The Summer of the Bear
Bella Pollen, 2011
Grove/Atlantic
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802145888
Summary
With her fifth novel, critically acclaimed writer and journalist Bella Pollen takes readers into the private dynamics of a family grappling with the loss of father and husband in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, where between elemental beauty and utter bleakness, strange forces are at play.
In 1980 Germany, under Cold War tension, a mole is suspected in the British Embassy. When the clever diplomat Nicky Fleming dies suddenly and suspiciously, it’s convenient to brand him the traitor. But was his death an accident, murder, or suicide? As the government digs into Nicky’s history, his wife, Letty, relocates with her three children to a remote Scottish island hoping to salvage their family. But the isolated shores of her childhood retreat only intensify their distance, and it is Letty’s brilliant and peculiar youngest child, Jamie, who alone holds on to the one thing he’s sure of: his father has promised to return and he was a man who never broke a promise.
Exploring the island, Jamie and his teenaged sisters discover that a domesticated brown bear has been marooned on shore, hiding somewhere among the seaside caves. Jamie feels that the bear may have a strange connection to his father, and as he seeks the truth, his father’s story surfaces unexpected ways. Bella Pollen has an uncanny ability to capture the unnoticeable moments in which families grow quiet. A novel about the corrosive effects of secrets and the extraordinary imagination of youth, The Summer of the Bear is Pollen’s most ambitious and affecting book yet. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 22, 1961
• Where—Oxford, England, UK
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Ladbroke, Grove, London
Arabella Rosalind Hungerford Pollen is an English couturier and author. Arabella, nicknamed Bella, was born in Oxford, the daughter of Peregrine Michael Hungerford Pollen and Patricia Helen Barry. In 1981 she founded the fashion design company Arabella Pollen Ltd., running it until 1994. Among her clients were Diana, Princess of Wales; Margaux Hemingway and Marianne Faithfull.
Pollen is also a writer who, as a journalist, has contributed to a wide variety of publications, including The Sunday Telegraph, Vogue, and The Observer. As a novelist, she has published five books: All About Men; B Movies, Blue Love; Midnight Cactus; Hunting Unicorns, and The Summer of the Bear.
Her first marriage was to Giacomo Dante Algranti. In 1995 she married David Maurice Benjamin Macmillan, the grandson of former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The couple have two children: Finn Joshua M. Macmillan and Mabel Macmillan. They live in Ladbroke, Grove, London.
Book Reviews
Full of vivid detail.... Pollen is an acute observer of people and places.... a skilled dissector of the subtleties of sibling warfare.
Washington Post
Pollen delivers a potent narrative about a family gripped by grief.
Terry Loncaric - Chicago Post-Tribune
There’s magic at the margins of The Summer of the Bear.... The novel has a bit of the style of Lemony Snicket and a smidgeon of The Secret of Roan Inish. Pollen’s writing is clean and clear enough that you can really smell the peat smoke and feel the wind.
Los Angeles Times
Affecting.... Riveting.... A thrilling tale that unravels mysteries of the human heart, The Summer of the Bear is spine-tingling. (4.5 stars)
People
What's real and what's imagined is at the heart of this gem of a novel, which is one part fairy tale, one part international thriller, and all-parts engrossing family drama.... Pollen's lyrical and often witty prose makes this a stirring tale of loss and self-discovery.
Lynn Schnurnberger - More
In the time it took me to finish the first two or three sentences, I was already hooked: the characters, their feelings and their behavior seemed entirely real and true to me.... The Outer Hebrides are so vividly described that I am obsessed with going there for a visit.
Nancy Pearl - NPR
A haunting, unsentimental look at estranged families and hidden secrets.... Magically melancholy.... Tender and wistful, Pollen doesn’t shy away from harsh truths, but at the heart of her story there’s an unquenchable belief in love and redemption
Marie Claire (UK)
In 1980s Berlin, there's evidence that the British Embassy was undermined by a mole, and when diplomat Nicky Fleming dies unexpectedly (was it murder? suicide?), it's easy enough to point the finger at him. Trying to protect her three children, his widow resettles in the Outer Hebrides, where odd but brilliant young Jamie discovers a brown bear while exploring the island with his teenaged sisters. Jamie believes that the bear is somehow connected to his father, and what really happened back in Berlin begins to emerge. A fascinating plot, and now that British author Pollen has two novels in film development, one must wonder whether she is heading for a breakout. With suggestions of both political and psychological tension, this should appeal to a wide range of readers.
Library Journal
Pollen sensitively and intricately takes each family member through painful stages of grief and longing. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
(Starred review.) In her moving, beautifully written fifth novel, Pollen (Midnight Cactus, 2006, etc.) serves up an improbable mix that, on the face, seems as if it shouldn't work. The main strand of narrative is something out of Cold War thrillerdom (whence le Carré): Letty Fleming's diplomat husband, posted to Berlin a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall, dies there.... A shocked Letty, with children in tow, retreats to the Outer Hebrides to sort things out.... [Young son] conjures up a conversation about grizzlies with Dad, an admonition from Mom that "there are no bears in Scotland" and, in good time, some reckonings with the grizzly himself, who is quite a smart and sensitive fellow.... A sensitive and literate story told on several levels, all of them believable—if some of them improbable, too
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Set between the natural wilderness of the Outer Hebrides and the civilization of Bonn and its nuanced rules of diplomatic society, The Summer of the Bear follows Letty Fleming and her children as they struggle to comprehend the sudden death of their beloved husband and father. Begin your discussion by considering the differences between these two settings and how they reflect Letty’s emotional conflicts. Is she better able to understand what happened in Germany away from Germany, or is there something about the Outer Hebrides that clouds her thinking?
2. Continuing with your discussion of setting and place, think specifically about the remote Scottish islands where everyone lies at the constant mercy of the wind, the tides, and lack of daylight. Talk about the influence of the natural world on each member of the family. How do they adjust to this new way of life, both physically and spiritually?
3. When Nicky dies, Letty and the children find a gaping hole at the center of their world. Examine the ways in which the British diplomatic community has shaped their lives and the ways in which, on Nicky’s death, they no longer have a place in this society. Why do you think Letty flees to the Outer Hebrides? What is she hoping to find there? Do you think Letty is fleeing from her life in Bonn or, rather, fleeing toward something in the Outer Hebrides?
