place and history create, surround and engulf us. From bustling, cut-throat Fleet Street to hallowed London publishing houses, from the wealth and corruption of Chelsea to the smoky shadows of Limehouse and Hackney, this is an exploration of the city, peering down its streets, riding on its underground, and drinking in its pubs and clubs.
Everything is possible—not only in the new freedom of the 1960s but also in London's timeless past. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 5, 1949
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Cambridge University
• Awards—Whitbread Award (2); Somerset Maughm Award
• Currently—lives in London, England
Peter Ackroyd is an English biographer, novelist, and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards.
He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature in 1984 and created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.
Early life and education
Ackroyd was born in London and raised on a council estate in East Acton by his single mother in a "strict" Roman Catholic household. He first knew that he was gay when he was seven. He was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing, and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English literature. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University.
Work
The result of his Yale fellowship was Notes for a New Culture, written when Ackroyd was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, an echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for exploring and re-examining the works of other London-based writers.
He worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. He worked as chief book reviewer for The Times (of London) and was a regular broadcaster on radio. Since 1984 he has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
His literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel, which is a reworking of Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place." However, his transition to novelist was unexpected. In a 1989 interview with Patrick McGrath, Ackroyd said
I enjoy it, I suppose, but I never thought I’d be a novelist. I never wanted to be a novelist. I can’t bear fiction. I hate it. It’s so untidy. When I was a young man I wanted to be a poet, then I wrote a critical book, and I don’t think I even read a novel till I was about 26 or 27.
Thematics
In his novels he often contrasts historical segments with segments set in the present-day (e.g. The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor, The House of Doctor Dee). Many of Ackroyd's novels play in London and deal with the ever changing, but at the same time stubbornly consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, especially its writers:
• Oscar Wilde in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), a fake autobiography of Wilde;
• Nicholas Hawksmoor, Sir Christopher Wren, and Sir John Vanbrugh in Hawksmoor (1985);
• Thomas Chatterton and George Meredith in Chatterton (1987);
• John Dee in The House of Dr Dee (1993);
• Dan Leno, Karl Marx, George Gissing, and Thomas de Quincey in Dan Leno and the
Limehouse Golem (1994);
• John Milton in Milton in America (1996);
• Charles Lamb in The Lambs of London (2004).
Hawksmoor, winner of both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, was inspired by Iain Sinclair's poem "Lud Heat" (1975), which speculated on a mystical power from the positioning of the six churches Nicholas Hawksmoor built. The novel gives Hawksmoor a Satanical motive for the siting of his buildings, and creates a modern namesake, a policeman investigating a series of murders.
Chatterton (1987), a similarly layered novel explores plagiarism and forgery and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
London: The Biography, by Ackroyd, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages. In 1994 when interviewed by The Observer, about the London Psychogeographical Association, he remarked:
I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory, the place, the past speaks ... Just as it seems possible to me that a street or dwelling can materially affect the character and behaviour of the people who dwell in them, is it not also possible that within this city (London) and within its culture are patterns of sensibility or patterns of response which have persisted from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and perhaps even beyond?
In the three-book sequence, London: The Biography (2000), Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002), and Thames: Sacred River (2007), Ackroyd has produced works of what he considers historical sociology. These books trace themes in London and English culture from the ancient past to the present, drawing again on his favoured notion of almost spiritual lines of connection rooted in place and stretching across time.
His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced:
• Ezra Pound (1980)
• T. S. Eliot (1984),
• Charles Dickens (1990)
• William Blake (1995)
• Thomas More (1998)
• Chaucer (2004)
• William Shakespeare (2005)
• J. M. W. Turner.
The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction. Ackroyd was forced to think of new methods of biography writing in T. S. Eliot when he was told he couldn't quote extensively from Eliot's poetry and unpublished letters.
From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight, his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series ("Not just sound-bite snacks for short attention spans, but unfolding feasts that leave you with a sense of wonder", The Sunday Times) is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.
