The Wind is Not a River
Brian Payton, 2014
HarperCollins
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062279972
Summary
A gripping tale of survival and an epic love story in which a husband and wife—separated by the only battle of World War II to take place on American soil—fight to reunite in Alaska's starkly beautiful Aleutian Islands
Following the death of his younger brother in Europe, journalist John Easley is determined to find meaning in his loss, to document some part of the growing war that claimed his own flesh and blood. Leaving behind his beloved wife, Helen, after an argument they both regret, he heads north from Seattle to investigate the Japanese invasion of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, a story censored by the U.S. government.
While John is accompanying a crew on a bombing run, his plane is shot down over the island of Attu. He survives only to find himself exposed to a harsh and unforgiving wilderness, known as "the Birthplace of Winds." There, John must battle the elements, starvation, and his own remorse while evading discovery by the Japanese.
Alone in their home three thousand miles to the south, Helen struggles with the burden of her husband's disappearance. Caught in extraordinary circumstances, in this new world of the missing, she is forced to reimagine who she is—and what she is capable of doing. Somehow, she must find John and bring him home, a quest that takes her into the farthest reaches of the war, beyond the safety of everything she knows.
A powerful, richly atmospheric story of life and death, commitment and sacrifice, The Wind Is Not a River illuminates the fragility of life and the fierce power of love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1966
• Where—Los Angeles County, USA
• Education—Seminary of Christ the King;
University of Victoria
• Currently—lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Brian Payton is an Ameroican-Canadian writer of books and essays. Born in in 1966, Payton lived in California, Illinois, Texas, New Mexico, and Alaska before settling in British Columbia at the age of 16. He was educated at the Seminary of Christ the King and attended the University of Victoria.
Payton's nonfiction writing about adventure, wildlife, and the environment has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Canadian Geographic. His books include both novels and nonfiction.
Payton’s first novel, Hail Mary Corner (2001) is a coming-of-age tale based on his experience living among fellow seminarians and Benedictine monks.
Shadow of the Bear: Travels in Vanishing Wilderness (2006), work of narrative nonfiction, chronicles a personal search for the eight remaining bear species across continents, cultures, and memory.
The Ice Passage: A True Story of Ambition, Disaster, and Endurance in the Arctic Wilderness (2009), is a narrative nonfiction account of the final voyage in the 1850s of HMS Investigator.
His historical novel, The Wind Is Not a River (2014) is the story of a World War II journalist who, after a plane crash, survives in the Alaskan wilderness and hides from Japanese soldiers who have invaded the Aleutian Islands.
Payton lives with his wife in Vancouver. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/12/2014.)
Book Reviews
A haunting love story wrapped in an engaging and unsettling history lesson…Along the way, readers will learn not just about a fascinating and largely forgotten slice of American history, but what it felt like to live through it.
USA Today
Payton crafts a beautiful, heart-inspiring and heart-wrenching tale of love, forgiveness, loneliness, the strength of the human spirit, and the power of faith in God and family. These are not the stories we heard from our parents, but they are believable nonetheless.
Pitttsburgh Post Gazette
This top-notch WWII historical novel...involves the little-remembered Japanese invasion and partial occupation of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. War correspondent John Easley is shot down in a seaplane.... He and the only other survivor, young Texan aviator Karl Bitburg, hunker down in a beachside cave while hiding from the Japanese.... Payton has delivered a richly detailed, vividly resonant chronicle of war’s effect on ordinary people’s lives.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.)John Easley...and one other survivor of [an airplane] crash endure a desperate struggle to survive the cold and hunger [in Alaska] while evading patrolling Japanese soldiers. Meanwhile John's wife, Helen,...joins a USO show, hoping to make her way to Alaska to search for her husband.... [A] suspenseful, beautifully researched title that readers will want to devour in one sitting. —Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage P.L., AK
Library Journal
Payton, in the loveliest of prose, illuminates a little-known aspect of WWII while portraying a devoted couple who bravely face down the isolation, pain, and sacrifice of wartime.
Booklist
Set against a meticulously described Alaskan setting, each harrowing or quietly painful minute is portrayed in realistic detail…The book arcs poetically across the distance between Helen and John, drawing out the separation that they (and the reader) can hardly bear.