4. Heartbroken and bewildered, Letty is left as the head of her family and feels very much out of her depth in this new role. “It no longer felt as if they were a family. More like a collection of damaged souls bound by a set of rites and rhythms over which they had little control—but then maybe that was the definition of a family” (pp. 18-19). Discuss Letty’s thought process here. What do you think the definition of a family is? Is it possible for there to be a fixed definition for something so fluid and so dependent on external forces? How does an event such as an unexpected death like Nicky’s throw the contours of a family into stark relief?
5. Discuss the structure of the novel with its flashbacks and changing narrative viewpoints from adult to children to bear. Did it serve to deepen your experience of the novel? If so, how? What were your thoughts when you understood that the narrator of the “swimmer” chapters was the bear? How long did it take for you to realize this? Were you happy to suspend your disbelief and to move forward with the novel as a magical fable?
6. Talk about Letty’s character. What is it about her that made her something of a misfit in Bonn among the diplomats’ wives? Would you consider her inability to conform as a character strength or weakness? How does it impact her treatment at the hands of Nicky’s former colleagues, and the formidable ambassadress in the weeks following Nicky’s death? How much of this treatment does she bring on herself by not fighting back? Why do you think she doesn’t?
7. Despite his death in the first chapter, Nicky Fleming remains a strong presence in the book. It is his very personal and rigid sense of morality that shapes the story. Discuss his role as a father and as a diplomat. Was he right to flout the diplomatic code by putting family before king and country? Or humanity over the political ideals of his government? Was his decision to protect the island selfish or selfless?8. Discuss whether it is Nicky’s death that shakes Letty more, or the questions that his death raises? Is she more concerned by the fact that he might have been a traitor or that he was not the man she thought she knew?
9. What does their friend and fellow diplomat, Tom, mean by “Hold on to what you believe. That’s all that’s important” (p. 139).
10. Consider the statement, “people tended to sleepwalk through their lives . . . capable only of happiness retrospectively—until something happened that was monumental and only then did life divide into the before and after” (p. 19). One of the book’s themes is that moment before knowing, before life changes forever. The before and the after. Sometimes, as with death, the characters have no control over these defining moments, but at other times they make a conscious decision to change their lives in inalterable ways. Find examples of this throughout the novel and talk about the way the characters can mold their own lives by stepping willingly into the “after.” Is it sometimes preferable to be in an “after” moment where one can begin to move forward and heal rather than to remain stuck in the unpredictability of the “before?”
11. Letty spares Jamie from attending his father’s funeral, and spares all three children her tears and the talk. Instead she “turns turtle” and retreats into silence. At what point does her protection of the children turn into doing them harm? And what about herself? Is she helping or harming herself? Why do you think she is so afraid of talk?
12. The author writes beautifully on the ways in which families work and is especially sensitive to the ways in which families communicate—or don’t. Discuss the importance of the theme of “communication” throughout the novel starting with Nicky’s statement, “Almost everything that goes wrong in the world is due to people not knowing how to talk to each other.” Find instances of Letty and her children failing to communicate with each other.
13. Alba, the middle child, bristles with anger throughout the novel, furious that secrets are being kept from her by her mother and her older sister. “She eyeballed her mother willing her to answer all the suspicions she didn’t dare voice.” How is her adolescent fury a means of communication? How does her mother react? What is Alba really hoping for? After Letty finds out about Alba’s shoplifting spree, she is roused into anger for a moment and then she and Alba return to the status quo with the silence between them “stretched long and shrill.” What are your feelings for Letty as she fails her daughter, as the seeds are set for potential tragedy?
14. Alba lashes out at life around her, stealing from the local shop because she believes that life owes her—although shoplifting “couldn’t add up to the debt that life was obligated to pay her” (p. 200). Do you understand what she means by this? Can you empathize? Would you say that this feeling of discontent reflects a growing trend in our society?
15. Talk about Georgie, the oldest child. How would you describe her character? Discuss how the knowledge of carrying secrets affects her and changes her. How does she grow up during the course of the novel? How far would you say this sentence describes Georgie’s role in the family? “As always it fell to Georgie to bridge the gulf between her mother’s pretence at normality and her sister’s mutinous rebuttal” (p. 38).
16. Consider the elusive quality of truth in the novel. How far does Letty want to go in her pursuit of the truth behind Nicky’s death? Does she really want to know the truth, or instead a truth she can live with? Discuss the place of truth in Bonn’s diplomatic society life, set against the backdrop of the Cold War.
17. Continuing your analysis of truth—or approximation thereof—throughout the novel, turn your thoughts to Jamie Fleming, Letty’s youngest child. Jamie lives in a world of his own making, an amalgamation of reality and fantasy strung together from the hints, stories, and off-hand comments of others, especially his parents. How far would you agree that his parents are responsible for perpetuating his inability to live in the real world? Is this harmful to him? Why do you think they constantly protect him from the truth?
18. In many ways, through the character of Jamie, the narrative questions reality: Is it something that we all conspire to agree on in the adult world? Talk about the narrative as a search for what is real. Is it possible that Jamie with his childish honesty, his lack of irony or sarcasm and his literal view of the world, has the least distorted version of reality?
19. In a magical collision of reality and imagination, Jamie believes that the lost bear is his deceased father, seeking out his family. Discuss the ways in which Jamie comes to this conclusion—and why it appears to be so obvious to him. How effective was this fable-like binding of magic and reality? Do you agree with Jamie’s thoughts, “Why was he the only person who believed in anything? Why was he always the only one not to succumb to the epidemic of hopelessness? Were faith and optimism things that disappeared when you grew up?” (p. 185)
20. Nicky’s determination to honor his promises to the children accounts for Jamie’s conviction that his father will return to him. This is turn leads to Jamie’s belief that his father has come back in the form of the bear. Do you feel this promise saves Jamie’s life or puts his life in danger?21. It is left up to the reader to decide whether the bear truly is Nicky or whether the connection is a figment of Jamie’s imagination. For those who believe that Nicky does in some way reappear to keep his pledge to Jamie and save the life of his son, discuss whether Nicky can be deemed to have kept his promise to each member of his family and how this ultimately allows them to find peace.22. Consider the children as a group and talk about the ways they react to their new post-Bonn life. A review for this novel refers to the children as “underparented”—would you agree with this description of them?
