Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934
Scribner
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780684801544


Summary
In Tender Is The Night, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture.

First published in 1934, Fitzgerald's classic story of psychological disintegration was denounced by many as an unflattering portrayal of Sara and Gerald Murphy (in the guise of characters Dick and Nicole Diver), who had been generous hosts to many expatriates.

Only after Fitzgerald's death was Tender Is the Night recognized as a powerful and moving depiction of the human frailties that affect privileged and ordinary people alike. (From Scribner edition.)

More
In Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald distilled much of his tempestuous life with his wife Zelda, and the knowledge of the wrecked, fabulous Fitzgeralds adds poignancy and regret to this tender, supple and poetic portrait. To the just-fashionable French Riviera come Dick and Nicole Diver—handsome, rich, glamorous and enormous fun. Their dinners are legend, their atmosphere magnetic, their intelligence fine. But something is wrong. Nicole has a secret and Dick a weakness. Together they head towards the rocks on which their lives crash—and only one of them really survives. (From Penguin Essentials 2 Edition.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 24, 1896
• Where—St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
• Died—December 21, 1940
• Where—Hollywood, California
• Education—Princeton University


F. Scott Fitzgerald was named for his famous relative, Francis Scott Key, though he was always referred to as "Scott." Minnesota born and Princeton educated, Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920 to critical and popular acclaim.

That same year, He married Zelda Sayre, the queen of Montgomery, Alabama youth society, and the two lived a boisterous, decadent life in New York City. (See LitCourse 5 with Fitzgerald's story "Babylon Revisited" for an idea of their life.) To better afford their extravagant lifestyle, the couple moved to France, where Fitzgerald befriended Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, becoming part of the legendary group of expatriate writers and artists, which Stein labeled the "Lost Generation." In Paris he wrote his finest novel, The Great Gatsby (1925).

Zelda was eventually hospitalized in 1930 for the first of many breakdowns, and Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood (William Faulkner was there, too), where his heavy drinking ended his screen writing career. In 1934 he published Tender Is the Night. He died there of a heart attack six years later at the age of 44.

More
The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. The Great Gatsby, Scott's masterpiece, was published in 1925. Hemingway greatly admired The Great Gatsby and wrote in his A Moveable Feast "If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one" (153). Hemingway expressed his deep admiration for Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald's flawed, doomed character, when he prefaced his chapters concerning Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast with:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless. (129)

Much of what Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast helped to create the myth of Fitzgerald's eventual demise and Zelda's hand in that demise. Though much of Hemingway's text is factually correct, it is always tinged with his disappointment with Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s but was sidetracked by financial difficulties that necessitated his writing commercial short stories, and by the schizophrenia that struck Zelda in 1930. Her emotional health remained fragile for the rest of her life. In 1932, she was hospitalized in Baltimore, Maryland.

Scott rented an estate in the Baltimore suburb of Towson and began work on Tender Is the Night, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist who falls in love with and marries one of his patients. Some critics have seen the book as a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel recounting Fitzgerald's problems with his wife, the corrosive effects of wealth and a decadent lifestyle, his own egoism and self-confidence, and his continuing alcoholism. Indeed, Fitzgerald was extremely protective of his material (their life together). When Zelda published her own version of their lives in Europe, Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald was angry and succeeded in getting her doctors to keep her from writing any more.

Tender was finally published in 1934, and critics who had waited nine years for the follow up to The Great Gatsby had mixed opinions about it. The novel did not sell well upon publication, but the book's reputation has since risen significantly.

Although he reportedly found movie work degrading, Fitzgerald was once again in dire financial straits and spent the second half of the 1930s in Hollywood, working on commercial short stories, scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (including some unfilmed work on Gone with the Wind), and his fifth and final novel, posthumously published as The Last Tycoon (based on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg). Scott and Zelda became estranged; she continued living in mental institutions on the east coast, while he lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, a well-known gossip columnist, in Hollywood.

Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. According to Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, Scott claimed that he had contracted tuberculosis. Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940, and on December 21, while awaiting a visit from his doctor, Fitzgerald collapsed in Sheilah Graham's apartment and died. He was 44. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
(Older works have few mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

For Fitzgerald desolation is a precondition of the lyrical. Hence the most distinctive impression of Tender: A beautiful novel about failure.
Independent (UK)


In the wake of World War I, a community of expatriate American writers established itself in the salons and cafes of 1920s Paris. They congregated at Gertrude Stein's select soirees, drank too much, married none too wisely, and wrote volumes—about the war, about the Jazz Age, and often about each other. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were part of this gang of literary Young Turks, and it was while living in France that Fitzgerald began writing Tender Is the Night. Begun in 1925, the novel was not actually published until 1934. By then, Fitzgerald was back in the States and his marriage was on the rocks, destroyed by Zelda's mental illness and alcoholism.

Despite the modernist mandate to keep authors and their creations strictly segregated, it's difficult not to look for parallels between Fitzgerald's private life and the lives of his characters, psychiatrist Dick Diver and his former patient turned wife, Nicole. Certainly the hospital in Switzerland where Zelda was committed in 1929 provided the inspiration for the clinic where Diver meets, treats, and then marries the wealthy Nicole Warren. And Fitzgerald drew both the European locale and many of the characters from places and people he knew from abroad. In the novel, Dick is eventually ruined—professionally, emotionally, and spiritually—by his union with Nicole.

Fitzgerald's fate was not quite so novelistically neat: after Zelda was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and committed, Fitzgerald went to work as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1937 to pay her hospital bills. He died three years later—not melodramatically, like poor Jay Gatsby in his swimming pool, but prosaically, while eating a chocolate bar and reading a newspaper. Of all his novels, Tender Is the Night is arguably the one closest to his heart. As he himself wrote, "Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith.
Amazon Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. How would you describe the characters of Dick and Nicole Diver? What is the nature of their marriage? Do they love one another? Talk about how and why their marriage changes during the course of the novel?

2. Talk about Nicole's psychological state? Why did Dick marry her? As his patient, their relationship most likely would be viewed today as a violation of the the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) code of ethics. Why would marrying a patient concern the APA? How does Nicole's mental illness affect their marriage?

3. What do you make of Rosemary Hoyt? Is she a "provocateur" with regards to the Divers' marriage? Would you describe her as innocent, aggressive, duplicitous...or as a young, naive American out of her depth? Why is Dick Diver attracted to her? What, if anything, does she offer him? What does it say about Rosemary that she is also attracted to Brady right after professing her love for Dick?

4. Rosemary encounters two parties on the beach at the beginning of the book. What is the distinction she makes between the two—and what do two circles represent? What is your opinion of the two groups?

5. The book is concerned with the differences between Americans and Europeans. How does that difference present itself? Would you say that Dick is more European or more American?

6. The narrator refers to French Mediterranean Coast as a region in a state of flux. How so?

7. The book's narrator identifies with Rosemary in the first part of the novel. Thus we see the characters through her perspective. Starting in Book 2, however, the narrator is allied with Dick Diver...as we follow him into his decline. Why would Fitzgerald have used two perspectives?

8. Hollywood is, of course, the capital of acting. How does "acting" become a theme throughout the novel? Who besides Rosemary acts? What does Hollywood as "the city of thin partitions" mean? How might that descriptive phrase apply to the main characters?

9. How does McKisco change after the duel...and what inspires the change? Talk about the juxtaposition of his rise with Diver's fall.

10. What is the significance of the scene in the restaurant, where the Divers, Norths and Rosemary measure the "repose" of American diners? How does "repose" reflect on Americans' ability to maintain elegance and dignity? Are those qualities important?

11. In what ways can Dick be considered a father figure for women? Would you say he has a need to fulfill that role?

12. Does Nicole ruin Dick's potential to become a great psychiatrist? In other words, did she ruin his career...or is he the cause of his own downfall?