Bookpage
An unusual novel in that Payton takes us to...the Japanese-occupied Aleutian Islands in 1943. John Easley...a journalist...is shot down and forced into survival mode on the island of Attu.... Meanwhile, John's wife....wangles a trip to entertain the troops in Alaska.... [Through alternating chapters] Payton effectively gives the reader two visions—and two versions—of a neglected aspect of World War II.
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.
On Such a Full Sea
Chang-rea Lee, 2014
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594486104
Summary
A highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman’s legendary quest in a shocking, future America.
On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee’s elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in.
In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class—descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China—find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement.
In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 29, 1965
• Where—Seoul, Korea
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., University of
Oregon (USA)
• Awards—PEN/Hemingway Award; Anisfield-Wolf Prize;
NAIBA Book Award
• Currently—lives in Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Chang-rae Lee landed on the literary scene in 1995 with Native Speaker, a detective story about much more than just another crime. Critics responded, and Lee's debut received a string of recognition, including a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Biography/Critical Appreciation. Everyone agreed that Chang-rae Lee was a writer to watch. Over the nearly two decades since then, he has published four more novels, all to wide acclaim.
Lee and his family emigrated from Seoul, South Korea to the United States in 1968. His family settled in Westchester, New York, and Lee eventually attended Yale and the University of Oregon, where he earned his M.F.A.
Lee's first novel, Native Speaker (1995), won numerous awards including the PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel centers around a Korean American industrial spy, explores themes of alienation and betrayal as felt or perpetrated by immigrants and first-generation citizens, and played out in local politics.
In 1999, he published his second novel, A Gesture Life. This elaborated on his themes of identity and assimilation through the narrative of an elderly Japanese-American doctor who remembers treating Korean comfort women during World War II. For this book, Lee received the Asian American Literary Award.
His 2004 novel Aloft received mixed notices from the critics and featured Lee's first protagonist who is not Asian American, but a disengaged and isolated Italian-American suburbanite forced to deal with his world. It received the 2006 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in the Adult Fiction category.
His 2010 novel The Surrendered won the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a nominated finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In 2014 Lee published On Such A Full Sea, a dystopian novel set in a future version of the American city of Baltimore, Maryland called B-Mor where the main character, Fan, is a Chinese-American laborer working as a diver in a fish farm.
Lee a writer and a teacher, as well as the director of the M.F.A. Program at Hunter College of City University in New York City. Those fortunate enough to be his students get to learn from the man who knows the stuff of human nature—that the aftereffect of any act is the core of every great story, and that even the most conventional characters can bear the weight of unconventional story lines. (Adapted from Barnes & Noble and Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/12/2014.)
Extras
(From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview):
• If I weren't a writer," Lee reveals in our interview, "I'd probably be working in the food and/or wine business, perhaps running a wine or coffee bar—or even an Asian noodle soup shop."
• When asked what book most influenced his life or career as a writer, here is his response:
"The Book" doesn't quite exist for me—there are too many that influenced me in incalculable ways.... These, in no particular order, are several of my many, many favorites:
Dubliners by James Joyce—Stories so luminous that one would be instantly blinded by their beauty were it not for the revelatory poignancy of their narratives.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac—This is a wild and inspiring book, and was especially so for someone like me, a middle-class suburban kid who was always taught to color within the lines.
Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike—One of the few novels I might consider calling "perfect" —it's all here, in a virtuosic and utterly unified presentation: voice, characterization, narrative sequencing, keen social commentary, metaphorical/pictorial wizardry. Updike at the height of his powers.
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron—A torrential display of Styron's prodigious imagination and lyricism.
The Names by Don DeLillo—A brilliant, complex, brooding inquiry into the uses—and essential position—of language. A "novel of ideas" that goes beyond rgumentation and ultimately soars with the force of poetry.
(Autho nterview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Watching a talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of devoted reading, and On Such a Full Sea provides all that and more. It's a wonderful addition not only to Chang-rae Lee's body of work but to the ranks of "serious" writers venturing into the realm of dystopian fantasy…Lee has always been preoccupied by the themes of hope and betrayal, by the tensions that arise in small lives in the midst of great social change. His marvelous new book…takes on those concerns with his customary mastery of quiet detail—and a touch of the fantastic…A reader hoping for weird mutants and wild conflagrations has picked up the wrong book; Lee's influence is more Philip Roth than Philip K. Dick. Although he peppers On Such a Full Sea with some genre pleasures…Fan's journey through a mysterious future turns out to be a timeless exploration of the human condition.