23. “Everyone has a place where they fit into their skins, a place where they are able to make sense of the world, and the island was hers.” Discuss the moment when Letty realizes that while this may be her home, her moral compass, it is certainly not that of her children’s.
24. “Everything and every event is pervaded by the Grace of God” (p. 181). What do you think Nicky means by this, and why did he leave it with the details of his “betrayal”? How true do you think it is?
25. While charting the family’s separate journeys into grief, the author also manages to infuse the novel with a fine sense of wit and humor. Find elements of light-heartedness throughout the story and discuss its place within the emotional arc of the narrative.
26. What do the islanders represent? Compare the close-knit society of the islands to that of the governmental community in Bonn.
27. How satisfactory did you find the novel’s conclusion? Would you consider the novel, ultimately, as hopeful? Discuss what might lie in the future for the Fleming family.
(Questions by publisher.)
The World Without You
Joshua Henkin, 2012
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375424366
Summary
Winner, 2012 Edward Lewis Wallant Award
From the author of the New York Times Notable Book Matrimony, a moving, mesmerizing new novel about love, loss, and the aftermath of a family tragedy.
It’s July 4, 2005, and the Frankel family is descending upon their beloved summer home in the Berkshires. But this is no ordinary holiday. The family has gathered to memorialize Leo, the youngest of the four siblings, an intrepid journalist and adventurer who was killed on that day in 2004, while on assignment in Iraq.
The parents, Marilyn and David, are adrift in grief. Their forty-year marriage is falling apart. Clarissa, the eldest sibling and a former cello prodigy, has settled into an ambivalent domesticity and is struggling at age thirty-nine to become pregnant. Lily, a fiery-tempered lawyer and the family contrarian, is angry at everyone. And Noelle, whose teenage years were shadowed by promiscuity and school expulsions, has moved to Jerusalem and become a born-again Orthodox Jew.
The last person to see Leo alive, Noelle has flown back for the memorial with her husband and four children, but she feels entirely out of place. And Thisbe —Leo’s widow and mother of their three-year-old son—has come from California bearing her own secret.
Set against the backdrop of Independence Day and the Iraq War, The World Without You is a novel about sibling rivalries and marital feuds, about volatile women and silent men, and, ultimately, about the true meaning of family. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 7, 1964
• Where—New York City
• Education—B.A., Harvard; M.F.A., University of Michigan
• Awards—James Fellowship for the Novel; Hopwood Award,
PEN Syndicated Fiction Award; Edward Lewis Wallant Award.
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York
Joshua Henkin is the author of Swimming Across the Hudson (1997), which was selected by the Los Angeles Times as a notable book of the year; Matrimony (2007), a New York Times Nobtable Book of the Year; and The World Without You (2012), which has received wide critical acclaim. His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in many journals and newspapers. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the 92nd St. Y in New York City, and curently directs the MFA Program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College. (From the publisher.)
More
His fiction has been performed at Symphony Space and broadcast on NPR's Selected Shorts; published in Spanish translation in Habra Una Vez, an anthology of young North American Writers; anthologized in 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11; and cited for distinction in Best American Short Stories. He is the recipient of the James Fellowship for the Novel, the Hopwood Award, the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and a grant from the Michigan Council of the Arts. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere. (From the author's website.)
Joshua Henkin also wrote a terrific essay about book clubs that received a lot of attention in the blogosphere. It's worth reading.
Book Reviews
Grief can be a divisive force, especially within families. Sorrow can’t really be shared, as Joshua Henkin illustrates in his insightful third novel, The World Without You. The book opens a year after the death of Leo Frankel, a Daniel Pearl-like journalist killed on assignment in Iraq, as his family gathers at their summer home in the Berkshires for a memorial.... The World Without You definitely favors character over plot. The most dramatic event, Leo’s death, has already happened.... Henkin rotates through his cast, moving elegantly from one perspective to another and providing ample background to illuminate the tensions each person feels in the present. The World Without You shows how loss forces people to reconceive of themselves, a painful but necessary transformation.
New York Times Book Review
It's damn difficult to make the basic unhappy-family novel distinctly one's own. Henkin does so with a one-two combination of strengths: psychological empathy for his realistic characters, and an expository modesty that draws attention away from the skilled writing itself...in order to focus, with great care, on the subtleties and complications of familial love.... Tenderness spills from these pages.
Lisa Schwarzbaum - Entertainment Weekly
Blazingly alive....[Henkin] grounds his novel in both time and place, creating a living, breathing world.... Gorgeously written, and as beautifully detailed as a tapestry, Henkin delicately probes what these family members really mean to one another....[C]ompassionate, intelligent, and shining.
Caroline Leavit - Boston Globe
A densely detailed and touching portrait.
People
The World Without You gives us a welcome portrait of the repercussions of faraway wars on people who usually consider themselves to be spectators.... [P]owerful and unexpected...compassionate and beguiling.
Jane Ciabattari - NPR Books
Could be the plot of a Chekhov play or a Woody Allen movie.... [The book explores] with subtlety and feeling the meaning of family, both those we are born with and those we choose, those we leave behind and those with whom we soldier on.”
Marion Winik - Newsday
Pleasingly old-fashioned.... [A] warm-hearted novel.”
Wendy Smith - Washington Post
Deeply felt...striking...vivid.... [T]he novel is permeated with small moments of restored intimacy. There’s a lot of tender feeling here for the American family, on the ropes for sure, but well worth fighting for, Henkin’s heartfelt novel insists.”
Andrew Furman - Miami Herald
The members of the Frankel family seem unhappy enough, in their own individual ways, but it also seems as if happiness has never really been an option for them, as if it were an item that had somehow been left off the menu of life.... [The] little details, in fact, the bits and pieces of choice and circumstance, fortune and misfortune, that make up the mosaic of each individual's life, is what this subtle and ingenious novel is about.... [A] novel for mature readers—those who like fiction providing insight into how people actually live.
Frank Wilson - Philadelphia Inquirer
Intimate and insightful.... In The World Without You, Henkin...reminds us that families are icebergs, with nine-tenths of their emotions just below the surface, capable of wreaking havoc when struck.
