The Sound of Broken Glass (Kincaid and James Series, 15)
Deborah Crombie, 2013
HarperCollins
359 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061990632
Summary
In the past...
On a blisteringly hot August afternoon in Crystal Palace, once home to the tragically destroyed Great Exhibition, a solitary thirteen-year-old boy meets his next-door neighbor, a recently widowed young teacher hoping to make a new start in the tight-knit South London community. Drawn together by loneliness, the unlikely pair forms a deep connection that ends in a shattering act of betrayal.
In the present...
On a cold January morning in London, Detective Inspector Gemma James is back on the job now that her husband, Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid, is at home to care for their three-year-old foster daughter. Assigned to lead a Murder Investigation Team in South London, she's assisted by her trusted colleague, newly promoted Detective Sergeant Melody Talbot. Their first case: a crime scene at a seedy hotel in Crystal Palace. The victim: a well-respected barrister, found naked, trussed, and apparently strangled.
Is it an unsavory accident or murder? In either case, he was not alone, and Gemma's team must find his companion—a search that takes them into unexpected corners and forces them to contemplate unsettling truths about the weaknesses and passions that lead to murder. Ultimately, they will begin to question everything they think they know about their world and those they trust most. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 6, 1952
• Raised—McKinney, Texas, USA
• Education—Austin College; Tarrant County
College
• Awards—3 Macavity Awards (more below)
• Currently—lives in McKinney, Texas
Deborah Crombie (nee Darden) is an American author of the Duncan Kinkaid / Gemma James mystery series set in the United Kingdom. Crombie was raised in McKinney, Texas, studied Biology at Austin College, and was a writing student of Warren Norwood at Tarrant County College. She has lived in both England and Scotland in the UK.
Crombie began writing her first mystery after dissecting the structure of books by mystery novelists—and has never had a rejection slip. The author of more a dozen novels, she is a top regarded mystery writer. The Independent Mystery Booksellers selected her 1997 Dreaming of the Bones as one of the 100 Best Crime Novels of the Century. She is a three-time Macavity Award winner, an Edgar Award nominee, and New York Times Notable author.
Crombie still lives in McKinney, Texas, sharing a house that is more than one hundred years old with her husband, three cats, and two German shepherds. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The Sound of Broken Glass, Deborah Crombie’s 15th mystery featuring the Scotland Yard detectives Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid, is new on the hardcover fiction list at No. 9. These books are as British as Downton Abbey, so it’s a bit surprising to learn that Crombie still lives outside her hometown, Dallas.
Gregory Cowles - New York Times Book Review
Bestseller Crombie puts together past and present in her solid, finely controlled 15th novel featuring married police detectives Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid (after 2012’s No Mark upon Her). While Duncan looks after their three-year-old foster daughter at home, Gemma and Det. Sgt. Melody Talbot investigate the murder of barrister Vincent Arnott, found in a seedy hotel in London’s Crystal Palace area, naked, tied with a belt, and strangled. When the body of a second barrister, killed in exactly the same way, turns up, physical evidence proves the same person murdered both men. Gemma and Melody painstakingly and methodically unravel the clues, finding connections that began 15 years earlier in the Crystal Palace area. Flashbacks show how the meeting of a lonely 13-year-old boy and a recently widowed teacher had grave consequences. The unfolding domestic relationship between Gemma and Duncan softens and humanizes them. The city of London, foggy, blustery, and historic, provides a seductive background.
Publishers Weekly
Friendships go seriously awry.... DS Melody Talbot spends the night with guitarist Andy Monahan, a witness and possibly even a suspect in a murder case.... Andy had argued with barrister Vincent Arnott, the victim, between sets at a pub in the Crystal Palace area. Could the musician have followed Arnott to the sleazy Belvedere Hotel, plied him with drugs, stripped him naked, trussed him up, then strangled him with a scarf?.... When another barrister, Shaun Francis, is murdered in identical fashion, the only link between the two dead men seems to be Andy.... Another solid outing for the reliable Crombie, who turns a judicious eye on secrets that can overwhelm what they're meant to protect despite the best intentions.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Talk about the four detectives featured in the novel: Melody, Gemma, Duncan, and Doug. What techniques do they use during their investigation? Does their gender have any influence on how they approach their jobs?