13. By the end of the novel, Nicole seems to have achieved a healthy mental state. Is Dick responsible for her cure?

14. Who loves whom in this book? Do Dick and Nicole love one another? Does Dick love Rosemary? Does Nicole love Tommy Barban?

15. Critics and scholars see Tender Is the Night as partially autobiographical, tracing F. Scott's and Zelda's marriage. Do a little research and discuss how the book parallels the Fitzgeralds' own lives.

16. Does Dick's disappearance in America resolve any problems raised in the novel? Why would Fitzgerald have ended his story in this way? Do you find the ending satisfying...or would you have preferred a different one?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Everybody Has Everything
Katrina Onstad, 2012
Random House Canada
312 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780771068980


Summary
Combining a pitch-perfect, whip-smart dissection of contemporary urban life with a fresh and perceptive examination of our individual and collective ambivalence towards parenthood, Katrina Onstad's Everybody Has Everything balances tragedy and comedy with verve and flair, and is destined to be one of Canada's most talked-about novels of 2012.

What happens when the tidy, prosperous life of an urban couple is turned inside out by a tragedy with unexpected consequences? After a car crash leaves their friend Marcus dead and his wife Sarah in a coma, Ana and James are shocked to discover that they have become the legal guardians of a 2½-year-old, Finn. Finn's crash-landing in their lives throws into high relief deeply rooted, and sometimes long-hidden, truths about themselves, both individually and as a couple. Several chaotic, poignant, and life-changing weeks as a most unusual family give rise to an often unasked question: Can everyone be a parent? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—B.A., McGill University; M.A. University
   of Toronto
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Ontario


Katrina Onstad’s second novel, Everybody Has Everything, came out in Canada in 2012 and in the U.S. in 2013. Her first novel, How Happy to Be, was met with critical acclaim in 2006.

Katrina is also a freelance writer whose work on culture high and low appears in publications including the New York Times Magazine, Guardian and Elle. Katrina has a column in the Saturday Style section of the national paper Globe and Mail and is a regular contributor to Toronto Life magazine. At CBC.ca, she was head film critic and an on-line arts producer.

Born and raised in Vancouver, B.C., Katrina has an English degree from McGill and a Master’s from University of Toronto. She lives in Toronto with her family.

Katrina is a National Magazine Award winner in Canada for Arts Writing, and has been nominated several times, including as Best Columnist for her work in Chatelaine. In 2008, Katrina was a finalist for an American National Magazine Award in the Essay category for an article about high school sex scandals and female desire that ran in Elle.
Other Media

Katrina’s work in non-print media includes reading and hosting at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors; frequent appearances on CBC radio and television; TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies and The Agenda; hosting events for the Toronto International Film Festival Group; and co-hosting the national film review show Reel to Real. She also does speaking and teaching engagements, and is a writer-for-hire. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
More ambitious and assured that Onstad’s debut, but just as gripping.... Onstad’s timely new novel examines how and why adults choose to be parents, and what happens when you don’t have that much choice in the matter.... Ana and James are thoroughly convincing and their agony and triumphs compelling in this impressive sophomore effort.
Globe and Mail


A literary excursion into the poignancy and murkiness of loss, parenting and marriage.... This is sharp, edgy writing.... Onstad mines the emotions of flawed and wounded characters.... Impressive...intelligent, ambitious and unsettling.... Most definitely memorable.
Winnipeg Free Press


Unsparingly honest.... Never sentimental but always compassionate, this compelling book is hard to put down.
Hello Magazine


Everyone will recognize the all too common yearnings and failings of two people trying to figure out what will make them happy.
Chatelaine


This new book is very good, to get that out of the way: Onstad’s writing is always vigorous, funny and mean-because-it’s-true.... Onstad perfectly gets at her characters, and their so-called “status life”...the rhythms of rich, white city parents, who used to be young and who have problems that are at once real and magical. Writing all of it like this, so cruel and right, makes it feel even worse than it is, but by its very telling, a little bit better.
National Post

Revelations are both joyous and heartbreaking, and Onstad handles both aspects well.... The characters’ motivations, self-revelations, and discoveries are carefully elucidated, such that the reader is able to form connections not just with Ana and James, but with the supporting characters as wel.... Onstad delicately builds up layers and peels them away.
Quill & Quire

Discussion Questions
1. How do you understand the meaning of the novel’s title?