Glenn C. Altschuler - San Francisco Chronicle
Henkin juggles [his] large cast of characters with ease, telling a poignant story while maintaining each unique identity. This is no small trick, as the characters are neither perfect nor perfectly unlikeable. They are, in the end, a family. They do what families do, which is a complex dance of happy and sad, of distance and intimacy.
Robin Vidimos - Denver Post
A poignant and moving novel.... Henkin is a polished writer with an eye for detail...but where he really shines is in how he tenderly reveals each character’s complex personality, layer by layer.... [A] moving story and a good read, and, from start to finish, deeply honest.
Abigail Pickus - Times of Israel
Henkin is a master at letting his characters emerge in subtle but captivating ways.... [A] deeply woven and affecting novel about grief.
Wingate Packard - Seattle Times
Henkin's prose is as smooth and clear as a morning lake. You want to dip back in for the specificity of detail and feelings evoked.... The World Without You is a study of close relationships, typified by warmth and wit. The characters are sympathetic and flawed, drawn with compassionate strokes.... [T]he narrative builds tiers of tension that break unexpectedly into dramatic action, like blocks in a Jenga tower.
Jackie Reitzes - Minneapolis Star Tribune
(Starred review.) A more bittersweet version of Jonathan Tropper’s This is Where I Leave You or a less chilly variation on Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Henkin...tenderly explores family dynamics in this novel about the ties that bind, and even lacerate.
Publishers Weekly
The Frankel family has gathered at their summer home in the Berkshires to attend a memorial service for their youngest sibling, Leo, who was killed while reporting in Iraq. Parents Marilyn and David are struggling with their 40-year marriage while three daughters wrestle with infertility, unemployment, urban ennui, and assorted relationship tensions. Leo's widow, Thisbe, and young son Calder fly in from California with news of their own. For the few days surrounding July 4, 2005, the family members struggle with their shared pasts, uncertain futures, and each other. Verdict: Henkin (director of Brooklyn College's MFA program in fiction writing, Matrimony; Swimming Across the Hudson) might gain some new readers with this honest and well-paced look at an American family. Point this one out to contemporary fiction fans of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, or the works of Rick Moody, Richard Russo, Philip Roth, and John Updike.—Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll. Northeast
Library Journal
A family melodrama that encompasses both tragedy and farce, as an upper-middle-class clan gathers to mourn a dead son and perhaps move on. When conventionalists claim, "They don't write novels like that anymore," this is the sort of novel they mean.... Which relationships will endure, which will collapse, and which will change over the course of a long weekend? A novel that satisfies all expectations in some very familiar ways.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the sibling relationships in the novel. To what extent have Noelle’s decisions been shaped by being Clarissa and Lily’s sister?
2. When Marilyn announces that she and David are separating, Clarissa, Lily, and Noelle are thrown into shock. Is separation/divorce different for children when they’re adults than when they’re younger?
3. Marilyn won’t let David tell the girls their news before everyone gets up to the Berkshires. Do you agree with this decision not to tell the family in advance?
4. “It’s been the hardest year of Thisbe’s life, yet it’s different for her. Marilyn and David were Leo’s parents.” What does the novel mean by this? In what ways is it different to lose a son than to lose a husband?
5. Marilyn thinks, “Mothers and daughters-in-law: such volatile, loaded relationships.” Is there something about Marilyn and Thisbe that makes it hard for them to be close? Is the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law inherently volatile?
6. Clarissa’s infertility plays a central role in the book. Originally, it was Nathaniel who wanted to have children and Clarissa didn’t, but now that they’re having trouble conceiving Clarissa seems more upset than Nathaniel is. Does this have to do with Leo’s death? Is infertility always harder for the woman than for the man?
7. Lily and Noelle have a particularly difficult relationship. Why is this? How do sibling relationships change as people get older? Are some siblings simply not meant to get along?
8. Marilyn and David bought kosher food and a new set of dishes so Noelle could eat in their home, but Noelle still won’t eat there. Do you agree with Noelle’s decision? In a conflict between loyalty to one’s family and loyalty to one’s beliefs, what should win out?
9. There are some very high-powered people in this novel. Nathaniel has two PhDs and may someday win the Nobel Prize. Lily clerked on the Supreme Court. Malcolm is a chef featured in magazines. Marilyn is a successful doctor. Amram and Noelle, by contrast, struggle professionally. To what extent do the characters in this book define their own success in comparison with the success of their siblings and parents?
10. Thisbe says to Lily, “Everyone who knew us says Leo and I were great together. There’s no love like the love that’s been erased.” Were Leo and Thisbe great together? How reliable is memory when someone has died? Do you think Thisbe and Leo would have worked things out if he had come home from Iraq?
11. Most of the major characters in the novel are female, yet the author is male. Does that influence the way you read this novel? Is it different for a male writer to write from the perspective of a woman?
12. Like the journalist Daniel Pearl, Leo was captured in the Middle East and executed by terrorists. More recently, a number of prominent journalists have died in the Middle East. The specter of the Iraq War hovers over this novel, and the book is populated by characters who have strong, often opposing political opinions. Yet the book takes place in the bucolic Berkshires, far from the center of the conflict. Would you describe this as a political novel?
13. Although Lily and Malcolm aren’t married, they live together and have been a couple for ten years. Why does Lily refuse to let Malcolm come to the Berkshires for Leo’s memorial? Does it say something about their relationship? About Lily herself?
14. Noelle thanks her father for being “the voice that understands there are things you can’t know.” What does she mean by that? What makes David such a likable character?
15. Amram, by contrast, is a more difficult human being. What do you think attracted Noelle to him? What attracted Amram to Noelle? The novel says that Thisbe “understands Amram’s appeal. He has a kind of bullying charisma.” Do you find Amram likable?
16. “Judaism, Lily likes to say: just another installment in the random life of Noelle Glucksman.” Later, Noelle tells Thisbe that it was random that she ended up in Israel and that she could just as easily have landed in Sweden. What role do randomness and coincidence play in Noelle’s life? In the lives of the other characters?
17. Thisbe thinks: “Everyone wants to know about the milestones—Leo’s birthday, their anniversary—and those are hard, of course, but it’s the everyday things that are the toughest.” What does Thisbe mean by that? Do you agree with her observation?