In a 2012 interview with Matthew Stadlen of the BBC, when asked the question, "Who do you think is the person who has made the biggest impact upon the life of this country ever?" Ackroyd said, "I think William Blake is the most powerful and most significant philosopher or thinker in the course of English history"—though he did not say what had led him to form this opinion. In the same interview, when asked what fascinates him about London, he said he admired "its power, its majesty, its darkness, its shadows." When asked what he did outside of writing, he said, "I drink...that's about it."
Personal life
Ackroyd had a long-term relationship with Brian Kuhn, an American dancer he met while at Yale. After a nervous breakdown in the late 1980s, Ackroyd moved to Devon with Kuhn. However, Kuhn was then diagnosed with AIDS, dying in 1994, and Ackroyd moved back to London. He has long been known for his abuse of alcohol, and in 1999 he suffered a heart attack and was placed in a medically induced coma for a week. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/24/2014.)
Book Reviews
Three Brothers is an alternative autobiography, a ghost story and a murder mystery all in one slim volume. Dickens, Blake, and Eliot—all subjects of lives by Ackroyd—cast shadows over the three-ply narrative that is full of chance and coincidence, 'alliances and affinities,' 'contenders and young pretenders,' shape-shifters and shirt-lifters ... The waspish vignettes of literary London and fusty academe are a delight. The air is full of poison—and echoes of other Ackroyd novels. He sees the capital as 'a web so taut and tightly drawn' that the slightest movement sets off a chain of events ... The brilliant result is the quintessence of Ackroyd.
Telegraph (UK)
Three Brothers [is] a London novel which is permeated by Dickens ... The themes—lost childhoods and crime—are Dickensian, and the novel is suffused with the author’s awareness of the strangeness and often loneliness of the bleak streets of London. There is melodrama and comedy, and this too is Dickensian ... A book full of rich and sudden moments of delight.
Scotsman (UK)
London is a major character in the novel. In Ackroyd's accomplished hands the city becomes a mystical place, where visions abound. Highly recommended.
Daily Mail (UK)
Three Brothers, an amalgam of social satire and noirish thriller, is vintage Ackroyd."
Financial Times (UK)
[A] characteristically sly novel juxtaposing the mundane and the mystical in 1960s London. [A] trio of brothers...take radically different paths in life...[and] embody different aspects of Ackroyd’s own biography—a segmentation that contributes to their oddly impersonal feel. In contrast, the author’s beloved London [is] triumphantly alive...coincidence is everywhere, anything is possible.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) With overtones of Greek tragedy and Charles Dickens, this is a literary and engrossing parable and a loving tribute to London in all its depravity.
Library Journal
[An] intriguing if inconsistent latest...stew of family saga, murder mystery, political conspiracy and tableau of London's history.... Ackroyd's short novel maintains a patchy course.... At times humdrum and perfunctory, at others fantastical, this genre-spanning novel offers lightweight bookish entertainment.
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.)
Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War
Amanda Vaill, 2014
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374172992
Summary
A spellbinding story of love amid the devastation of the Spanish Civil War
Madrid, 1936. In a city blasted by a civil war that many fear will cross borders and engulf Europe—a conflict one writer will call "the decisive thing of the century"—six people meet and find their lives changed forever.
Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes that this war will give him fresh material and new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious novice journalist hungry for love and experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, idealistic young photographers based in Paris, want to capture history in the making and are inventing modern photojournalism in the process. And Arturo Barea, chief of Madrid’s loyalist foreign press office, and Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with loyalty to their sometimes compromised cause—a struggle that places both of them in peril.
Hotel Florida traces the tangled wartime destinies of these three couples against the backdrop of a critical moment in history. As Hemingway put it, "You could learn as much at the Hotel Florida in those years as you could anywhere in the world."
From the raw material of unpublished letters and diaries, official documents, and recovered reels of film, Amanda Vaill has created a narrative of love and reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth: finding it out, telling it, and living it—whatever the cost. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1948-49
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Radcliffe College (now Harvard University)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Amanda Vaill is an American writer and editor, noted for her non-fiction. A graduate of Radcliffe College (now Harvard University), she worked in publishing before becoming a writer full-time in 1992. In the 1970s Vaill was an editor at Viking Press alongside Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She lives in New York City.