2. Consider the epigraph the author has chosen. What do you think she hopes you to take from it? How does is relate to the novel?

3. There are many poetic and musical references in the novel, and one song in particular plays a key role in the narrative. What do the various quotations tell us about the different characters in the novel who recall or recognize them? What do you think the author wishes to say through the use of that one key song? About Ana’s life, about James’s life, about life more generally?

4. Is this a particularly “urban” novel? Why or why not?

5. “How did you know?” Ana asks Sarah on page 57, about wanting to have a child. Whose side of the ensuing exchange made the most sense to you? Why could Ana not be honest with Sarah about when, or if, she herself “knew”?

6. How does James’s behaviour upend (or conform to) conventional notions of masculinity? At work? At home? With Finn? In what ways does Ana challenge the concept of femininity? How do these shifting gender roles affect the story?

7. At certain points, both Ana and James find themselves acutely aware of their age. What triggers this awareness in each of them? What does this awareness mean to each of them?

8. Neither Ana’s nor James’s mother quite fits the picture of an “ordinary mother.” Can you see people you know in either of them? In what ways?

9. Is it still a social taboo for a woman to resist motherhood? How does Ana experience society’s attitudes toward women who aren’t mothers? Is it possible for a female character to be sympathetic if she rejects motherhood?

10. How does the sudden presence of a child in James and Ana’s relationship foment marital discord, and flirtations with infidelity – or does it? To what extent is their marriage affected by parenthood?

11. What do you make of Ana’s flirtation with Charlie? What attracts her to him?

12. The final scene of the novel involves James telling Finn (and Ana) a story. How does this closing story-within-a-story relate to the novel as a whole?

13. What do you think the next chapter in life will be for Ana, for James, for Finn, for Sarah?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Innocent
David Baldacci, 2012
Grand Central Publishing
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455519002


Summary
America has enemies—ruthless people that the police, the FBI, even the military can't stop. That's when the U.S. government calls on Will Robie, a stone cold hitman who never questions orders and always nails his target.

But Will Robie may have just made the first—and last—mistake of his career.

The Innocent It begins with a hit gone wrong. Robie is dispatched to eliminate a target unusually close to home in Washington, D.C. But something about this mission doesn't seem right to Robie, and he does the unthinkable. He refuses to kill. Now, Robie becomes a target himself and must escape from his own people.

Fleeing the scene, Robie crosses paths with a wayward teenage girl, a fourteen-year-old runaway from a foster home. But she isn't an ordinary runaway-her parents were murdered, and her own life is in danger. Against all of his professional habits, Robie rescues her and finds he can't walk away. He needs to help her.

Even worse, the more Robie learns about the girl, the more he's convinced she is at the center of a vast cover-up, one that may explain her parents' deaths and stretch to unimaginable levels of power.

Now, Robie may have to step out of the shadows in order to save this girl's life...and perhaps his own. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—Richmond, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., Virginia Commonwealth University; J.D.,
   University of Virginia
• Currently—Northern Virginia


David Baldacci's authoritative legal thrillers operate on the irresistible notion that a sinister undercurrent threads through the country's most powerful institutions.

While his stories hinge on the complex machinations behind the presidency, the FBI, the Supreme Court and other spheres of influence, Baldacci (a former Washington, D.C.-based attorney) finds his way into a mystery through the eyes of the innocents. Semi-innocents, at least: small players who often don't realize they're players at all end up hunting down answers, and their hunt becomes the reader's.

According to Baldacci, reading John Irving's The World According to Garp convinced him that he wanted to be a novelist. Absolute Power—in which a thief finds himself accidentally connected to a murder involving the president and the ensuing coverup—was hardly Irvingesque; but it did begin Baldacci's friendly relationship with the bestseller lists, which has continued over his writing career.