18. Gretchen’s wealth plays a role in this novel, and the family all responds to it differently. Discuss the role of money in the novel in general.
19. The book says that David “mourns for Leo no less than Marilyn does even if he isn’t bellowing it into bullhorns.... In a way he thinks his response is more dignified.” Is David’s response more dignified? Are there better and worse ways to mourn?
20. When Amram finally returns after having been gone for two days, Noelle is livid. Later, she hits Amram in the eye with a tennis ball, and Amram accuses her of having done so intentionally. Do you think Noelle hit him intentionally? Whom do you sympathize with in this scene?
21. At the book’s end, where do you think the various characters will be in ten years?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Light Between Oceans
M.L. Stedman
Scribner
345 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451681758
Summary
The debut of a stunning new voice in fiction—a novel both heartbreaking and transcendent
After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast.
To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel.
Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.
Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom’s judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.
M. L. Stedman’s mesmerizing, beautifully written novel seduces us into accommodating Isabel’s decision to keep this “gift from God.” And we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another’s tragic loss.
The Light Between Oceans is exquisite and unforgettable, a deeply moving novel. (From the publisher.)
See the 2016 film version with Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbinder.
Listen to our Movies Meet Book Club Podcast as Hollister and O'Toole discuss the movie and book.
Author Bio
M.L. (Margot) Steadman was born and raised in Western Australia and now lives in London. This is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
More
Excerpt from The Age (Australia).
Her official biography comprises a single line: ''M.L. Stedman was born and raised in Western Australia and now lives in London.'' Even her first name, Margot, is concealed.
In only her second media interview, by phone from Perth, Stedman is nervous and bats back questions about her age, schooling, family and her work as a lawyer with a polite: ''I really don't want to answer that.'' Stedman later explains that she has never been one to seek out the limelight. ''As the book's not autobiographical, details of my life won't really shed light on the story for the reader and I'd much rather let readers focus on the book and their own experience of it.''
These are the dot points of her writing life that Stedman reluctantly offers for public consumption: raised and schooled in Perth, she says she always adored the artistry of words, had an affinity for them. Working in London as a lawyer in 1997, while staring at her office computer screen, she had a eureka moment, ''from God knows where'', deciding then to try creative writing. She hired a writing coach, went to Greece on a creative-writing holiday, where she wrote her first published short story, Flight, and went on to study creative writing part time at the University of London. Three novellas were published in an out-of-print anthology, Desperate Remedies, in 2008. Read more . . .
Book Reviews
As time passes the harder the decision becomes to undo and the more towering is its impact. This is the story of its terrible consequences. But it is also a description of the extraordinary, sustaining power of a marriage to bind two people together in love, through the most emotionally harrowing circumstances.
Victoria Moore - Daily Mail (UK)
This fine, suspenseful debut explores desperation, morality, and loss, and considers the damaging ways in which we store our private sorrows, and the consequences of such terrible secrets.
Martha Stewart Whole Living
(Starred review.) In Stedman’s deftly crafted debut, Tom Sherbourne, seeking constancy after the horrors of WWI, takes a lighthouse keeper’s post on an Australian island, and calls for Isabel, a young woman he met on his travels, to join him there as his wife. In peaceful isolation, their love grows. But four years on the island and several miscarriages bring Isabel’s seemingly boundless spirit to the brink, and leave Tom feeling helpless until a boat washes ashore with a dead man and a living child. Isabel convinces herself—and Tom—that the baby is a gift from God. After two years of maternal bliss for Isabel and alternating waves of joy and guilt for Tom, the family, back on the mainland, is confronted with the mother of their child, very much alive. Stedman grounds what could be a far-fetched premise, setting the stage beautifully to allow for a heart-wrenching moral dilemma to play out, making evident that “Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can’t tell which is which until you’ve shot ’em both, and then it’s too late.” Most impressive is the subtle yet profound maturation of Isabel and Tom as characters.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Haunting...Stedman draws the reader into her emotionally complex story right from the beginning, with lush descriptions of this savage and beautiful landscape, and vivid characters with whom we can readily empathize. Hers is a stunning and memorable debut
Booklist
(Starred review.) The miraculous arrival of a child in the life of a barren couple delivers profound love but also the seeds of destruction. Moral dilemmas don’t come more exquisite than the one around which Australian novelist Stedman constructs her debut.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the novel’s title, The Light Between Oceans. Why do you think the author selected this title? What do you visualize when you hear or read The Light Between Oceans?
2. The novel is rich with detailed descriptions of the ocean, the sky, and the wild landscape of Janus Rock. Is there a particular passage or scene that stood out to you? What role does the natural world play in Tom and Isabel’s life?
3. “The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focusing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm—the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you’re wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind.” (page 110) Discuss the impact of living in seclusion on both Tom and Isabel. Why do you think each of them is drawn to live on Janus Rock? Do you think, in the moments when we are unobserved, we are different people?
4. When Isabel tries to get Tom to open up about his family, he responds: “I’ll tell you if you really want. It’s just I’d rather not. Sometimes it’s good to leave the past in the past.”(pages 44-45) Do you think it is possible to leave the past in the past? What do you think of Tom’s opinion that it’s a “pity” that we’re a product of our family’s past? What does this tell you about his character? Discuss the impact of family history on Tom, Isabel, Hannah, and Frank.
5. Tom is haunted by what he witnessed—and what he did—during his enlistment in World War I. The narrator reflects that he’s not “one of the men whose legs trailed by a hank of sinews, or whose guts cascaded from their casing like slithering eels….But he’s scarred all the same, having to live in the same skin as the man who did the things that needed to be done back then.” (page 10) How do you think Tom’s experiences as a soldier impact his decisions throughout the novel? What other outside elements, like the war, influences the narrative?
6. Janus Rock is named for Janus, the Roman God of doorways, “always looking both ways, torn between two ways of seeing things.” (page 65) How does this knowledge impact your reading of The Light Between Oceans? Who is “torn between two ways of seeing things”?
7. Discuss the theme of opposites in The Light Between Oceans—darkness and light; safety and danger; land and water; truth and lies. How do these opposing forces shape your reading?