Andrew Sean Greer - New York Times Book Review
Genius… With this strange and magically grim book, Chang-rae Lee has allowed us to leave the familiar behind, all so we can see it more clearly.
Boston Globe
I've never been a fan of grand hyperbolic declarations in book reviews, but faced with On Such a Full Sea, I have no choice but to ask: Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee today? His new, his fifth — where have you been? — book seals this deal. A chilling, dark, unsettling ride into a dystopia in utopia's guise, this is a novel that might divide but will no doubt conquer where it matters most.
Los Angeles Times
[On Such a Full Sea is] not just a fully realized, time-jumping narrative of an audacious young girl in search of lost loved ones, but an exploration of the meaning and function of narrative, of illusion and delusion, of engineered personalities and faint promises of personhood, and of one powerful nation's disappearance and how that indelibly affects another.
Chicago Tribune
The adventures of this feisty yet wary protagonist, together with a bleak but arresting vision of the future, keep the reader rapt and concerned for the fate of both beleaguered character and battered brave new world… There is a final surprise in store at Fan's journey's end, but it polishes what already shines. In Lee's richly imagined and skillfully executed work, the joy of traveling far outpaces the satisfaction in arriving.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
(Starred review.) Lee's (The Surrendered) latest novel is set in a dystopic future world in which....city dwellers spend their lives in happy serfdom, working day jobs to produce goods (mostly food) for the richer Charter communities. But when Fan, an unassuming 16-year-old...[goes] in search of her vanished boyfriend, Reg, the fabric of orderly B-Mor begins to fray.... [A] fantastic blend of imagination and interpretation.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Once revealed in context, this book's title alone is an astonishing feat of encapsulated genius from the inimitable Lee. Control, individuality, nature, perfection, reality, society—all that and more fill this dystopic treatise about a not-so-futuristic, ruined America.... [Lee's] versatility ensures...appreciation among readers who enjoy a heart-thumping adventure and doctoral students in search of a superlative dissertation text. —Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A harrowing and fully imagined vision of dystopian America from Lee, who heretofore has worked in a more realist mode.... Lee has written an allegory of our current predicaments, and the narration, written in the collective voice of [his characters], gives the novel the tone of a timeless and cautionary fable. Welcome and surprising proof that there's plenty of life in end-of-the-world storytelling.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The novel is narrated by a collective voice of B-Mor residents, telling the story of Fan from a distance of some years. Why do you think the author chose to narrate the book this way? What does the collective narration add to the book? How might it read differently if it had been told as a much closer third-person narration? What if it had been told by Fan herself?
2. How does the author implicitly explain this narrator's ability to describe events that happened beyond the physical limits of B-Mor?
3. Legend and storytelling are major themes in the story itself-from the legend of Fan as it is narrated by the collective B-Mor residents to (within that larger story) the story Quig tells Fan about his past, the tale that Fan has heard about the brother she never really knew, and the stories represented on the murals of the kept girls in the charter village. Do these stories have anything in common with one another, either in their telling or their effect on their audience? What about the stories' effect on the tellers themselves? What do you think the author is saying about the nature of storytelling?
4. Fan's journey is a quest narrative, a storytelling form that traditionally tells about a hero's transformation. Fan, though, doesn't fundamentally change from the start of the novel to the end. Why do you think this is true? What has changed over the course of the novel?
5. By the time the events of the novel begin, Reg has already disappeared. Why do you think the author has chosen not to introduce us to Reg as an active character during the novel?
6. There is a period of growing discontent within B-Mor. What do you think accounts for this situation? How is it resolved? Do you think Fan would have left B-Mor if Reg had not disappeared? Do you think any of the discontent within B-Mor would have occurred if Fan had not gone after Reg?
7. Think about race and how it is used in the book. In some ways this is a postracial America, but in other important ways, old prejudices linger. In addition, new divisions seem to have sprung up in place of racial discord. What are some of these divisions and how do they affect the characters and their lives? What do you think the author was trying to accomplish in this way?
8. What do you think are the most significant quality-of-life differences between the settlements and the charter villages? Where are people the happiest, and why? What are the appeals of life in the Open Counties? Why haven't more B-Mor residents like Fan ever left their settlement? Where do you think that you would be the happiest?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Big Crowd
Kevin Baker, 2013
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
424 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780618859900
Summary
From “the lit world’s sharpest chronicler of New York’s past” (Rolling Stone), a novel of two Irish brothers who travel from the gangland waterfront to the halls of power.