2. Discuss the structure of the novel. Each chapter begins with a small entry on the history of the Crystal Palace. It also includes information from one of the main character's lives: Andy. Why did the author frame the story this way? How does this add to the tension and the plotting? What do you learn about this section of London—how has it changed from when Crystal Palace was built to Andy's childhood to today?
3. How do some of the detectives' choices complicate the case? By the book or think outside of the box?
4. If you are fans of the series, compare the characters from the first novel you read to this one. Describe the arc of each of the characters' developments and identify the factors that helped shape their personalities. Do you have a favorite character? Identify and explain what attracts you to him or her.
5. Being a detective is a highly immersive profession. How do Gemma and Duncan balance work and family life? How does having small children complicate their work? What does it add to it? How does Duncan cope with being a stay-at-home dad?
6. If you are a fan of mystery novels, how does this novel—and the series compare to others in the genre? What is it about this series that appeals to you? Compare and contrast British and American detectives. If this were set in America, how would it be different?
7. Were you surprised when the killer's identity became clear? If yes, what plot devices did Deborah Crombie employ to keep you guessing? If you suspected the killer early, what led you to suspect the truth?
8. What role does class play in the story? Do the detectives have their own prejudices that shape their attitudes and color their investigations?
9. What do you think will happen in the next novel? Will Melody still be seeing Andy? What would you like to see happen in her and Doug's relationship? What may happen to Duncan and his career?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea
Dina Nayeri, 2013
Penguing Group USA
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487040
Summary
Growing up in a small rice-farming village in 1980s Iran, eleven-year-old Saba Hafezi and her twin sister, Mahtab, are captivated by America. They keep lists of English words and collect illegal Life magazines, television shows, and rock music.
So when her mother and sister disappear, leaving Saba and her father alone in Iran, Saba is certain that they have moved to America without her. But her parents have taught her that “all fate is written in the blood,” and that twins will live the same life, even if separated by land and sea.
As she grows up in the warmth and community of her local village, falls in and out of love, and struggles with the limited possibilities in post-revolutionary Iran, Saba envisions that there is another way for her story to unfold. Somewhere, it must be that her sister is living the Western version of this life. And where Saba’s world has all the grit and brutality of real life under the new Islamic regime, her sister’s experience gives her a freedom and control that Saba can only dream of.
Filled with a colorful cast of characters and presented in a bewitching voice that mingles the rhythms of Eastern storytelling with modern Western prose, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea is a tale about memory and the importance of controlling one’s own fate. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979
• Where—Iran
• Raised—Oklahoma, USA
• Education—B.A. Princeton University; M.B.A., M.Ed.,
Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Iowa City, Iowa (the Iowa Writers'
Workshop)
Dina Nayeri was born in the middle of a revolution in Iran and moved to Oklahoma at ten-years-old. Her debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, was released in 2013 by Riverhead Books (Penguin), translated to 13 foreign languages, and selected as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers book. Her work is published or scheduled for publication in over 20 countries and has appeared in Granta New Voices, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salon, Glamour, and elsewhere. She holds an MBA and a Master of Education, both from Harvard, and a BA from Princeton. She has worked in high fashion, management consulting, university admissions, investment banking, and once as a grumpy lifeguard. Now Dina is at work on her second novel (also about an Iranian family) at the Iowa Writers Workshop where she is a Truman Capote Fellow and Teaching Writing Fellow (Fom the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Lovely.
Vanity Fair
A feel-good family tale.
Cosmopolitan
This ambitious novel set in northern Iran in the decade after the 1979 revolution contains not a teaspoon but a ton of history, imagination, and longing. Beginning with the 1981 disappearance of 11-year-old Saba Hafezi’s twin sister, Mahtab, and their mother, Khanom, Nayeri interweaves Saba’s family trauma as seen through the eyes of the women of her seaside village, along with fantasies about Mahtab’s teenage fascination with everything American, shared by her friends Reza and Ponneh. Saba loves Reza, but allows herself to be married off to old Abbas Hossein Abbas, expecting to eventually gain freedom by becoming a rich widow. The characters’ dreams are shattered, however, amid rising violence, as beautiful Ponneh is beaten for wearing red high-heels, Saba is violently attacked by two chador-clad women working for her husband and the new regime, and another woman is hanged for defying the new Islamic norms. Saba’s first tentative protests give way to more drastic decisions as the realities of postrevolution Iran and the truth about her mother and sister sink in. Nayeri crams so much into her story, especially Saba’s distracting fiction of her sister’s life in the United States, that her lyrical evocation of a vanishing Iran gets lost in an irritating narrative tangle.