8. When Isabel brings Tom the map of Janus, complete with new names for all the locations on the island, Tom has an interesting reaction: “Janus did not belong to him: he belonged to it, like he’d heard the natives thought of the land. His job was just to take care of it.” (page 62) Discuss the difference in Tom’s point of view compared to Isabel’s. Does this difference in opinion foreshadow future events? How does it relate to their conflicting opinions of what to do with Lucy?
9. Did you sense that the silver rattle might turn out to play a pivotal role in the story?
10. Tom believes that rules are vital, that they are what keep a man from becoming a savage. Do you agree with him?
11. Which characters won your sympathy and why? Did this change over the course of the novel? Did your notion of what was best or right shift in the course of your reading?
12. Tom and Isabel’s deception impacts the lives of everyone around them. What did you think of the other characters’ reactions when they discover the truth about Lucy? Consider Hannah, Gwen, Septimus, Isabel’s parents, Ralph, Bluey.
13. Discuss Hannah’s reunion with Grace. Do you think she had fair expectations? Did you agree with Dr. Sumpton’s advice to Hannah about completely cutting Lucy off from Isabel and Tom?
14. M.L. Stedman makes it clear that there is no one perfect answer to the question of who should raise Grace/Lucy. She seems to undermine all notions of absolutes. It is clear that she will not dismiss all Germans as evil either. There is Hannah’s husband, ripe for persecution, and yet he is utterly innocent. Discuss the places in the novel where easy certainty turns out to be wrong.
15. Were you surprised by Isabel’s final decision to admit her role in the choice to keep Lucy—freeing Tom, but losing her child forever? Why or why not? What would you have done?
16. What did you think of the conclusion of the novel? What emotions did you feel at the story’s end? Did it turn out as you expected? Were you satisfied?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Last Tycoon (aka The Love of the Last Tycoon)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1941
Scribner
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780020199854
Summary
The Last Tycoon (aka The Love of the Last Tycoon), edited by the preeminent Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, is a restoration of the author's phrases, words, and images that were excised from the 1940 edition, giving new luster to an unfinished literary masterpiece.
It is the story of the young Hollywood mogul Monroe Stahr, who was inspired by the life of boy-genius Irving Thalberg, and is an exposé of the studio system in its heyday. (From the publisher.)
See the 2016 series with John Bomer and Kelsey Grammer. Listen to our Movies Meet Book Club Podcast as Hollister and O'Toole discuss the movie and book.
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
Of all our novelists, Fitzgerald was by reason of his temperament and his gifts the best fitted to explore and reveal the inner world of the movies and of the men who make them. The subject needs a romantic realist, which Fitzgerald was; it requires a lively sense of the fantastic, which he had; it demands the kind of intuitive perceptions which were his in abundance.... Monroe Stahr, the movie big shot about whom the story is centered, is Fitzgerald's most fully conceived character.... Fitzgerald has created a memorable figure in Stahr, Hollywood's "last tycoon"; he had marvelously conveyed the atmosphere in which a mammoth American industry is conducted; he would have ended, we can see, by bringing it clearly into focus as a world of its own within the larger pattern of American life as a whole.
J. Donald Adams - New York Times (11-9-1941)
Literary detective Bruccoli has produced a remarkable feat of scholarship in this welcome critical edition of the novel Fitzgerald began during his final year (1940) while working in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Generally considered a roman a clef, the story charts the power struggle of self-made, overworked producer Monroe Stahr (modeled on MGM producer Irving Thalberg) with rival executive Pat Brady (a stand-in for MGM head Louis B. Mayer). It is also the story of Stahr's love affair with Kathleen Moore and is (partly at least) narrated by Cecelia, Brady's cynical daughter who is hopelessly in love with Stahr. After Fitzgerald's death in December, his conflicting drafts for the novel were reworked by Edmund Wilson, who spliced episodes, moved around scenes and altered words and punctuation. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald biographer and editor of Cambridge's critical edition of The Great Gatsby, has restored Fitzgerald's original version and has also restored the narrative's ostensible working title, one that implies that Hollywood is the last American frontier where immigrants and their progeny remake themselves. Equally significant are other entries in this volume: Bruccoli's informative introduction; letters by Fitzgerald, Wilson and Maxwell Perkins; facsimiles of Fitzgerald's notes and drafts; and textual commentary, including helpful explanations of the novel's numerous topical references.
Publishers Weekly
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 Last Tycoon:
1. How would you describe Monroe Stahr as a film producer? Is he someone to admire? Do you consider him ruthless, corrupt, a bully, fair minded, obsessed with power, concerned about those who work for him?
2. At one point we are told that, early on, Stahr had to learn, as if he were learning a lesson, "tolerance, kindness, forbearance, and even affection." Can you learn those qualities...or are they innate? We learn politeness, for instance, but do we "learn" kindness or tolerance?
3. What do you think of Kathleen Moore? Why is she so mysterious? Why does she hide her engagement from Stahr?
4. Why, when Stahr can have his pick of Hollywood beauties, is he irrevocably drawn to Moore? What is the attraction, and why is it so powerful? Is it mutual...or is Stahr more besotted that she? Does he truly love her...or is he infatuated with her as a replica of Minna Davis? What about his illness? If it seems unfair for Moore to hide her impending marriage, is it fair for him to hide his illness?
5. What do you think of Stahr's behavior (his performance?) in Chapter 4, as he watches the daily rushes with his directors and cameramen? Are you impressed by the breadth of technical knowledge or his aesthetic insight? Or are you disturbed by the way he uses (or abuses) his power over those who work for him? Is he a compulsive micro-manager? Does it matter that his judgment is "always—almost always—right"?
6. What do you think of Hollywood...it this book...and in it's present day incarnation? Have you come away after reading Tycoon understanding a little more about movie making, all that goes into the production process—"months of buying, planning, writing and rewriting, casting, constructing, lighting, rehearsing and shooting"? Was there anything that surprised you...or jumped out at you?
7. Fitzgerald finds ways to satirize Hollywood, especially through his well known wit—there's the director, who when fired knew "that he could not have a third wife just now as he had planned." What other humor do you find in the book?
8. Follow-up to Question 7: Besides his use of humor, how else...or at what else... does Fitzgerald take aim in Hollywood? What about the faded star at the table during the charity ball in Chapter 5? Can you discern Fitzgerald's attitude toward Hollywood? Does he portray Hollywood as corrupt, cruel, shallow, funny?
