Odds Against Tomorrow
Nathaniel Rich, 2013
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250043641
Summary
New York City, the near future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of a cavernous office in the Empire State Building; Mitchell is employee number two.
He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters. This is the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is booming.
As Mitchell immerses himself in the mathematics of catastrophe—ecological collapse, global war, natural disasters—he becomes obsessed by a culture’s fears. Yet he also loses touch with his last connection to reality: Elsa Bruner, a friend with her own apocalyptic secret, who has started a commune in Maine.
Then, just as Mitchell’s predictions reach a nightmarish crescendo, an actual worst-case scenario overtakes Manhattan. Mitchell realizes he is uniquely prepared to profit. But at what cost?
At once an all-too-plausible literary thriller, an unexpected love story, and a philosophically searching inquiry into the nature of fear, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow poses the ultimate questions of imagination and civilization. The future is not quite what it used to be. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 5, 1980
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Currently—lives in New Orleans
Nathaniel Rich is an American novelist and essayist. He is the author of the 2013 novel, Odds Against Tomorrow, the 2008 novel, The Mayor's Tongue and the 2005 nonfiction book, San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present. Rich has written essays and criticism for the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Slate.
Rich is an alumnus of Yale University, where he studied literature. After graduation he worked on the editorial staff of the New York Review of Books. He moved to San Francisco to write San Francisco Noir, which the San Francisco Chronicle named one of the best books of 2005, the same year he was hired as an editor by the Paris Review.
The Mayor's Tongue was described by Carolyn See in the Washington Post as a "playful, highly intellectual novel about serious subjects—the failure of language, for one, and how we cope with that failure in order to keep ourselves sane." A number of prominent artists and book designers, as well as readers, have contributed to an ongoing project to design cover art for books by the fictional Constance Eakins, a central character in the novel.
NPR's Alan Cheuse called Odds Against Tomorrow a "brilliantly conceived and extremely well-executed novel...a knockout of a book." Cathleen Schine wrote, in the New York Review of Books, "Let's just, right away, recognize how prescient this charming, terrifying, comic novel of apocalyptic manners is.... Rich is a gifted caricaturist and a gifted apocalyptist. His descriptions of the vagaries of both nature and human nature are stark, fresh, and convincing, full of surprise and recognition as both good comedy and good terror must be." (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/4/2013.)
Book Reviews
[Rich's] precise, journalistic prose is that of, in Saul Bellow's words, "a first-class noticer"…Any sentence from Rich is worth reading, any thought worth pondering in this ambitious novel of ideas about the way we die now. I'm excited to see what he'll predict next…and also a little terrified.
Teddy Wayny - New York Times Book Review
Scarily prescient and wholly original.
Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair
Let's just, right away, recognize how prescient this charming, terrifying, comic novel of apocalyptic manners is...Rich is a gifted caricaturist and a gifted apocalyptist. His descriptions of the vagaries of both nature and human nature are stark, fresh, and convincing, full of surprise and recognition as both good comedy and good terror must be.
Catherine Schine - New York Review of Books
This brilliantly conceived and extremely well-executed novel [is] the opposite of a disaster, a knockout of a book by a young writer to keep your eye on from now on.
Alan Cheuse - NPR's All Things Considered
Mitchell Zukor works for a unique consulting firm, FutureWorld, predicting disasters that companies can indemnify themselves against...—earthquakes, nuclear war, terrorist attacks, pandemics, financial meltdowns, tsunamis.... It is almost impossible to read this novel without indelible images of Hurricane Sandy coming to mind. The novel succeeds on its own terms in envisioning such a disaster in terrifyingly visceral terms. And Mitchell’s intensely fraught journey from man of intellect to man of action is one the reader will not soon forget.
Publishers Weekly
This literary thriller is blessed with a propulsive plot, macabre humor, several richly developed characters, and serious ethical and philosophical issues, all lightly clothed in skillful writing. Highly recommended.
Booklist
A mathematician with a combination of unusual gifts sees the worst coming in this strange rumination on catastrophe prediction. Mitchell Zukor is the protagonist of this open-ended exercise in paranoia by Rich.... Zukor's impossibly accurate prediction makes him a cult figure of sorts, the visionary held hostage by his own fear.... [T]his book is not comfortable reading, but it's also nearly impossible to put down. An oddly affectionate portrait of disaster relief that deftly mocks the indemnity mindset of a culture under siege.
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.