Based on one of the great unsolved murders in mob history, and the rise-and-fall of a real-life hero, The Big Crowd tells the sweeping story of Charlie O’Kane. He is the American dream come to life, a poor Irish immigrant who worked his way up from beat cop to mayor of New York at the city’s dazzling, post-war zenith. Famous, powerful, and married to a glamorous fashion model, he is looked up to by millions, including his younger brother, Tom. So when Charlie is accused of abetting a shocking mob murder, Tom sets out to clear his brother’s name while hiding a secret of his own.
The charges against Charlie stem from his days as a crusading Brooklyn DA, when he sent the notorious killers of Murder, Inc., to the chair—only to let a vital witness go flying out a window while under police guard. Now, out of office, Charlie lives in a shoddy, Mexico City tourist hotel, eaten up with regrets and afraid he will be indicted for murder if he returns to the U.S. To uncover what really happened, Tom must confront stunning truths about his brother, himself, and the secret workings of the great city he loves.
Moving from the Brooklyn waterfront to city hall, from the battlefields of World War II to the beaches of Acapulco, to the glamorous nightclubs of postwar New York, The Big Crowd is filled with historical powerbrokers and gangsters, celebrities and socialites, scheming cardinals and battling, dockside priests. But ultimately it is a brilliantly imagined, distinctly American story of the bonds and betrayals of brotherhood. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 1958
• Where—Englewood, New Jersey, USA
• Raised—Rockport, Massachusetts
• Education—B.A., Columbia University
• Awards—James Fenimore Cooper Prize; American
Book Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Kevin Baker is an American novelist and journalist. He was born in Englewood, New Jersey and grew up in New Jersey and Rockport, Massachusetts.
As a youth he worked on the Gloucester Daily Times, covering school-boy sports, as well as local town meetings and other civic affairs. He graduated from Columbia University, where he majored in political science, in 1980.
Baker is the author of the City of Fire trilogy, which consists of the following historical novels: Dreamland (1999); the bestselling Paradise Alley (2002); and Strivers Row (2006). The middle volume of the trilogy was the winner of the 2003 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction and the American Book Award.
He has also written a contemporary baseball novel, called Sometimes You See it Coming (1993), and a graphic novel called Luna Park (2009). Baker was chief historical researcher on Harold Evans’s illustrated history of the United States, The American Century (1999). He is also the author of The Story of Us, the companion book to the History Channel 2010 series, and wrote the new final chapter for the reissue of Baseball, the companion book to Ken Burns' 1994 10-part series, Baseball, which has aired on public television.
Baker resides in New York, where he is a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine. He was formerly a columnist for "In the News" in American Heritage magazine, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times and New York Times Book Review. Baker appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and The Colbert Report in the summer of 2009, to discuss the Barack Obama Presidency. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/11/2014.)
Book Reviews
succeeds in creating a compelling imagined world. Most of the telling is through dialogue, and Baker's re-creation of the cadences and diction of another time is impressive…Best of all, the novel delivers on what the title promises, a detailed rendering of the relationships within that era's power cabal…I've read few other novels that portray in such a nuanced way the temptations of power, the complex division of control in a great metropolis and the perils of political deal-making in that environment. Baker doesn't like the Big Crowd any more than Tom O'Kane does, but, fortunately for us, he understands its workings very well.
Scott Turow - New York Times Book Review
With The Big Crowd, Kevin Baker earns the title of Best American Historical Novelist—heck, maybe best American novelist, period. This inspired, fun, serious, thought-provoking, page-turning book gives all the good, old pleasures: if you read it on the subway, be prepared to miss your stop. But Baker also raises the key questions about New York, about America, about who we are. Charlie and Tom O'Kane are characters for the ages." —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life
Associated Press
Baker takes an all-but-forgotten crime—the William O’Dwyer case—and builds a novel as big and as blustery as the city it portrays. This sprawling saga traces the spectacular rise and fall of two Irish immigrant brothers during the course of the first half of the twentieth century.... Baker takes another juicy bite out of the Big Apple, demonstrating once again that nobody does old New York—in all its glamour and its grit—better. --Margaret Flanagan
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.
Carthage
Joyce Carol Oates, 2014
HarperCollins
768 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062298829
Summary
Zeno Mayfield's daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins his frantic search for the girl, they discover the unlikeliest of suspects—a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family. As grisly evidence mounts against the troubled war hero, the family must wrestle with the possibility of having lost a daughter forever.