Baldacci's style is brief and plot-driven, but he's not afraid to linger on macabre and vivid details, such as a rosary clenched in a plane crash victim's hand, or hard-learned lessons from a sniper's life (pack your food so you can find it at night, by touch). These small but memorable—indeed, almost cinematic—details give his books another layer that distinguishes them from the average potboiler.

Although the author has occasionally departed from his usual fare (examples include the tenderhearted coming-of-age tale Wish You Well and the holiday-themed adventure The Christmas Train), it is high-octane thrillers that are his true stock in trade. Whether it's a taut stand-alone or a new installment in his "Camel Club" series, readers know when they crack the spine of a new Baldacci book, they're in for an action-packed page-turner.

Extras
• Baldacci was a trial lawyer and a corporate lawyer for nine years in Washington, D.C.

• He worked his way through college as a Pinkerton security guard and by washing and detailing 18-wheel trucks.

• Baldacci writes under his own name except when published in Italy, where he uses a pseudonym because it is the homeland of his ancestors. (From Barnes and Noble.)

Book Reviews
[A] spectacular entry into the hardcore action-adventure world...a tour de force of storytelling power and grace. Baldacci at his best, which is as good as it gets.
Providence Sunday Journal

This is another great novel by a brilliant writer. Baldacci catches you from the very first page and grabs your attention until the last word. Read it.
Lincoln Journal Star

Another action tale of espionage and betrayal from a master storyteller. Baldacci brings his unusual, distinctive skill in character development to portray people who seem very real, with a degree of unpredictability that advances this very clever plot.
Free-Lance Star (Fredericksburg, VA)

The Innocent is....all-American, all-heart... a maze of bread-crumb clues keeping you riveted to the page as each precious minute ticks toward its deadly ultimatum ....His talent for weaving so many disparate and delicate strands into a perilous web of deception is masterful, resulting in a remarkable, intellectually satiating experience.
Everyday eBook

This book is a definite one-day, 'edge-of-your-chair' read, with an ending that is a complete surprise. One of the best Baldacci's since Absolute Power, this is one that will have all suspense readers enthralled.
Suspense Magazine

"The Innocent is Baldacci at his absolute best...Baldacci provides the reader a non-stop pulse pounding ride that will keep you on the edge of your seat into the wee hours of the morning...Five Stars.
Examiner.com (San Francisco)

David Baldacci is still at the top of his game.... He is a meticulous writer who blasts his plot into a million pieces yet is able to pull it back together before the final page is turned. [He] continutes to impress.
Huffington Post

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 these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Innocent:

1. Talk about the moral justification for assassination.

His employer decided who among the living and breathing would qualify as a target. And then they turned to men like Robie to end the living and breathing part. It made the world better, was the justification.

What do you think of "sanctioned assassinations?" Can there ever be, as the last sentence of the above quote says, a "justification" for political killing? Are assassinations sometimes necessary for public safety?

2. What do you think of Will Robie? How would you describe him as a character? Is he presented as one-dimensional—or does the author give him an psychological and emotional inner life? Does he have a moral compass?

3. Do you think our government ever employs hit men like Robie?

4. What makes Robie refuse to kill the target of his newest assignment? What makes him suspicious?

5. What do you think about Julie Getty? Does she represent the stereotypical foster child? Why does Robie decide to ally himself with her? When did he (and you, as the reader) begin to suspect that she was at the heart of the mission he was assigned to?

6. The plot consists of two climactic episodes: one when the villain is unmasked, and the second, well...we won't spoil that one. Did you find the climaxes satisfying? One more so than the other? Are the endings believable? Were you surprised...not surprised...gratified? Are all the loose ends tied up, so that all the mystifying events that take place earlier in the novel are revealed and resolved?

7. The thriller genre is characterized by a fast-paced plot, unexpected twists and turns, danger and suspense. Does The Innocent live up to its reputation as a thriller? Top-notch...or so-so?