Constance
Patrick McGrath, 2013
Bloomsbury USA
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781608199433
Summary
The cool, beautiful Constance Schuyler lives alone in Manhattan in the early 1960s. At a literary party, she meets Sidney Klein, a professor of poetry twenty years her senior.
Sidney is a single father with a poor marital record, and he pursues Constance with relentless determination. Eventually she surrenders, accepts his marriage proposal, and moves, with some dread, into his dark, book-filled apartment.
She can't settle in. She's tortured by memories of the bitterly unhappy childhood she spent with her father in a dilapidated house upstate. When she learns devastating new information about that past, Constance's fragile psyche suffers a profound shock. Her marriage, already tottering, threatens to collapse completely.
Frightened, desperate, and alone, Constance makes a disastrous decision and then looks on as her world rapidly falls apart. Her only consolation, as the city swelters in an interminable heat wave, is the friendship of Sidney's son, Howard, a strange, delicate child, not unlike Constance herself.
The story of a marriage in crisis and a family haunted by trauma, Constance is also a tale of resilience and loyalty, and of the moral inspiration that can lead even the most lost of souls back to the light. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 7, 1950
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Stonyhurst College
• Awards—Premio Flaiano Prize (Italy)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York, USA
Patrick McGrath is a British novelist whose work has been categorized as gothic fiction. He was born in London, grew up near Broadmoor Hospital where his father was Medical Superintendent, and was educated at Stonyhurst College.
He is the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Asylum (1996), Martha Peake (2000), Port Mungo (2004), Trauma (2008), and Spider (1990), which was adapted into a 2002 David Cronenberg film. His fiction is principally characterised by the first person unreliable narrator, and recurring subject matter in his work includes mental illness, repressed homosexuality and adulterous relationships. His novel Martha Peake won the Premio Flaiano Prize in Italy.
He is married to actress Maria Aitken and lives in New York City. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6//4/2013.)
Book Reviews
[T]he novel's effects are oddly, cumulatively hypnotic. As a piece of monomaniacal writing, McGrath's strange narrative never fails to grip and startle. But as a study of emotional and sexual anesthesia, of marital numbness, of the ways in which family obsession and love—or the lack of it—can wreak havoc on a person's psychological and sexual development, it's a tour de force…[an] unforgettable book.
Julie Meyerson - New York Times Book Review
McGrath demonstrates the power of his craft with a thoroughly unlikable protagonist, hell bent on not only her own destruction but also that of everyone around her, escalating a pattern of familial dysfunction that she has the power to stop, yet chooses not to. ... [I]t’s difficult to understand [her stepson] Sidney’s motivations for wanting to save her; she doesn’t seem worth saving. Despite McGrath’s demonstrable skill, the reader will be left with mild irritation rather than catharsis.
Publishers Weekly
Unhappy families being unhappy in their own way...again. McGrath's hyperanalytical approach to traumatic family relationships runs deep. Constance Schuyler, a cool, iconic blonde in a Hitchcock-ian mold, lives in New York.... Although Constance seems to hate her father...her marriage to Sidney suggests she's looking for a father replacement.... Throughout the novel, McGrath moves us from Constance's to [her stepson] Sidney's point of view, sometimes lurching the novel forward by having them use the same words to characterize what's happening in their lives. A novel of fierce rages and great tenderness, exhausting in its emotional intensity.
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.
The Son
Philipp Meyer, 2013
HarperCollins
560 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062120397
Summary
Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim.
Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his homestead and take him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to Comanche life, carving a place as the chief's adopted son, and waging war against their enemies, including white men. But when disease, starvation, and overwhelming numbers of armed Americans decimate the tribe, Eli finds himself alone.
Neither white nor Indian, civilized or fully wild, he must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong—a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University
• Currently—near Ithaca, New York; Austin, Texas
Philipp Meyer is an American fiction writer, born in 1974, and is the author of the novel American Rust, as well as short stories published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and Esquire UK. He grew up in Hampden, a blue-collar Baltimore, Maryland, neighborhood often featured in the films of John Waters. His mother is an artist; his father is an electrician turned college biology instructor.
Meyer attended Baltimore city public schools, including Baltimore City College High School, until dropping out at age 16 and getting a GED. He spent the next five years working as a bicycle mechanic and occasionally volunteering at Baltimore’s Shock Trauma Center.
At age 20, while taking college classes in Baltimore, Meyer decided to become a writer. He also decided to leave his hometown and at 22, after several attempts at applying to elite colleges, was admitted to Cornell University. Meyer graduated Cornell with a degree in English but then took a job on Wall Street to pay off his student loans.