Publishers Weekly
Nayeri’s highly accomplished debut is a rich, multilayered reading experience. Structurally complex, the overriding theme is storytelling in all its forms, and the fine line between truth and lies. Each one of the large cast of characters is fully realized and sympathetic. Saba is a captivating heroine whose tragedies and triumphs will carry readers on a long but engrossing ride..
Library Journal
Elegant aspirational novel of life in post-revolutionary Iran.... Twin sisters Saba and Mahtab Hafezi live at the end of the universe--or, more specifically, in a tiny rice-farming village deep in the Iranian interior, having moved from Tehran to escape the eyes and hands of the mullahs and revolutionary guards.... [I]n Nayeri's (Another Jekyll, Another Hyde, 2012, etc.) richly imaginative chronicle, everyone dreams there, not least Saba, whose expectations crumble in the face of a reality for which she's not prepared.... It takes a village full of sometimes odd, sometimes ordinary people to afford Saba the wherewithal to realize her dreams, which take her far, far from there. Lyrical, humane and hopeful; a welcome view of the complexities of small-town life, in this case in a place that inspires fear instead of sympathy.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Saba invents a life for Mahtab that parallels her own. How or why does she choose these particular scenes or moments of Mahtab’s life to imagine? How do the stakes of Mahtab’s decisions change over the course of the book as Saba herself grows up and her own desires evolve?
2. “The beauty of being Mahtab is that you need no partner at all,” Saba tells Khanom Omidi in one of her descriptions of her sister’s American life. Why is this idea so beautiful to Saba? How does it foreshadow the decisions she will make later in her own life?
3. In what ways is A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea a story about storytelling? What are some important narratives that the characters create for one another, or for themselves? What are the effects of these stories in the novel as a whole?
4. The stories told by the characters do not necessarily have to be the truth in order to be honest. What kinds of untruths are told in this book? How are they positive? How are they negative?
5. Talk about the book’s four first-person narrators: Khanom Basir, Khanom Mansoori, Khanom Omidi, and Dr. Zohreh. How do these women’s perspectives change your understanding of Saba’s life story, especially the disappearance of her mother and sister? Why are their insights important?
6. Discuss the status of women in this book. In what ways are they oppressed and mistreated? In what ways are they revered and powerful? How do Saba and Ponneh deal with these tensions? In this society, how is it meaningful that Saba grew up with a father but no mother?
7. Khanom Basir constantly criticizes the way Saba’s mother raised her and Mahtab before her disappearance. From what you know of Maman, do you agree with Khanom Basir? Did Maman’s boldness make her a bad mother? Did she put her daughters in jeopardy, or did she teach them how to be independent women? Khanom Basir says, “God will never forgive Bahareh for her impractical ways, for teaching her daughter to search for meaning in illegal nothings.” Did this lesson in fact ruin Saba’s life, or did it save it?
8. “Good-byes are such luxuries,” Khanom Basir says. Which is worse for Saba: the loss of her family, or the uncertainty surrounding it?
9. How does Ponneh’s guilt about Farnaz’s execution resemble Saba’s guilt about Mahtab’s drowning?
10. After harboring so much hatred for him, why does Saba ultimately feel so bad letting Abbas die?
11. Saba wants her freedom, but what exactly is she longing to be free from? Her past? The inevitable consequences of a future in Iran? Longing itself? Discuss.
(Questions from the author's website.)
The Puzzle of Grandpops
Mark Williams, 2013
Mirador Publishing
148 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781909220096
Summary
A businessman inherits a mansion and property from his grandfather who died under mysterious circumstances. The suspicious grandson later moves in and investigates the crime personally. Eventually he begins to suspect the household staff and feels he is getting closer to solving the case. (From the author.)
Author Bio
Mark Williams was born 1970 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He currently resides in Michigan where he writes fiction, mostly thrillers and mysteries.
Book Reviews
(Sorry. There are no reviews yet for this title.)
Discussion Questions
1. What is the relationship between the main character and his grandfather.
2. Address options that could have been used in setting and characterization.
3. What about ideals which would have been more logical for the reader.
4. As a debut mystery will the reader be happy enough to buy the sequel?
5. At 148 pages was the mystery long enough?
(Questions issued by author.)