Writing
In 1995 Vaill published Everybody Was So Young, a biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, prominent 1920s socialites of the French Rivera. It was nominated for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. She also contributed to the catalogue for Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy, an exhibition mounted by the Williams College Museum of Art, and also shown at the Yale Art Gallery and the Dallas Museum of Art.
Her next book in 2006 was Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She later wrote Something to Dance About, a 2009 PBS documentary about Robbins life and work, which was part of PBS's American Masters series. Her screenwriting was nominated for the 2009 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming. The film went on to win both an Emmy and a George Foster Peabody Award.
In 2008 Vaill co-wrote a book on her grandfather, the jeweller Seaman Schepps.
Her 2014 book, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, follows a group of writers and photographers (including Hemmingway) who covered the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War.
Vaill has also written for Esquire, New York Observer, Talk, Harper’s Bazaar, Architectural Digest, among others. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/34/2014.)
Book Reviews
Magical and meticulous... [Hotel Florida] is a masterful reconstruction of one of the most tumultuous conflicts in 20th Century Europe.
Jane Ciabattari - BBC.com
[An] energetic group biography.... [Vaill] is a diligent researcher and a spirited writer who confidently inhabits and channels her historical characters. Her set pieces are numerous and well turned.
Charles Trueheart - American Scholar
During Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.... Vaill vividly recounts specific scenes of dying Spanish soldiers and citizens captured photographically by the journalists as well as deftly describing how Gellhorn insinuated herself into Hemingway’s marriage.... Beautifully told, Vaill’s story captures the timeless immediacy of warfront reporting with the universal struggle to stay in love, just before the Nazis permanently changed the European landscape. 16p. b&w illus
Publishers Weekly
The tragic Spanish Civil War (1936–39) began as a rebellion of the military against the elected government and became a rehearsal for world war.... In the midst of this, left-leaning journalists and photographers flocked to besieged Madrid's Hotel Florida to report on the Loyalist fight against Fascism..... The kind of history that readers will say "reads like a novel." —Stewart Desmond, New York
Library Journal
Vaill follows a handful of characters...through the Spanish Civil War.... Although it will be difficult for readers to turn their eyes away from the power couple (Hemingway and Gellhorn), Vaill does a good job of getting us deeply interested in the lives...of the others.... War, sex, friendship, betrayal, celebrity, rivalry, jealousy, idealism, foolishness and foppery—all this and more gather in the lobby of Madrid's Hotel Florida.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Hotel Florida focuses on the Spanish Civil War experiences of six extraordinarily talented, courageous individuals. What was it about the social or political backgrounds of these six that drew them to the Loyalist cause? What strengths and flaws did they bring to their work? Who waspragmatic, idealistic, selfish, altruistic?
2. In her opening note, Amanda Vaill writes that Hotel Florida is about how each of the main characters relates to the truth—“whether, for each of them, living the truth becomes just as important as telling it, to the world, to each other, and to themselves.” How did each of them tell the truth and live the truth? What is Vaill’s intent in echoing the first line of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls in the first line of Hotel Florida?
3. The United States, Britain, and France chose not to become involved in the Spanish Civil War, despite the graphic evidence of civilian suffering contained in dispatches from battered cities and burning villages. Was this a wise policy? What kinds of support might have been provided? How were both sides—the Nationalists and the Loyalists—left politically vulnerable to the German and Russian agendas?
4. Do the relationships between the couples—Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar—seem typical of traditional gender roles and stereotypes of the era? Were Martha, Gerda, and Ilsa at a disadvantage because they were women? Were there advantages they exploited to further their careers? How did their work compare to that of the men they worked alongside?