With the Swiss investment bank UBS, Meyer trained in London and Zurich and was given a position as a derivatives trader. After several years at UBS, he had written most of a novel (no relation to American Rust) and decided to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. When attempts at publishing that novel failed, a book he has called “an apprentice-level work,” Meyer took jobs as an emergency medical technician and construc-tion worker. He was preparing for a long-term career as a paramedic when, in 2005, he received a fellowship at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, where he wrote the majority of American Rust.
Not long after arriving in Austin, Meyer drove to New Orleans to do relief work during Hurricane Katrina. He arrived in the middle of the hurricane and spent several days doing emergency medical work for a local police department.
American Rust was an Economist Book of the Year in 2009, a Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2009, a New York Times Notable Book of 2009, a Kansas City Star Top 100 Book of 2009, and an Amazon Top 100 Book of 2009. Reviewers in the London Telegraph, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and Dayton Daily News have suggested it fits the category of "Great American Novel."
The book is a third person, stream-of-consciousness narrative influenced, according to Meyer, by writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Kelman. While a reviewer in The Baltimore Sun compared the novel to the work of Faulkner, various other reviewers, including Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, Ron Charles of the Washington Post, and Taylor Antrim writing in the Daily Beast, have favorably compared Meyer to a wide variety of more traditional writers, including Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and Dennis Lehane.
The Son, published in 2013, has been hailed a classic, even the "Great American Novel," by reviewers. It is a saga of the Texas Mccullough family—"the tale of the United States written in blood across the Texas plains, a 200-year cycle of theft and murder that shreds any golden myths of civilized development." (Ron Charles, Washington Post).
Meyer currently lives in rural areas outside Ithaca, New York, and Austin, Texas. (Adapted from Wikipedia..)
Book Reviews
What a pleasure it is…to see Meyer confirm all that initial enthusiasm [for American Rust] with a second book that's even more ambitious, even more deeply rooted in our troublesome economic and cultural history. With its vast scope—stretching from pre-Civil War cowboys to post-9/11 immigrants—The Son makes a viable claim to be a Great American Novel of the sort John Dos Passos and Frank Norris once produced. Here is the tale of the United States written in blood across the Texas plains, a 200-year cycle of theft and murder that shreds any golden myths of civilized development.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
The Son isn't just one of the most exciting Texas novels in years, it's one of the most solid, unsparing pieces of American historical fiction to come out this century.
Michael Schaub - National Public Radio
(Starred review.) In chronicling the settlement and scourge of the American West, from the Comanche raids of the mid-19th century into the present era, Meyer never falters. The sweeping history of the McCullough dynasty unfolds across generations and through alternating remembrances of three masterfully drawn characters.... Like all destined classics, Meyer’s second novel (after American Rust) speaks volumes about humanity—our insatiable greed, our inherent frailty, the endless cycle of conquer or be conquered.
Publishers Weekly
Eli McCullough, the first male child born in the Republic of Texas, is kidnapped at age 13 by Comanches, and from then on his life becomes a study in conflict.... [B]y the time he turns 16...he is set free. ... His son, Pete, is cut from a different cloth and rebels against his family's history of violence and....Pete's daughter, Jeanne Anne, struggles to be taken seriously as a rancher and oil tycoon. The broody McCulloughs gain in wealth but often pay dearly....Meyer (American Rust) brings the bloody, racially fraught history of Texas to life. Call it a family saga or an epic, this novel is a violent and harrowing read. —Keddy Ann Outlaw, formerly with Harris Cty. P. L., Houston
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Anthony Marra, 2013
Crown Publishing
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780770436421
Summary
A resilient doctor risks everything to save the life of a hunted child, in this majestic debut about love, loss, and the unexpected ties that bind us together.
In his brilliant, haunting novel, Stegner Fellow and Whiting Award winner Anthony Marra transports us to a snow-covered village in Chechnya, where eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night, accusing him of aiding Chechen rebels.
Across the road their lifelong neighbor and family friend Akhmed has also been watching, fearing the worst when the soldiers set fire to Havaa’s house. But when he finds her hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.
For the talented, tough-minded Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. And she has a deeply personal reason for caution: harboring these refugees could easily jeopardize the return of her missing sister.
But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weave together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., University of Southern California; M.F.A.,
Iowa Writers Workshop
• Awards—Pushcart Prize; Narrative Prize; Whiting Writers' Award
• Currently—lives in Oakland, California
Anthony Marra is an American writer, whose debut novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena was published in 2013.