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Benediction
Kent Haruf, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307959881
Summary
From the beloved and best-selling author of Plainsong and Eventide comes a story of life and death, and the ties that bind, once again set out on the High Plains in Holt, Colorado.
When Dad Lewis is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he and his wife, Mary, must work together to make his final days as comfortable as possible. Their daughter, Lorraine, hastens back from Denver to help look after him; her devotion softens the bitter absence of their estranged son, Frank, but this cannot be willed away and remains a palpable presence for all three of them.
Next door, a young girl named Alice moves in with her grandmother and contends with the painful memories that Dad's condition stirs up of her own mother's death. Meanwhile, the town’s newly arrived preacher attempts to mend his strained relationships with his wife and teenaged son, a task that proves all the more challenging when he faces the disdain of his congregation after offering more than they are accustomed to getting on a Sunday morning. And throughout, an elderly widow and her middle-aged daughter do everything they can to ease the pain of their friends and neighbors.
Despite the travails that each of these families faces, together they form bonds strong enough to carry them through the most difficult of times. Bracing, sad and deeply illuminating, Benediction captures the fullness of life by representing every stage of it, including its extinction, as well as the hopes and dreams that sustain us along the way. Here Kent Haruf gives us his most indelible portrait yet of this small town and reveals, with grace and insight, the compassion, the suffering and, above all, the humanity of its inhabitants. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 24, 1943
• Where—Pueblo, Colorado, USA
• Died—November 30, 2014
• Where—Salida, Colorado
• Education—B.A., Nebraska Wesleyan University; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—(see below)
Alan Kent Haruf was an American novelist and author of six novels, all set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado.
Life
Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado, the son of a Methodist minister. He graduated with a BA from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965, where he would later teach, and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973.
Before becoming a writer, Haruf worked in a variety of places, including a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Denver, a hospital in Phoenix, a presidential library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, as an English teacher with the Peace Corps in Turkey, and colleges in Nebraska and Illinois.
He lived with his wife, Cathy, in Salida, Colorado until his death in 2014. He had three daughters from his first marriage.
Works
All of Haruf's novels take place in the fictional town of Holt, in eastern Colorado, a town based on Yuma, Colorado, one of Haruf's residences in the early 1980s. His first novel, The Tie That Binds (1984), received a Whiting Award and a special Hemingway Foundation/PEN citation. Where You Once Belonged followed in 1990. A number of his short stories have appeared in literary magazines.
Plainsong was published in 1999 and became a U.S. bestseller. The New York Times' Verlyn Klinkenborg called it "a novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader." Plainsong won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award and the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
Eventide, a sequel to Plainsong, was published in 2004. Library Journal described the writing as "honest storytelling that is compelling and rings true." Jonathan Miles saw it as a "repeat performance" and "too goodhearted."
On November 30, 2014, at the age of 71, Kent Haruf died at his home in Salida, Colorado, of interstitial lung disease.
Our Souls at Night, his final work, was published posthumously in 2015 and received wide praise. Ron Charles of the Washington Post called it "a tender, carefully polished work that it seems like a blessing we had no right to expect."
Recognition
1986 - Whiting Award for fiction
1999 - Finalist for the 1999 National Book Award for Plainsong
2005 - Colorado Book Award for Eventide
2005 - Finalist for the Book Sense Award for Eventide
2009 - Dos Passos Prize for Literature
2012 - Wallace Stegner Award
2014 - Folio Prize shortlist for Benediction
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/26/2015.)
Book Reviews
Kent Haruf’s novels...defy our expectation that literature rooted in a particular place should show how the place is changing. [Holt's] artfully stylized...stories [are about ]dramatic changes in the lives of the people of Holt.... [A] benediction (an epigraph informs us) is “the utterance of a blessing, an invocation of blessedness.” It’s a lovely effect, but here it calls attention to how little we come to know about Reverend Lyle: what led him to speak up for gay people back in Denver and against war here in Holt, what led him to quit the ministry so abruptly.... Haruf hints at Reverend Lyle’s motives but leaves things there, as if withholding the full story for some later installment.