5. The book contains many descriptions of war correspondents coming under fire during battle— taking notes and photos as shells exploded and soldiers and civilians died. Hemingway, Gellhorn, Capa, and Taro leave Spain but are drawn back repeatedly in spite of the danger. Why? Is it passion for their work, belief in the cause, desire for fame and recognition, empathy for the suffering of their fellow humans, a need to belong to something larger than themselves? Do their reasons change as the war progresses?
6. Arturo Barea is a complex and flawed man of conscience. What were the experiences that changed him from an uncommitted, lazy, “emotional socialist” into the Unknown Voice of Madrid and, ultimately, a successful writer?
7. Each of the six main characters wanted to bear witness to the truth. But each of them also manipulated the truth, not only in support of the Loyalist cause but to satisfy the demands of the organizations they worked for. In the service of truth, how did each of them distort it? Did the ends always justify the means, or were some of their actions blatantly opportunistic or unethical?
8. The photograph known as Falling Soldier, which Capa took in Espejo, is described as one of the most famous photographs in the world. Vaill cites evidence that it probably captured a real event, but the image may have been staged. Does it matter what really happened, given the impact of the photograph? How did Capa’s and Taro’s photographs change as the war progressed?
9. When Capa catches himself writing to a friend that “the story is incomplete.... There was only an alarm, no bombing,” he is immediately horrified that he has become a journalist who cares more about the story than the people dying to make it happen. Are there instances of other journalists behaving this way?
10. Ernest Hemingway was a legend in his lifetime and is remembered today as an icon of American literature. He is portrayed as larger-than-life, macho, narcissistic, and given to exaggeration. His friend F. Scott Fitzgerald writes, “He is living in a world so entirely his own that it is impossible to help him.” Are there indications in Hemingway’s writing from Spain, or in his speeches or comments, that he considers himself to be more a player in the war than a mere documenter of events? When he writes of the “godwonderful housetohouse fighting” in Teruel, what does this reveal about his state of mind? Why is what he calls “the true gen” so important to him? Despite his bombast and self-absorption, is there evidence that he was sincere in his love for Spain and the Spanish people?
11. Imagine the Spanish Civil War with social media such as Twitter and Instagram available to all: correspondents, civilians, politicians, military leaders, and soldiers in the field. What might have been different?
12. Father Leocadio Lobo counsels Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar, “Talk and write down what you think you know, what you have seen and thought, tell it honestly and speak the truth. Let the others hear and read you, so that they are driven to tell their truth, too. And then you’ll lose that pain of yours.” What is the pain he is talking about? Did others in the book suffer from it as well?
13. In wartime, politicians, the military, and the media often find themselves uneasily coexisting in a web of truths, half-truths, and lies. What are some examples of this in Hotel Florida? How can a propagandist be a truth teller? How can a photograph lie?
14. The Spanish Civil War had historical repercussions beyond Spain and the late 1930s. What were the issues within Spain that started the war? How did Spain become a microcosm for conflicts that were building in other parts of the world? What far-reaching impact did the Nationalist victory have? For example, given the socialist views of many of the American correspondents, might there be a link to the McCarthy-era blacklisting in the United States in the 1950s?
15. By March 1939, with a Nationalist victory a reality, all of the five surviving lead characters had left Spain. How did their experiences during the war influence the rest of their lives? Of the five, who seemed to have gained, and who to have lost, the most?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Midnight in Europe
Alan Furst, 2014
Random House
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400069491
Summary
Paris, 1938. As the shadow of war darkens Europe, democratic forces on the Continent struggle against fascism and communism, while in Spain the war has already begun. Alan Furst, whom Vince Flynn has called "the most talented espionage novelist of our generation," now gives us a taut, suspenseful, romantic, and richly rendered novel of spies and secret operatives in Paris and New York, in Warsaw and Odessa, on the eve of World War II.
Cristian Ferrar, a brilliant and handsome Spanish emigre, is a lawyer in the Paris office of a prestigious international law firm. Ferrar is approached by the embassy of the Spanish Republic and asked to help a clandestine agency trying desperately to supply weapons to the Republic’s beleaguered army—an effort that puts his life at risk in the battle against fascism.