Marra attended the Landon School in high school, and he would go on to graduate from the University of Southern California with a BA and the Iowa Writers Workshop with an MFA. He is 2011-2013 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
He has contributed pieces to The Atlantic, Narrative Magazine, and MAKE Magazine.
His short story "Chechnya" won a 2010 Pushcart Prize and the 2010 Narrative Prize. He won a 2012 Whiting Writers' Award. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/31/2013.)
Book Reviews
The strange and invigorating thing about Mr. Marra's novel...is how much human warmth and comedy he smuggles, like samizdat, into his busy story. At heart he's a satirist, a lover not a fighter, a prose writer who resembles the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 and the Jonathan Safran Foer of Everything Is Illuminated.... A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is ambitious and intellectually restless. It's humane and absurd, and rarely out of touch with the Joseph-Heller-like notion that, as Mr. Marra puts it, "stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
This novel is, among other things, a meditation on the use and abuse of history, and an inquiry into the extent to which acts of memory may also constitute acts of survival.... While reminding us of the worst of the war-torn world we live in, Marra finds sustainable hope in the survival of a very few, and in the regenerative possibility of life.... [T]that image is the textbook definition: “a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.
Madison Smartt Bell - New York Times Book Review
Marra is trying to capture some essence of the lives of men and women caught in the pincers of a brutal, decade-long war, and at this he succeeds beautifully....his storytelling impulses are fed by wellsprings of generosity....[the] ending is almost certain to leave you choked up and, briefly at least, transformed by tenderness.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Anthony Marra's first novel...is a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles…a testament to the vibrancy of contemporary fiction. Here, in fresh, graceful prose, is a profound story that dares to be as tender as it is ghastly, a story about desperate lives in a remote land that will quickly seem impossibly close and important.... I haven't been so overwhelmed by a novel in years…you simply must read this book.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
A powerful tale.... The moment Akhmed walks into the hospital with Havaa…rivals anything Michael Ondaatje has written in its emotional force.... There are many reasons to read A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. To enter the tragedy of Caucasus history that has been dishonored by the Boston Marathon bombings, allegedly committed by two ethnic Chechen immigrants; to marvel at the lack of fear in a writer so young. To read a book that can bring tears to your eyes and force laughter from your lungs.... But the one I kept returning to, the best reason to read this novel, is that this story reminds us how senseless killing often wrenches kindness through extreme circumstances.
John Freeman - Boston Globe
This beautiful work will matter long after Chechnya has disappeared from our headlines.... The sense of connectedness is as meaningful as the particulars of it.... Over and over again, this is an examination of the ways in which many broken pieces come together to make a new whole. In exquisite imagery, Marra tends carefully to the twisted strands of grace and tragedy.... Everything in A Constellation of Vital Phenomena...is dignified with a hoping, aching heartbeat.
Ramona Ausubel - San Francisco Chronicle
Remarkable.... [A] novel about love as much as war.... In the aftermath of Boston, in a world where all our lives are linked more closely than ever before, these are words to hold close.
Tricia Springstubb - Cleveland Plain Dealer
Amazing...brilliant...one of the most accomplished and affecting books I've read in a very long time.... Though the lives lived in this novel can seem unbearable, what Anthony Marra has done is to diligently describe them in passionate, extraordinary prose.
Meg Wolitzer - NPR
With remarkable pathos and a surprising amount of humor, Marra keeps the focus on the relationships, struggles, and tiny triumphs of an unforgettable group of characters.... Marra creates a specific and riveting world around his characters, expertly revealing the unexpected connections among them. While Marra doesn’t shy away from the very real conflict of the region....this novel, full of humanity and hope, ultimately leaves you uplifted. Constellation deserves to be on the short list for every major award. It’s an absolute masterpiece.
Sarah Jessica Parker - Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review.) A complex debut…[Marra writes] with elegant details about the physical and emotional destruction of occupation and war.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) An authentic, heartbreaking tale of intertwining relationships during wartime.... As he shifts in time through the years of the two Chechen wars, Marra confidently weaves those plots together, and several more besides, giving each character a rich backstory that intersects, often years down the line, with the others.... [T]he novel’s tone remains optimistic, and its characters retain vast depths of humanity (and even humor) in spite of their bleak circumstances.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Extraordinary...Marra collapses time, sliding between 1996 and 2004 while also detailing events in a future yet to arrive, giving his searing novel an eerie, prophetic aura. All of the characters are closely tied together in ways that Marra takes his time revealing, even as he beautifully renders the way we long to connect and the lengths we will go to endure.