8. If you're read other books by David Baldacci, how does this compare?

9. Do expect—hope—that The Innocent will be the first in a new Will Robie series?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Affair (Jack Reacher series, 16)
Lee Child, 2011
Random House
608 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780440246305


Summary
Everything starts somewhere.... For elite military cop Jack Reacher, that somewhere was Carter Crossing, Mississippi, way back in 1997. A lonely railroad track. A crime scene. A coverup.

A young woman is dead, and solid evidence points to a soldier at a nearby military base. But that soldier has powerful friends in Washington.

Reacher is ordered undercover—to find out everything he can, to control the local police, and then to vanish. Reacher is a good soldier. But when he gets to Carter Crossing, he finds layers no one saw coming, and the investigation spins out of control.

Local sheriff Elizabeth Deveraux has a thirst for justice—and an appetite for secrets. Uncertain they can trust one another, Reacher and Deveraux reluctantly join forces. Reacher works to uncover the truth, while others try to bury it forever. The conspiracy threatens to shatter his faith in his mission, and turn him into a man to be feared.

A novel of unrelenting suspense that could only come from the pen of #1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child, The Affair is the start of the Reacher saga, a thriller that takes Reacher—and his readers—right to the edge...and beyond. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 30, 1953
• Raised—Coventry, England, UK
• Education—Sheffield University
• Awards—Anthony and the Barry Awards for Best First
   Mystery; Barry and Nero Awards for Best Novel
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York, USA


Lee Child, whose real name is Jim Grant, is a British thriller writer. He is the author of 16 Jack Reacher thrillers, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers Worth Dying For, 61 Hours, Gone Tomorrow, Nothing to Lose, and Bad Luck and Trouble. His debut, Killing Floor, won both the Anthony and the Barry awards for Best First Mystery, and The Enemy won both the Barry and the Nero awards for Best Novel. Foreign rights in the Jack Reacher series have sold in more than fifty territories.

Each of Child's novels follows the adventures of a former American Military Policeman, Jack Reacher, who wanders the United States.

Though Grant was born in Coventry, England, his parents moved him and his three brothers to Handsworth Wood in Birmingham when he was four years old, so the boys could get a better education. Grant attended Cherry Orchard Primary School in Handsworth Wood until the age of 11 and was one of the cleverest boys in his year. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, also the alma mater of J. R. R. Tolkien and Enoch Powell. His father was a civil servant and his younger brother, Andrew Grant, is also a thriller novelist.

Some of Grant's early influences include Enid Blyton, W.E. Johns, and Alistair MacLean.

In 1974, at age 20, Grant attended law school in Sheffield at Sheffield University, though he had no intention of entering the legal profession and, during his student days, worked backstage in a theatre. Instead, he took a job in commercial television after graduating.

In January 2012, Grant donated £10,000 towards a new vehicle for Brecon Mountain Rescue Team. He offered the donation because his brother is a senior member of the team. The team's former control vehicle was written off after a collision in 2011.

His wife Jane is from New York.

Grant joined Granada Television, part of the UK's ITV Network, in Manchester as a presentation director. There he was involved with shows including Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. Grant was involved in the transmission of more than 40,000 hours of programming for Granada, writing thousands of commercials, news stories, and trailers. He stayed with Granada 1977-1995 and ended his career there with two years as a trade union shop steward.

After being let go from his job because of corporate restructuring, he decided he wanted to start writing novels, stating they are "the purest form of entertainment." In 1997, his first novel, Killing Floor, was published and he moved to the United States in the summer of 1998.

He has said that he chose the name Reacher for the central character in his novels because he is himself tall and, in a supermarket (Asda in Kendal, Cumbria, when he was living in Kirkby Lonsdale), his wife Jane told him: "Hey, if this writing thing doesn't pan out, you could always be a reacher in a supermarket.... I thought, 'Reacher — good name.'" Some books in the Reacher series are written in first person, while others are written in the third person.