Carthage plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young corporal haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression, while unraveling the story of a girl whose exile from her family may have come long before her disappearance.
Dark and riveting, Carthage is a powerful novel that explores the human capacity for violence, love, and forgiveness, and asks if it's ever truly possible to come home again.. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 16, 1938
• Where—Lockport, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Syracuse Univ.; M.A., Univ. of Wisconsin
• Awards—National Book Award for Them, 1970; 14 O. Henry
Awards; six Pushcart Prizes
• Currently—lives in Princeton, New Jersey
Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most influential and important storytellers in the literary world. She has often used her supreme narrative skills to examine the dark side of middle-class Americana, and her oeuvre includes some of the finest examples of modern essays, plays, criticism, and fiction from a vast array of genres. She is still publishing with a speed and consistency of quality nearly unheard of in contemporary literature.
A born storyteller, Oates has been spinning yarns since she was a little girl too young to even write. Instead, she would communicate her stories through drawings and paintings. When she received her very first typewriter at the age of 14, her creative floodgates opened with a torrent. She says she wrote "novel after novel" throughout high school and college— a prolificacy that has continued unabated throughout a professional career that began in 1963 with her first short story collection, By the North Gate.
Oates's breakthrough occurred in 1969 with the publication of Them, a National Book Award winner that established her as a force to be reckoned with. Since that auspicious beginning, she has been nominated for nearly every major literary honor—from the PEN/Faulkner Award to the Pulitzer Prize—and her fiction turns up with regularity on the New York Times annual list of Notable Books.
On average Oates publishes at least one novel, essay anthology, or story collection a year (during the 1970s, she produced at the astonishing rate of two or three books a year!). And although her fiction often exposes the darker side of America's brightest facades—familial unrest, sexual violence, the death of innocence—she has also made successful forays into Gothic novels, suspense, fantasy, and children's literature. As novelist John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."
Where she finds the time for it no one knows, but Oates manages to combine her ambitious, prolific writing career with teaching: first at the University of Windsor in Canada, then (from 1978 on), at Princeton University in New Jersey. For all her success and fame, her daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast.
Extras
• When not writing, Oates likes to take in a fight. "Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost," she says in highbrow fashion of the lowbrow sport.
• Oates's Black Water, which is a thinly veiled account of Ted Kennedy's car crash in Chappaquiddick, was produced as an opera in the 1990s. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Praise for Oates from the UK
• One of the female frontrunners for the title of Great American Novelist.— Maggie Gee, Sunday Times
• A writer of extraordinary strengths...she has dealt consistently with what is probably the great American theme— the quest for the creation of self...Her great subject, naturally, is love.—Ian Sansom, Guardian
• Her prose is peerless and her ability to make you think as she re-invents genres is unique. Few writers move so effortlessly from the gothic tale to the psychological thriller to the epic family saga to the lyrical novella. Even fewer authors can so compellingly and entertainingly tell a story.—Jackie McGlone, Scotland on Sunday
• Novelists such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer slug it out for the title of the Great American Novelist. But maybe they're wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the Great American Novelist is a woman. —The Herald
(From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Oates returns with another novel that ratchets up the unsettling to her signature feverish pitch. Beginning with an attention-grabbing opener that begets addictive reading—Zeno Mayfield and a search party are on the hunt for Mayfield’s missing 19-year-old daughter.... When the truth and its fallout finally becomes clear at the end, the mood is not surprisingly claustrophobic and grim. Once again, Oates’s gift for exposing the frailty—and selfishness—of humans is on display.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Dark events in Carthage, a town in upstate New York—a war hero returning from Iraq, a broken engagement, a mysterious murder—but not everything is as it seems. Carthage seems to embody the values of small-town America, for its citizens are independent and patriotic, but in early July 2005, things start to go dreadfully wrong..... Knotted, tense, digressive and brilliant.
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.
Under the Wide and Starry Sky
Nancy Horan, 2014
Random House
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345516541
Summary
From Nancy Horan, author of Loving Frank, comes her much-anticipated second novel, which tells the improbable love story of Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and his tempestuous American wife, Fanny.
At the age of thirty-five, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne has left her philandering husband in San Francisco to set sail for Belgium—with her three children and nanny in tow—to study art. It is a chance for this adventurous woman to start over, to make a better life for all of them, and to pursue her own desires.