Booklist
A decade of war in Chechnya informs this multivalent, heartfelt debut, filled with broken families, lost limbs and valiant efforts to find scraps of hope and dignity. Marra's vision of Chechnya in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union is inevitably mordant.... But he's a careful, intelligent stylist who makes the most of his omniscient perspective; one of his favorite tricks is to project minor characters' fates into the future; by revealing their deaths, he exposes how shabbily war treats everybody and gives the living an additional dose of pathos. The grimness is persistent, but Marra relays it with unusual care and empathy for a first-timer. A somber, sensitive portrait of how lives fray and bind again in chaotic circumstances.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider using these LitLovers talking poinst in discussing A Vital Constellation of Phenomena:
1. Talk about each of the characters—Akhmed, Haava, Sonja, Natasha, Khassan, and Ramzan. Do you care about any of them? Whom do you find particularly sympathetic? Do your opinions of any of the characters change over the course of the novel?
2. One of the book's themes is our inability to know the depths of another being. In a beautiful paragraph (end of Chapter 3) Sonja ponders Haava who is lying next to her—Haava possesses 206 bones, 606 muscles, 2.5 million sweat glands, and 100 billion cerebral neurons; all this Sonja can know. She cannot fathom, however, "the dreams crowding [Havva's] skull" or "the mystery the girl would spend her life solving." Do you find that to be true in real life—how deeply can we know another being? Does fiction, perhaps, allow us insights into other beings that we cannot attain in our own lives? Do you feel you know the loved ones closest to you?
3. Follow-up to Question 2: The narrator frequently jumps ahead by years, even decades, to inform readers of what happens to various characters—whether they live...or die...or grow senile.... What effect does this create on you, the reader?
4. A emphasis on art runs throughout the novel. Akhmed draws portraits and posts them throughout the village; Haava "rebuilds" the body of her childhood nemesis, Akim, using Akhmed's portrait of him; Natasha recreates the view of a cityscape blown away by shelling, and Maali is nearly as invested in Natasha's project as Natasha herself. Why is art so significant in this book? What role does art play in Akhmed's and Natasha's lives—and in the lives of others.
5. Talk about the characters' religious beliefs or lack of beliefs? How does the war affect the faithful...and nonfaithful alike? How would your faith be affected?
6. In interviews author Anthony Marra has said he chose to write about Chechnya after spending his junior year in St. Petersburg during the time of the Chechnyan war. While there, he was fascinated by accounts of how ordinary people behaved in extraordinary situations—the kinds of moral choices they had to make. Talk about the characters in A Constellation of vital Phenomena who dramatize the tough moral choices Marra refers to...especially Ramzan and Khassan. Are there others? What choices do they make and why? How might you have responded in such horrific circumstances? Does morality change depending on the context?
7. SPOILER ALERTS! Follow-up to Question 6: Should Khassan have killed his son—is such an action just or moral? Does learning Ramzan's backstory, change your opinion of him...perhaps justify his later actions?
8. Trace the six-degrees-of-separation between the characters, their actions, and final consequences. In other words, how are the characters interconnected? What might the author be suggesting by such connectedness—both within the confines of the novel and, perhaps, in the real world outside the scope of the novel? What kind of worldview does Marra seem to project? Do the coincidences feel contrived? Or do you see them as organic, part of the gradual unfolding of the novel?
9. A great deal is made in the novel of the desire for characters to be buried at home. Notes with names and addresses are sewn into clothing so families can be notified and thereby claim the body of the loved one. Why is burial at home so important? Is it a tradition peculiar to that culture...or a universal desire?
10. The book contains a fair amount of humor—the banter between Akhmed and the nurse Deshi, the reference to Barbie Doll's emaciated waistline, Akhmed's confusion over Ronald Reagan and Ronald MacDonald, and his astonishment at how the U.S. elections transfer power from one president to the next—"It makes me wonder how [Russia] lost the Cold War." Where else do you find humor...and why do you suppose the author included such moments in an otherwise dark story?
11. Think about the structure of the novel, as it moves back and forth through time, and the inclusion of timelines at the head of each chapter. Why might Marra have devised a disjointed structure for his story? What might it suggest about the fractured lives of his characters? What do you, as a reader, think is gained—or lost—using such a structure?