Paul Elie - New York Times Book Review
We’ve waited a long time for an invitation back to Holt, home to Kent Haruf’s novels.... He may be the most muted master in American fiction: our anti-Franzen. Haruf's...novels are as plain and fortifying as steel-cut oatmeal: certified 100-percent irony-free, guaranteed to wither magic realism, stylistic flourishes and postmodern gimmicks.... At its best, Benediction offers deceptively simple "little dramas, the routine moments" of small-town life, stripped to their elemental details. Haruf's minimalism achieves more emotional impact than seems possible with such distilled material and so few words…He produces the kind of scenes that Hemingway might have written had he survived the ravages of depression.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
His finest-tuned tale yet.... There is a deep, satisfying music to this book, as Haruf weaves between such a large cast of characters in so small a space.... Strangely, wonderfully, the moment of a man's passing can be a blessing in the way it brings people together. Benediction recreates this powerful moment so gracefully it is easy to forget that, like [the town of] Holt, it is a world created by one man.
John Freeman - Boston Globe
Grace and restraint are abiding virtues in Haruf's fiction, and they resume their place of privilege in his new work.... For readers looking for the rewards of an intimate, meditative story, it is indeed a blessing.
Karen R. Long - Cleveland Plain Dealer
Haruf is maguslike in his gifts...to illuminate the inevitable ways in which tributary lives meander toward confluence.... Perhaps not since Hemingway has an American author triggered such reader empathy with so little reliance on the subjectivity of his characters.... [This] is a modestly wrought wonder from one of our finest living writers.
Bruce Machart - Houston Chronicle
As Haruf's precise details accrue, a reader gains perspective: This is the story of a man's life, and the town where he spent it, and the people who try to ease its end.... His sentences have the elegance of Hemingway's early work [and his] determined realism, which admits that not all of our past actions or the reasons behind them are knowable, even to ourselves, is one of the book's satisfactions.
John Reimringer - Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Haruf is the master of what one of his characters calls "the precious ordinary."... With understated language and startling emotional insight, he makes you feel awe at even the most basic of human gestures.
Ben Goldstein - Esquire
In Holt, the fictional Colorado town where all of Haruf’s novels are set, longtime resident Dad Lewis is dying of cancer. Happily married (he calls his wife “his luck”), Dad spends his last weeks thinking over his life, particularly an incident that ended badly with a clerk in his store, and his relationship with his estranged son. As his wife and daughter care for him, life goes on: one of the Lewises’ neighbors takes in her young granddaughter; an elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter visit with the Lewises, with each other, and with the new minister, whose wife and son are unhappy about his transfer to Holt from Denver. Haruf isn’t interested in the trendy or urban; as he once said, he writes about “regular, ordinary, sort of elemental” characters, who speak simply and often don’t speak much at all. “Regular and ordinary” can equate with dull. However, though this is a quiet book, it’s not a boring one. Dad and his family and neighbors try, in small, believable ways, to make peace with those they live among, to understand a world that isn’t the one in which they came of age. Separately and together, all the characters are trying to live—and in Dad’s case, to die—with dignity, a struggle Haruf (Eventide) renders with delicacy and skill.
Publishers Weekly
Haruf made his name with the heartfelt Plainsong, a best seller and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The subsequent Eventide, also a best seller, revisited Plainsong's setting, high-plains Holt, CO. Haruf again returns to Holt but with a new cast, among them Dad Lewis, dying of cancer and comforted by his wife and daughter though still estranged from his son. Then there's the little girl mourning her mother and a new preacher struggling with both his family and his congregation. Bittersweet charm.
Library Journal
Reverberant… From the terroir and populace of his native American West, the author of Plainsong and Eventide again draws a story elegant in its simple telling and remarkable in its authentic capture of universal human emotions. —Brad Hooper
Booklist
A meditation on morality returns the author to the High Plains of Colorado, with diminishing returns for the reader.... With his third novel with a one-word title set in Holt, the narrative succumbs to melodrama and folksy wisdom as it details the death of the owner of the local hardware store, a crusty feller who has seen his own moral rigidity soften over the years, though not enough to accomplish a reconciliation with his estranged son.... The death of Dad has dignity and gravitas, but too much leading up to it seems like contrived plotline filler. Between one character's insistence that "[e]verything gets better" and another's belief that "[a]ll life is moving through some kind of unhappiness," the novel runs the gamut of homespun philosophizing. Even the epiphanies seem like reheated leftovers.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Two of Haruf’s previous novels set in Holt, Plainsong and Eventide, followed the same groups of characters, but Benediction mentions them only in passing. Have you read those two novels? Do you think reading them would increase your enjoyment of Benediction?