Joining Ferrar in this mission is a group of unlikely men and women: idealists and gangsters, arms traders and aristocrats and spies. From shady Paris nightclubs to white-shoe New York law firms, from brothels in Istanbul to the dockyards of Poland, Ferrar and his allies battle the secret agents of Hitler and Franco.
And what allies they are: there's Max de Lyon, a former arms merchant now hunted by the Gestapo; the Marquesa Maria Cristina, a beautiful aristocrat with a taste for danger; and the Macedonian Stavros, who grew up "fighting Bulgarian bandits. After that, being a gangster was easy." Then there is Eileen Moore, the American woman Ferrar could never forget.
In Midnight in Europe, Alan Furst paints a spellbinding portrait of a continent marching into a nightmare—and the heroes and heroines who fought back against the darkness. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 20, 1941
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College; M.A., Pennsylvania State University
• Currently—lives in Sag Harbor (Long Island), New York
Alan Furst, an American author of historical spy novels, has been called "an heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene," whom he cites along with Joseph Roth and Arthur Koestler as important influences. Most of his novels since 1988 have been set just prior to or during the Second World War and he is noted for his successful evocations of Eastern Europe peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944.
Biography
Born in New York City, and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where he attended the Horace Mann School, Furst received a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1962 and an M.A. from Penn State in 1967.
While attending general studies courses at Columbia University, he became acquainted with Margaret Mead, for whom he later worked. Before becoming a full-time novelist, Furst worked in advertising and wrote magazine articles, most notably for Esquire, and as a columnist for the International Herald Tribune.
Early writings
Furst's papers were obtained by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. They include a 1963 letter from his grandfather, Max Stockman, urging Furst to become a teacher and "write as a sideline" in his spare time. The collection also includes early articles on a wide variety of topics, published in many magazines for which no common denominator can be found, including Architectural Digest, Elle, Esquire, 50 Plus, International Herald Tribune, Islands, New Choices, New York, New York Times, Pursuits, Salon, and Seattle Weekly.
The Ransom collection remarks: "Of note is the April 1984 Esquire article, "The Danube Blues," which sparked Furst's interest in writing espionage novels. Numerous slides of his 1983 Danube trip are also available.
His early novels (1976–1983) achieved limited success. One item, held in the Ransom collection, includes the manuscript for "One Smart Cookie" (with Debbi Fields, 1987), a commissioned biography of the owner of the Mrs. Fields Cookies company.
The year 1988 saw publication of Night Soldiers— inspired by his 1984 trip to Eastern Europe on assignment for Esquire—which invigorated his career and led to a succession of related titles. His output since 1988 includes more than a dozen works. Furst been called "an heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, whom he cites along with Joseph Roth and Arthur Koestler as important influences. He is especially noted for his successful evocations of Eastern Europe peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944. While all his historical espionage novels are loosely connected (protagonists in one book might appear as minor characters in another), only The World at Night and Red Gold share a common plot.
Writing in the New York Times, the novelist Justin Cartwright says that Furst, who lives in Sag Harbor, Long Island, "has adopted a European sensibility." Awarded a Fulbright teaching fellowship in 1969, Furst moved to Sommieres, France, outside of Montpellier, and taught at the University of Montpellier. He later lived for many years in Paris, a city that he calls "the heart of civilisation" which figures significantly in all his novels.
In 2011, the Tulsa Library Trust in Tulsa, Oklahoma selected Furst to receive its Helmerich Award, a literary prize given annually to honor a distinguished author's body of work. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/24/2014.)
Book Reviews
After a slow start, this spy thriller set in 1938...settles into a lazy pace, as it charts the attempts of two part-time arms dealers...to serve the Spanish Republic and its beleaguered army while most of the continent has its eye on Berlin.... As usual, Furst manages to capture the fragile, itinerant nature of European life during the interwar period, dropping in hints of the horror to come, but this is one of his less memorable efforts.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Through multiple novels, Furst has illuminated moments of reluctant courage and desperate love in a world teetering on the edge of destruction. He does so again here, and, as always, he does it exquisitely.... Furst is a master of mood, but, above all, he is able to show how the most personal of emotions—love, especially—drives the actions of men and women caught in a time of peril.