In 2007, Grant collaborated with 14 other writers to create the 17-part serial thriller The Chopin Manuscript narrated by Alfred Molina that was broadcast weekly on Audible.com from 25 September 2007 to 13 November 2007.

On 30 June 2008, it was announced that Lee Child would be taking up a Visiting Professorship at the University of Sheffield in the UK from November 2008. In 2009, Child funded 52 Jack Reacher scholarships for students at the university.

Child was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America in 2009. (From Wikipedia and Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Mr. Child's 16th book, The Affair, shakes up the status quo by delivering the Reacher creation myth…it presents his most colorful appearance in a long time. It establishes Reacher's idealistic but vengeful personality and lays out the rules by which he lives.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


With Reacher, #1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child has created “a series that stands in the front rank of modern thrillers.
Washington Post


Child’s compelling 16th thriller featuring incorruptible vigilante Jack Reacher (after Worth Dying For) rewinds the clock to 1997 when Reacher was still a military cop and working on the case that led to his eventual break with the Army. Reacher must figure out whether the shocking murder of 27-year-old Janice May Chapman in Carter Crossing, Miss., has any connection with nearby Fort Kelham, where Army Rangers are trained. Reacher soon learns that two other women had their throats slit in the same way as Chapman, and the leading suspect is a Fort Kelham captain, whose father is a U.S. senator and die-hard Army supporter. Reacher knows all too well the case has political trouble written all over it—and he and his Army bosses quickly butt heads over how it should be handled. Readers expecting new insight or details into Reacher’s background will be disappointed, but they’ll find all the elements—solid action, wry humor, smart dialogue—that have made this series so popular.
Publishers Weekly


What turned career army cop Jack Reacher into the wandering and deadly version of a knight in rusted armor? In this 16th novel in the highly successful Reacher franchise, Child goes back to small-town Mississippi in 1997. Women have been murdered near a secret Ranger base. The Rangers are suspected, and the official investigation is a mess. Reacher is sent to town disguised as a bum to keep one eye on what might be a flawed army investigation, the other on a series of similar killings in the town, and if he had a third eye, he would use it to cover his back. Verdict: Exciting and suspenseful, with deceit and cover-ups, violence, and sex, this is another great entry in Child's compelling series. Reacher's many fans can only hope there will be many more. Highly recommended for anyone who likes intelligent, well-written, tense thrillers. To the dismay of series fans, the diminutive Tom Cruise is slated to play the six-foot-tall Reacher in a film adaptation of Child's One Shot.—Ed.] —Robert Conroy, Warren, MI
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)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Affair:

1. How would you describe Jack Reacher? What are the rules he lives by? One of his most famous—"All you need, and nothing you don't"—could almost be called his "credo." What other codes define his life, and what do they say about his character?

2. Why has Reacher left the military?

3. A number of reviewers felt that this book gives the entire Reacher series a much needed boost, that the past several installments in the 16 book series have "jumped the shark," meaning that they had lost their freshness and were rehashing overly familiar ground.  Presuming you've read previous Jack Reacher books, in what way does this book differ from the others in the series?

4. Reacher has always been somewhat mysterious. What background information do you learn about him in The Affair—particularly about his family, as well as some of his idiosyncrasies (obsessions?) that appear in the 15 other Reacher books. In his various recollections and re-interpretations of his life, does Reacher learn anything about himself?

5. Lee Child writes with a degree of humor, which seems odd given that the series is in the suspense/thriller genre, not usually known for humor. What passages did you found funny?

6. What do you think of Sheriff Deveraux? How would you describe her—is she simply a female version of Reacher? Or is she a distinct personality in her own right?

7. What does Reacher mean when he says, "if I ever buy a house, it's going to be next to a railroad train." What's the fascination with trains—and what does it reveal about Reacher's personality?

8. The novel takes place four-and-a-half years before the 9/11 attacks. How does Child portray the US Army? Do you think his portrayal has validity?

9. What role does political connection or privilege play in this novel?

10. Does Child do a good job here of ratcheting up the suspense? Does the novel live up to it's name as a "thriller"?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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