2. The book’s epigraph is a definition of the word “benediction”: “the utterance of a blessing, an invocation of blessedness.” Why is it an appropriate title for this novel?
3. Discuss the character called Dad. Why do you think Haruf gave him that name? What does it signify?
4. What do we learn about Dad from the episode with Clayton? Why does Dad hallucinate a visit from Clayton’s wife?
5. There are many parental relationships in the novel: Dad and Mary and Lorraine, Willa and Alene, Lyle and John Wesley, for example. What makes some stronger than others?
6. Alice has many substitute mothers. Why do so many of the women want to take care of her? Who does she seem to respond to best?
7. One parental relationship in particular haunts the story: Dad and Frank. How does Dad feel about Frank at the end?
8. On page 43, Lyle counsels a couple who want to get married: “Love is the most important part of life, isn’t it. If you have love you can live in this world in a true way and if you love each other you can see past everything and accept what you don’t understand and forgive what you don’t know or don’t like.” How does this relate to his own life?
9. Why is Lyle’s sermon so inflammatory? What point is Haruf making about religion?
10. When Lyle goes out walking at night, he says he’s in search of “the precious ordinary.” (Page 162) What does he mean by that?
11. After Mary goes to Denver in search of Frank, she’s treated kindly by several strangers. What does this tell us about Mary, or about city life?
12. Lorraine has lost a child and is in an unfulfilling relationship. Do you think she’ll be happy to move back to Holt and take over Dad’s store? How do you imagine that will go?
13. Change is a theme that runs through the novel—fast change, slow change, changes in small-town living, changes in religion, changes in characters’ relationships. What larger point is Haruf making?
14. Why does John Wesley attempt suicide? Why doesn’t he go through with it?
15. What does Dad learn from the “visits” by his parents and Frank? Does Dad have regrets about his life?
16. Reread the closing paragraphs of the book. Why does Haruf end the novel this way?
17. Haruf’s language and punctuation are so plain, the writing is nearly austere. How does its simplicity contribute to the mood of the story?
18. In an interview in Publishers Weekly about Benediction, Haruf said: “In some ways, what happens in Holt happens in Denver, in Minneapolis, everywhere. Death is a fact of life, no matter where you live. Taking care of the dying is a necessity everywhere. Those are not conditions exclusive to small towns.” Did he succeed in making his story feel universal?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Return
Victoria Hislop, 2008 (U.S., 2009)
HarperCollins
404 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061715419
Summary
From the internationally bestselling author of The Island comes a dazzling new novel of family betrayals, forbidden love, and historical turmoil.
Sonia knows nothing of Granada's shocking past, but ordering a simple cup of coffee in a quiet café will lead her into the extraordinary tale of a family's fight to survive the horror of the Spanish Civil War.
Seventy years earlier, in the Ramírez family's café, Concha and Pablo's children relish an atmosphere of hope. Antonio is a serious young teacher, Ignacio a flamboyant matador, and Emilio a skilled musician. Their sister, Mercedes, is a spirited girl whose sole passion is dancing, until she meets Javier and an obsessive love affair begins. But Spain is a country in turmoil. In the heat of civil war, everyone must take a side and choose whether to submit, to fight, or to attempt escape. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Bromley, Kent, England, UK
• Raised—Tonbridge, England
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Currently—lives in Sissinghurst, England
Victoria Hislop writes travel features for The Sunday Telegraph and The Mail on Sunday, along with celebrity profiles for Woman & Home. She lives in Kent, England, with her husband and their two children. (From the publisher.)
More
Born in Bromley (Kent), Victoria Hislop (nee Hamson) grew up in Tonbridge. She read English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and worked in publishing and as a journalist before becoming an author.
In 1988 she married Private Eye editor Ian Hislop in Oxford. They have two children, Emily Helen and William David, and live in Sissinghurst.
Hislop's first novel, The Island (2005), which the Sunday Express hailed as "the new Captain Corelli's Mandolin" was a Number 1 Bestseller in the UK, selling more than 1 million copies. According to her website, she rejected a Hollywood film offer (worth £300,000) for the novel. Instead, she offered the rights to Mega, a Greek television channel, for a fraction of the fee. Her desire was "to preserve the integrity of the book and to give something back to the Mediterranean island on which it is based."