Booklist
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.)
Swimming Home
Deborah Levy, 2011
Bloomsbury USA
176 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781620401699
Summary
Shortlisted - 2012 Man Booker Prize
As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive.
She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe's enigmatic wife allow her to remain?
A subversively brilliant study of love, Swimming Home reveals how the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—South Africa
• Education—Dartington College of Arts
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
Deborah Levy, born in South Africa, is is a British playwright, novelist, and poet. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and she is the author of several novels including, Swimming Home and Hot Milk, both of which were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Life
Levy's father was a member of the African National Congress and an academic and historian. The family emigrated to Wembley Park, in 1968. Her parents divorced in 1974.
Work
Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts, leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, including Pax, Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and others which are published in Levy: Plays 1 (Methuen). She also served as director and writer for Manact Theatre Company in Cardiff, Wales.
Her first novel Beautiful Mutants, came out in 1986; her second, Swallowing Geography, in 1993; and her third, Billy and Girl, in 1996.
Swimming Home, her 2011 novel, was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. It was also shortlisted for the UK Author of the Year prize at the 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards and for the 2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.
Levy published a short story collection, Black Vodka, which was shortlisted for the BBC International Short Story Award 2012, and in 2016 she released her fourth novel, Hot Milk, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
She has always written across a number of art forms (including collaborations with visual artists) and was a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989 to 1991. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/24/2014.)
Book Reviews
Levy's elegant language and subtle, uncanny plot are strictly adult fare…Levy creates perfectly realistic scenes that erupt in flashes of disorienting hostility and the non sequiturs of dreams…The seductive pleasure of Levy's prose stems from its layered brilliance. These are deceptively simple scenes…but they all reward rereading. Levy moves her characters in and out of focus, always one step ahead of our sympathies, ready at any point to disrupt a conversation with some evocative revelation.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
From the first brief chapters of Deborah Levy's spare, disturbing and frequently funny novel, which was a finalist for this year's Man Booker Prize, we sense that things will turn out badly…As we continue reading, we realize that Swimming Home is unlike anything but itself. Its originality lies in its ellipses, its patterns and repetitions, in what it discloses and reveals, and in the peculiar curio cabinet Levy has constructed…Readers will have to resist the temptation to hurry up in order to find out what happens…because Swimming Home should be read with care…Our reward is the enjoyable, if unsettling, experience of being pitched into the deep waters of Levy's wry, accomplished novel.
Francine Prose - New York Times Book Review
Here is an excellent story, told with the subtlety and menacing tension of a veteran playwright.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Wholly new, fresh and yes, profound.... [Swimming Home] floats like a wasp, and stings like one too.
Tucker Shaw - Denver Post
This perfectly written, expertly crafted short book…[is] so well done and so clever.
Chicago Tribune
Exquisite.... Levy’s sense of dramatic form, as she hastens us toward the grim finale, is unerring, and her precise, dispassionate prose effortlessly summons people and landscapes.
The New Yorker
Levy is a keenly attentive writer, alive to the hyperreal nature of things, her prose achieving a hallucinatory quality as things seem to float out of the characters’ minds and into the text … Levy manipulates light and shadow with artfulness. She transfixes the reader: we recognize … the thing of darkness in us all. This is an intelligent, pulsating literary beast.
Telegraph (UK)
A statement on the power of the unsaid … Levy’s cinematic clarity and momentum … convey confusion with remarkable lucidity.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
Witty and poignant.
Sunday Times (UK)
One of the finest new novels I have read (and already reread) in a long time … it radiates the sensual languor of sun-drenched afternoons in the south of France and the disquieting, uncanny beauty only perceived by a true daytime insomniac.
Guardian (UK)
Allusive, elliptical and disturbing…Often funny and always acute…Swimming Home reminded me of Virginai Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Although a short work, it has an epic quality. This is a prizewinner.