9. Consider Stahr's statement toward the end of Chapter 5 when he talks with Boxley. Stahr tells the frustrated writer that "we have to take people's own favorite folklore and dress it up and give it back to them." Is he saying that the wider public is what cheapens Hollywood's artistic vision—that Hollywood creates what public taste demands? Or his he talking about making peoples' dreams come to life?
10. Talk about Cecilia Brady as a narrator—and as a character. How would you describe her narrative voice? Why would Fitzgerald have used her point of view—what does she bring to the story? What about the sections she does not narrate directly. How does she know about what happened? Did you find this back and forth confusing...or unconvincing? What happens to her by the end, based on Fitzgerald's notes.
11. Reinmund, one of the filming supervisors, is described as once "a man of some character, [but] he was daily forced...into devious ways of acting and thinking. He was a bad man now." Of what other character might the same be said? Is it inevitable that any of us would be corrupted by a corrupt system, in any profession?
12. Find out what you can about Fitzgerald's time in Hollywood as a writer. Could he have been referring to himself in the numerous comments about screenplay writers—those who "can't write," who are blocked...or find themselves double-teamed behind their backs? Is he, perhaps, Boxley?
13. What is Stahr so disturbed by the black fisherman he and Kathleen meet on the shoreline? Why does he care what the man thinks of films?
14. In Fitgerald's notes we learn that Stahr will be betrayed by his colleagues, especially by his former mentor, Brady? Why were the men determined to bring him down?
15. How does Kathleen Moore explain to Stahr that she got married immediately after spending the day with him? Is her explanation convincing? Fitzgerald's notes tell us that Stahr picks up with her again after her marriage. Were you surprised?
16. Where do you think Fitzgerald's sympathies lie—with the kind of Hollywood system that Stahr created...or with its dissolution because of its inherent corruption? The speculation is that Monroe Stahr is based on Irving Thalberg. Do a little research on Thalberg, and see if you can identify the parallels between the real-life producer and Fitzgerald's fictional one.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Dog Stars
Peter Heller, 2012
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307959942
Summary
A riveting, powerful novel about a pilot living in a world filled with loss—and what he is willing to risk to rediscover, against all odds, connection, love, and grace. Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope.
In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life—something like his old life—exists beyond the airport. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return—not enough fuel to get him home—following the trail of the static-broken voice on the radio. But what he encounters and what he must face—in the people he meets, and in himself—is both better and worse than anything he could have hoped for.
Narrated by a man who is part warrior and part dreamer, a hunter with a great shot and a heart that refuses to harden, The Dog Stars is both savagely funny and achingly sad, a breathtaking story about what it means to be human. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 13, 1959
• Raised—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Dartmouth College; M.F.A, Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—Iowa Writers' Workshop's Michener Fellowship; National Outdoor's Book Award
• Currently—lives in Denver, Colorado
Peter Heller is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. He is an award winning adventure writer and the author of four books of literary nonfiction. The Dog Stars, his first novel, was published in 2012.
Heller was born and raised in New York. He attended high school in Vermont and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where he became an outdoorsman and whitewater kayaker. He traveled the world as an expedition kayaker, writing about challenging descents in the Pamirs, the Tien Shan mountains, the Caucuses, Central America and Peru.
At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received an MFA in fiction and poetry, he won a Michener fellowship for his epic poem “The Psalms of Malvine.” He has worked as a dishwasher, construction worker, logger, offshore fisherman, kayak instructor, river guide, and world class pizza deliverer. Some of these stories can be found in Set Free in China, Sojourns on the Edge. In the winter of 2002 he joined, on the ground team, the most ambitious whitewater expedition in history as it made its way through the treacherous Tsangpo Gorge in Eastern Tibet. He chronicled what has been called "The Last Great Adventure Prize" for Outside, and in his book Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River.
The gorge—three times deeper than the Grand Canyon—is sacred to Buddhists, and is the inspiration for James Hilton’s Shangri La. It is so deep there are tigers and leopards in the bottom and raging 25,000 foot peaks at the top, and so remote and difficult to traverse that a mythical waterfall, sought by explorers since Victorian times, was documented for the first time in 1998 by a team from National Geographic. The book won a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, was number three on Entertainment Weekly’s “Must List” of all pop culture, and a Denver Post review ranked it “up there with any adventure writing ever written.”
In December, 2005, on assignment for National Geographic Adventure, he joined the crew of an eco-pirate ship belonging to the radical environmental group the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as it sailed to Antarctica to hunt down and disrupt the Japanese whaling fleet.
The ship is all black, sails under a jolly Roger, and two days south of Tasmania the engineers came on deck and welded a big blade called the Can Opener to the bow—a weapon designed to gut the hulls of ships. In The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammals, Heller recounts fierce gales, forty foot seas, rammings, near-sinkings, and a committed crew’s clear-eyed willingness to die to save a whale. The book was published in 2007.
In the fall of 2007 Heller was invited by the team who made the acclaimed film The Cove to accompany them in a clandestine filming mission into the guarded dolphin-killing cove in Taiji, Japan. Heller paddled into the inlet with four other surfers while a pod of pilot whales was being slaughtered. He was outfitted with a helmet cam, and the terrible footage can be seen in the movie. The Cove went on to win an Academy Award. Heller wrote about the experience for Men’s Journal.
Heller’s most recent memoir, about surfing from California down the coast of Mexico, Kook: What Surfing Taught Me about Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, was published in 2010. Can a man drop everything in the middle of his life, pick up a surfboard and, apprenticing himself to local masters, learn to ride a big, fast wave in six months? Can he learn to finally love and commit to someone else? Can he care for the oceans, which are in crisis? The answers are in. The book won a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which called it a “powerful memoir…about love: of a woman, of living, of the sea.” It also won the National Outdoor Book Award for Literature. (From the author's website.)
In 2012, Heller published his first novel, The Dog Stars, to wide acclaim. It received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Booklist and was chosen as a "Best Book of the Month" by both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Heller currently lives in Denver, Colorado.