The Return, her second novel, a sequel set in Spain, has also been a success and was followed by The Thread in 2012.
In 2009, she donated the short story "Aflame in Athens" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project—four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the Fire collection. ("More" adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)
Book Reviews
For her follow-up to international bestseller The Island, British author Hislop has friends Sonia and Maggie jetting off for flamenco lessons in Granada, Spain. Sonia is escaping monotony and a souring marriage to an older man while Maggie is celebrating her 35th birthday. The trip proves an odyssey of discovery for Sonia, who over a morning cup of coffee is mesmerized by an elderly cafe owner's stories of the Spanish Civil War and the Ramirez family who once owned the cafe and were torn apart during the time of Franco and the upheaval of war. Most intriguing was the story of Mercedes, whose passion for flamenco dancing was matched only by her love for renowned guitarist Javier Montero with whom she performed. Separated from her fractured family, she set out to search for Javier in the chaos of Civil War Spain. Dance holds a place of importance in the tale, especially when Sonia learns the truth about her own mother in a twist that adds suspense to the romance and familial drama. The well-done historical background is a rewarding plus in this fast-paced account of love's power through generations.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. "In the picture book of marriage, they were the perfect married couple. It was a story told for an audience." What does this extract tell us about Sonia and James's relationship? What changes between them as the novel progresses? Is James a villain? What tactics does he employ to control Sonia?
2. Why are music and dance so important to the characters in The Return? What does the way a character dances say about them and their relationships? Why is Sonia so drawn to flamenco in particular, and why does James disapprove of her dance classes so vehemently?
"
3. "We need real men in this country.... Spain will never be strong while it's full of fairies." What image of masculinity do the Ramírez males—and the other men in the book —present? Is maleness portrayed as a good or bad thing? How do women exert their power?
4. Did you identify any family traits that ran through the Ramírez generations? Does Sonia take after her father or her mother, or any of her other relations?
5. "For Ignacio, there was a distinction between what he regarded as being a casual informer and actually being an assassin." Why does Ignacio make this distinction? Is it an accurate one? Where else in the novel are we invited to compare physical violence with more subtle forms of cruelty?
6. 'The saints and martyrs with their painted on blood and theatrical stigmata had once been part of her life. Now she saw the church as a sham, a cupboard full of redundant props'. Why does Mercedes lose her faith? How does The Return portray religion and particularly the Catholic Church?
7. What does this book have to say about friendship? Is blood thicker than water?
8. "The lack of truth in [Concha and Mercedes'] correspondence did not mean there was no love between them. It merely meant that they loved each other enough to want to protect the other party." Who else withholds information in the novel, and why? What is the role of these secrets or non-disclosures? How do they affect the plot?
9. What did you make of Javier and Mercedes' relationship? Is it a childish infatuation, a survival tactic, a "fathomless love," or what?
10. What does The Return have to say about politics? To what extent does it affect real life? Did you detect a political bias to this book? If so, what is it?
11. What is the relevance of bull fighting in The Return? Does it tell us anything about Spanish culture or the Civil War more generally? Is it relevant that Republican citizens are assassinated in Granada's bullring and that Ignacio is hunted and killed like a bull? If so, why?
12. How does the history of the Ramírez family represent the Spanish Civil War more generally? Do you find their story a good way of conveying the history of the Civil War? Is Victoria Hislop successful in melding fact and fiction together?
13. "Antonio discovered that there was nothing more brutalising than to drive a bayonet into another human being and in this killing he felt part of himself die too." How does Antonio's perspective on killing compare to Ignacio's, and to other characters'? Were you surprised by the novel's violence? How does Victoria Hislop treat the subject of death in her writing?
14. Whose story did you enjoy most? Did the different strands hang well together, do you think?
15. "On his outstretched hand lay nothing more than a small mound of dirt, a pathetic sample of Spain's soil that he had brought with him over the mountains." What does this old man's gesture tell us about the emigrant experience? How do other characters in the book think about exile and home?
16. If you have read The Island, what similarities and differences did you identify between the two novels? Are there any plot and structure devices common to both? How do the two heroines, Sonia and Alexis, compare?
(Questions issued by publlisher.)