Independent (UK)
Swimming Home is a beautiful, delicate book underpinned by a complexity that only reveals itself slowly to the reader.
Financial Times (UK)
(Starred review. )Levy winds her characters up and watches them go, and they do as most humans do, which is to mess up in the face of desire. Her novel is utterly beautiful and lyrical throughout, even at the most tragic turns…. A shortlisted nominee for the Man Booker Prize, deserving of the widest readership.
Booklist
Kitty Finch...is staggeringly beautiful..., unclothed...and has designs on Joe Jacobs.... Levy winds her characters up and watches them go, and they do as most humans do, which is to mess up in the face of desire. Her novel is utterly beautiful and lyrical.... [D]eserving of the widest readership.
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.)
Gemini
Carol Cassella, 2014
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451627930
Summary
A stranger’s life hangs in the balance. What if you had the power to decide if she lives or dies?
Dr. Charlotte Reese works in the intensive care unit of Seattle’s Beacon Hospital, tending to patients with the most life-threatening illnesses and injuries. Her job is to battle death—to monitor erratic heartbeats, worry over low oxygen levels, defend against infection and demise.
One night a Jane Doe is transferred to her care from a rural hospital on the Olympic Peninsula. This unidentified patient remains unconscious, the victim of a hit and run. As Charlotte and her team struggle to stabilize her, the police search for the driver who fled the scene.
Days pass, Jane’s condition worsens, and her identity remains a mystery. As Charlotte finds herself making increasingly complicated medical decisions that will tie her forever to Jane’s fate, her usual professional distance evaporates. She’s plagued by questions: Who is Jane Doe? Why will no one claim her? Who should decide her fate if she doesn’t regain consciousness—and when?
Perhaps most troubling, Charlotte wonders if a life locked in a coma is a life worth living.
Enlisting the help of her boyfriend, Eric, a science journalist, Charlotte impulsively sets out to uncover Jane Doe’s past. But the closer they get to the truth, the more their relationship is put to the test. It is only when they open their hearts to their own feelings toward each other—and toward life itself—that Charlotte and Eric will unlock Jane Doe’s shocking secret, and prepare themselves for a miracle.
Filled with intricate medical detail and set in the breathtaking Pacific Northwest, Gemini is a riveting and heartbreaking novel of moral complexity and emotional depth. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1956-57
• Where—Dallas, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., Duke University; M.D.,Baylor College of Medicine
• Currently—lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington
Carol Cassella is a practicing anesthesiologist and novelist. She was a closet writer for years before blending medicine and fiction in her first novel, Oxygen, the story of an anesthesiologist tangled in the aftermath of an operating room catastrophe. Oxygen was an Indie Best Pick for July 2008, and selected as one of the best first novels of 2008 by The Library Journal. The novel has become a national bestseller and was released as a trade paperback in June, 2009.
Carol grew up in Dallas, Texas and graduated from Duke University with a degree in English Literature. After working in publishing for several years, Carol decided to pursue her fascination with all the weird and wonderful ways humans behave and misbehave by studying medicine. She initially intended to become a psychiatrist, but when she couldn’t separate the body and the soul she veered into internal medicine and then, six years later, into anesthesiology. She is board certified in both internal medicine and anesthesiology. Prior to writing fiction, Carol wrote about global public health issues in the developing world for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Carol now lives on Bainbridge Island, WA with her husband Steve and their two sets of twins. She enjoys hiking and cross country skiing in the North Cascades. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
[A] riveting, suspenseful story, full of vivid characters and stirring reflections on medical and genetic issues…. Cassella is a gifted writer, gorgeously animating her landscapes and the forces of nature, underlining her theme that even medicine cannot save her characters from mortality.