12. Why are the Feds so intent on finding Haava? What do they want with her?
13. What drove the two Chechnyan wars? What were the conflicts involved? What have you learned about the war that you were unaware of before reading A Constellation of Vital Phenomena? While the Chechnyan war was ongoing, how much attention did you pay to it?
14. What do you find most shocking in the account of the war? What is most horrifying or disturbing? Where do you find displays of human kindness to counteract the brutality? Is there anything hopeful in the book?
15. What is the meaning and/or significance of the book's title?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Live and Let Die
Bianca Sloane, 2012
CreateSpace
290 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781301050918
Summary
On a bitterly cold January evening, Tracy Ellis went for a jog along Chicago’s snowy lakefront and disappeared. Her body was discovered days later, her beautiful face bashed in with a rock. Police determine her brutal death to be a mugging gone wrong and drop the matter into their cold case files.
Over a year later, Tracy’s sister, Sondra, still can’t come to grips with what happened. She throws herself into her work as a documentary filmmaker to try and forget the cruelty of her sister’s death. However, a chance encounter with a man from Tracy’s past rips the wound open and sends Sondra on a desperate search for answers about the secrets from her sister’s life that may have led to her death.
As Sondra struggles to uncover what happened to Tracy, she’s launched into a tangled web of deceit and danger that put her on a collision course with life and death. (From the author.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Little Rock, Arkansas, USA
• Education—University of Miami
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
Bianca Sloane is the author of the psychological suspense novel, Live and Let Die, which was chosen as “Thriller of the Month” (May 2013) by e-thriller.com, a leading online reviewer of “e-thrillers” from independent and traditionally published authors.
Sloane began her career as a bookseller for Barnes and Noble, which included a stint as community relations coordinator, where she interacted with such authors as David Sedaris, Elizabeth Berg, and Raymond Benson. Sloane moved on to the world of public relations and advertising, where she worked in industries as varied as education, real estate and healthcare.
In addition to penning suspense novels, Sloane’s works as a freelance writer, producing press releases, bylined articles and speeches for corporate clients. (From the author .)
Book Reviews
Thriller of the Month (May 2013)
e-thriller.com
[A] cross between Sleeping with the Enemy and a superb murder mystery.
acrimereadersblog.wordpress.com
Live and Let Die is a book that will leave the reader scratching their head trying to figure out the villain. And, just when the reader thinks they have it all figured out—think again—AND AGAIN!
Examiner.com (New Orleans)
If you love puzzles and you like it when the author fools you all the way to the last page, you can’t go wrong with Live and Let Die.
Ionia Martin - Readful Things Blog
For a debut novel, Live and Let Die flows very smoothly - or perhaps I should say "gallops," because I was reading at a frantic pace to discover what happens next.
SheTreadsSoftly.Blogspot.com
This is one of those novels that will keep you turning the pages wondering what kind of secrets are going to be unearthed.
OOSA Online Book Club
A gripping suspense read.
WiLoveBooks.Blogspot.com
It’s been a really long time since I’ve read a thriller book that just completely wowed me as much as this one did. Considering that I am a huge suspense and thriller fan of many authors that have books that have just blown my mind, for a debut novel I think [Bianca Sloane] did outstanding!
Whatisthatbookabout.com
This is American author Bianca Sloane’s first novel. You wouldn’t know it. This is a great story that carries you along with it from the first page… enjoy the ride!
e-thriller.com
Discussion Questions
1.Given the stark differences in their personalities, were you surprised at how strong the bond was between sisters Sondra and Tracy?
2.When Tracy, who is African American, disappears, Sondra can’t help but notice the disparity in media coverage between her sister and the disappearances of white women. Is this something you’ve ever noticed when watching or reading news coverage of women who go missing?
3. The character of Paula is a very traditional housewife, focusing all of her attention and energies towards being completely devoted to her husband. In this modern age, how did it make you feel to read about a character with such traditional views and values?
4. How did you feel about the relationship between Phillip and Paula? What about Phillip’s relationship with Tracy?
5.The main characters of Live and Let Die are African American. How did this book compare to other books you’ve read where the main characters were African American? What were the differences or similarities you noticed?
6.What character did you most identify with and why?
7.In some ways, Live and Let Die follows the conventions of the mystery/suspense genre. How does it differ from other mystery/suspense novels you’ve read? What surprised you the most? Did you guess any of the plot twists?
8.Taking the entire story into account, what significance does the title of the book hold for you?
9. What were some of the recurring themes of the story? Where there some that were more prominent than others?
10.What is the most satisfying aspect of the book? Is there anything you would have wished turned out differently?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)