Not long after her arrival, however, tragedy strikes, and Fanny and her children repair to a quiet artists’ colony in France where she can recuperate. Emerging from a deep sorrow, she meets a lively Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, ten years her junior, who falls instantly in love with the earthy, independent, and opinionated “belle Americaine.”
Fanny does not immediately take to the slender young lawyer who longs to devote his life to writing—and who would eventually pen such classics as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In time, though, she succumbs to Stevenson’s charms, and the two begin a fierce love affair—marked by intense joy and harrowing darkness—that spans the decades and the globe.
The shared life of these two strong-willed individuals unfolds into an adventure as impassioned and unpredictable as any of Stevenson’s own unforgettable tales. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Nancy Horan is the American author of Loving Frank (2007) and Under the Wide and Starry Sky (2014). The first is a novel about Mamah Borthwick and her relationship with American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The author was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction by the Society of American Historians in 2009 for works written in 2007-2008.
Under the Wide and Starry Sky is her second biographical novel, this one detailing the marriage of Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne to Robert Louis Stevenson.
A native Midwesterner, Nancy Horan was a teacher and journalist before turning to fiction writing. She lived for 24 years in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where she raised her two sons. She now lives with her husband on an island in Puget Sound. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/9/2014.)
Book Reviews
Nancy Horan’s first novel, Loving Frank, explored the tangled personal life of Frank Lloyd Wright. Now, in her second, she takes a deep, long look at the intimate history of yet another creative man. This time, the action is viewed from two perspectives—those of Robert Louis Stevenson and (even more so) of his American wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, who hopes to be a painter or a writer herself. Under the Wide and Starry Sky is at once a classic artistic bildungsroman and a retort to the genre, a novel that shows how love and marriage can simultaneously offer inspiration and encumbrance,
Susann Cockal - New York Times Book Review
The central couple is Fanny Osbourne and Robert Louis Stevenson....[detailing] their years spent in the South Pacific traveling from one island to another. Her own writing talent is submerged in the wake of Louis’s growing fame, and her influence over him creates envy among his circle of friends in Britain. This beautifully written novel, neatly balanced between its two protagonists, makes them come alive with grace, humor, and understanding.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Horan’s spectacular second novel has been worth the wait. Brimming with the same artistic verve that drives her complicated protagonists, it follows the loving, tumultuous partnership of Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson and his Indiana-born wife, Fanny Osbourne…. Together, they are riveting and insightfully envisioned, including through moving depiction of how their relationship transforms over time…. [An] exhilarating novel.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. In order to separate from her unfaithful husband, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne takes her children across the continental U.S. and the Atlantic to study art in Europe. Do you think it’s the wisest choice, given the impact on her children? Would you make a similar decision under the circumstances? Are there other options she could have pursued?
2.At first glance, Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson might seem an unlikely match. Why do you think they are so drawn to each other? Why does their relationship endure?
3. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has become a phrase synonymous with the idea of the divided self. At any points in the novel, does Louis seem to live a double life? Does Fanny? In what ways do Fanny, Louis, and other characters struggle with their own identities?
4. After criticizing a story of Fanny’s, W. E. Henley incites a quarrel with Louis that threatens their friendship. Does Fanny deserve the criticism? Do you think she and RLS enhance or hinder each other’s artistic ambitions and accomplishments?
5. Take a look at John Singer Sargent’s painting “Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife” (1885; currently in the Steve Wynn collection). What do you think of his portrayal of Fanny and Louis?
6. Many of us feel the need to shape a story out of the facts of our lives. In making these stories, we sometimes create myths about ourselves. Does Fanny invent myths about herself? Does RLS do the same?
7. The Stevensons travel all over the globe in search of the ideal climate for their family, from Switzerland to the South Seas. How do landscape and environment affect each of them?
8. Many of Louis’s friends find Fanny overprotective of her husband. Do you agree or disagree? Are her actions justified?
9. In Samoa, late in their marriage, Louis suggests that the work Fanny does is not that of an artist. He tells her, “No one should be offended if it is said that he is not an artist. The only person who should be insulted by such an observation is an artist who supports his family with his work.” Do you agree with this? What does Fanny consider her art? Do you agree with her views?
10. Why do you think Horan chooses “Out of my country and myself I go” as the epigraph for this book?
11. What is Robert Louis Stevenson’s literary legacy? In what ways does reading Under the Wide and Starry Sky change your view of him and his writing?
(Questions from author's website.)