Seattle Times
An intensive-care doctor in Seattle grappling with her stagnant relationship and ticking biological clock, Charlotte Reese becomes engrossed in the case of a Jane Doe delivered to her hospital comatose after a highway hit-and-run.... A book at turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, it invites us to accept, if nothing else, that the only way to live is to "cling to every moment even as you into the next.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) The book prompts many questions: Who is Jane Doe? Why has no one come forward to identify her? How long can Charlotte keep this patient alive before an appointed guardian decides that it would be in the woman's best interests to let her die?.... Informed by her work as a doctor, Casella's...offers deepening mysteries to keep the reader turning the pages. —Sheila M. Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, DC
Library Journal
[A] compelling look at the collision of a physician’s professional and personal lives.... Readers will quickly perceive the connection between Raney and the Jane Doe in Charlotte’s ICU, but they’ll be surprised to discover that the women share another link. A uniquely involving read. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist
...the lives of a doctor and her critically injured patient intertwine in unexpected ways.... Dr. Charlotte [Reese] embarks on a determined quest to solve the puzzle of how this Jane Doe found herself in her present condition. Readers may well overlook Cassella's frequently interjected bromides about love...since this engaging medical mystery makes far more compelling points about economics and sociology.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why does Charlotte feel such a strong sense of responsibility for Jane Doe? How does she balance her protective feelings for Jane with her practical understanding of Jane’s prognosis?
2. From the moment she first sees Bo, Raney is acutely aware of the differences in their circumstances. How does her sensitivity about her background affect their relationship over the years? In what ways do they have more in common than she thinks? Why is their childhood attachment so enduring?
3. Charlotte sees her job as giving nature "as much time as possible" (117). In practice, what does that mean? How does it influence her feelings about Jane’s care and the appointment of a guardian ad litem?
4. How does the small town of Quentin, with its natural beauty and financial struggles, shape Raney’s life? In what ways does she identify as a small town girl, and in what ways does she resent that role?
5. Charlotte and Eric’s relationship is haunted by her desire to have a child, and his reluctance to do so. Why is the subject so difficult for them to discuss? Why does Charlotte feel they have stalled?
6. What reasons does Raney give for marrying Cleet? Would she have made the same decision if she were not pregnant? How is her understanding of love and loyalty shaped by her marriage to him?
7. How does Eric’s awareness of his neurofibromatosis, and the brushes with death it caused, influence his life? What choices does he make as a result? What boundaries does he lie down? Are his boundaries intended for his own protection or for others’?
8. As a child, Raney makes do with scavenged house paint for her art. How does that same make-do attitude manifest in her adult life?
9. What is the significance of Raney burning her paintings when her grandfather’s farm is sold? Why is this a turning point in her life as much as her grandfather’s?
10. Does Charlotte go too far by seeking David out and by trying to uncover Jake’s paternity? Does her involvement with Raney compromise her objectivity?
11. When she was a child, Raney's grandfather taught her to light a campfire "with one match and her own wits" (229). Does Raney take his lesson about self-sufficiency to heart? At what points does she fail to follow his advice?
12. What prompts Raney to marry David? Why does she ignore her growing misgivings and stay with him? Do you think David was responsible for the hit-and-run?
13. Why do you think the author chose Gemini, the zodiac sign represented by twins, as the title of the novel? How does she develop the theme established by the title? What characters or events are "twinned"?
14. Gemini contains several mysteries: Jane Doe’s identity, whether the hit-and-run was accidental or intentional, Jake’s parentage, and others. Was there a particular revelation that you found most surprising or satisfying? What devices did the author use to maintain suspense?
15. Discuss the role of genetics in the novel. How does Eric’s "fatal flaw" link the characters? Eric wrote in his editorial that knowledge of your genetic code could be more damaging than helpful; is that true for Jake? Would you rather know if your genetics carried a "fatal flaw" or not?
16. Gemini raises challenging questions about our fear of death and our willingness to confront or discuss it. Did you react differently to Jane Doe’s situation than you did to that of Raney’s grandfather? How would you answer the question that Eric poses to Charlotte: "Should quantity of life always trump quality?" (9) Did reading Gemini stir you to look more closely at your own feelings about death?
(Questions issued by publisher.)