Book Reviews
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller is a heavenly book, a stellar achievement by a debut novelist that manages to combine sparkling prose with truly memorable, shining, characters. It contains constellations of grand images and ideas, gleams with vitality, and sparkles with wit. And for a story of this ilk, it is also—a rarity—radiant with hope. Despite the many terrible events threatening to engulf our heroes, The Dog Stars never falls into the black hole of hopelessness common in many post-apocalyptic fictions.... Luminous with bright ideas.... The Dog Stars is the story of Hig’s conversation with his faith, with his humanity, with his former life. By turns moving, articulate and, exciting, it is also one of those stories that remains with the reader long after the book is closed. It contains all of the lyricism of Cormac McCarthy at his best—Hig fights for ‘things that have no use anymore except as a bulwark against oblivion. Against the darkness of total loss.’ And he reaches for the stars. For the constellations of his memory. He looks up and not down.
A. J. Kirby - New York Journal of Books
With its soulful hero, macabre villains, tender love story and action scenes staggered at perfectly spaced intervals, [The Dog Stars] unfolds with the vigor of the film it will undoubtedly become. But it also succeeds as a dark, poetic and funny novel in its own right.... That [Hig’s] story is not in the end depressing may be the most disturbing part of this novel. In fact, at times, the destruction of civilization seems to have given Hig the chance to live more richly in the present, to feel grace more acutely, to sleep outdoors and gaze up at the stars in his purged, rejuvenated universe. It is frightening to face up to the apocalypse. It’s perhaps even more frightening when we get past that and start seeing its upside.
Jennifer Reese - NPR
The Dog Stars is a post-apocalyptic adventure novel with the soul of haiku..... Heller is a well-known adventure writer, and his knowledge of and sensitivity to nature and outdoor pursuits come through here with precision and power.... A novel that gets under the skin of what it means to survive unbearable loss.
Margaret Quamme- Columbus Dispatch
A heart-wrenching and richly written story about loss and survival—and, more important, about learning to love again.... The Dog Stars is a love story, but not just in the typical sense. It’s an ode to friendship between two men, a story of the strong bond between a human and a dog, and a reminder of what is worth living for.
Michele Filgate - Minneapolis Star Tribune
By putting us in the worst of all possible times, literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope. And that brings us to Peter Heller’s ravishing doomsday novel, The Dog Stars.... An indelible core of kindness beats like a heart within [Hig]..... The supreme pleasure of this book is the lovely writing. Hig talks to himself, and to us, in a kind of syncopated rhythm that’s as intimate as a conversation, with pauses and clipped words.... In the midst of all the devastation, Heller shows us the stunning beauty of the natural world.... The pages of The Dog Stars are damp with grief for what is lost and can never be recovered. But there are moments of unexpected happiness, of real human interaction, infused with love and hope, like the twinkling of a star we might wish upon, which makes this end-of-the-world novel more like a rapturous beginning.... Remarkable.
Caroline Leavitt - San Francisco Chronicle
When Hig takes his plane into the wilderness surrounding the airport, The Dog Stars can feel less like a 21st-century apocalypse and more like a 19th-century frontier narrative (albeit one in which many, many species have become extinct). There are echoes of Grizzly Adams or Jeremiah Johnson in scenes where Heller lingers on the details of how the water in a flowing stream changes color as the sun moves across the sky, or making a fire from fallen twigs on a bed of dry moss. Modern technology finds its way back into the story, but we’re so far inside Hig’s head that it feels like one more element in the dreamlike landscape. Though it is punctuated by intensely violent outbursts, once these recede into the background, Heller’s novel can approach moments of quiet, poetic beauty.
Ron Hogan -Dallas News
Heller crafts a richly emotional perspective on how humans choose to respond when confronted with calamity.... [T]here’s a singular voice at work here in Hig’s halting first-person narration that turns his mind into a battleground between two choices of handling apocalypse: self-preserving fear, or risky humanity. At times funny, at times thrilling, at times simply heartbreaking and always rich with a love of nature, The Dog Stars finds a peculiar poetry in deciding that there’s really no such thing as the end of the world—just a series of decisions about how we live in whatever world we’ve got.
Scott Renshaw - Salt Lake City Weekly
The Dog Stars is a compelling debut from author Peter Heller, which decisively strikes at the ever-arching desire to know what makes us human.... Gruff, tormented and inspirational, Heller has the astonishing ability to make you laugh, cringe and feel ridiculously vulnerable throughout the novel that will have you rereading certain passages with a hard lump in the pit of your stomach. One of the most powerful reads in years.
Playboy
(Starred review.) In the tradition of postapocalyptic literary fiction such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse, this hypervisceral first novel by adventure writer Heller (Kook) takes place nine years after a superflu has killed off much of mankind. Hig, an amateur pilot living in Colorado, has retreated to an abandoned airport from which he flies sorties in “the Beast,” his vintage Cessna, over isolated pockets of survivors. His only neighbor is the survivalist Bangley, who’s sitting on a stockpile of weapons and munitions, and the only visitors are plague survivors who have descended into savagery. Hig’s one real comfort, besides the memory of his dead wife, Melissa, who fell victim to the flu while pregnant, is his dog, Jasper. But when that comfort is withdrawn, Hig flies west in search of the radio voice that called out to him three years before. Instead, he ends up being shot down and restrained by a doctor named Cima and her shotgun-toting father, a former Navy SEAL. With its evocative descriptions of hunting, fishing, and flying, this novel, perhaps the world’s most poetic survival guide, reads as if Billy Collins had novelized one of George Romero’s zombie flicks. From start to finish, Heller carries the reader aloft on graceful prose, intense action, and deeply felt emotion.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) In the near future, a flu pandemic has decimated civilization, leaving only scattered pockets of survivors to fend for themselves. Hig is one of the healthy ones. For the past nine years, he has coexisted with a loner named Bangley...find[ing] sanity in fishing, staring at the constellations, and flying his plane.... Verdict: After an award-winning career as an adventure writer and NPR contributor, Heller has written a stunning debut novel. In spare, poetic prose, he portrays a soaring spirit of hope that triumphs over heartbreak, trauma, and insurmountable struggles. A timely must-read. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Library Journal
(Starred review.)Richly evocative yet streamlined journal entries propel the high-stakes plot while simultaneously illuminating Hig’s nuanced states of mind as isolation and constant vigilance exact their toll, along with his sorrow for the dying world.... Heller’s surprising and irresistible blend of suspense, romance, social insight, and humor creates a cunning form of cognitive dissonance neatly pegged by Hig as an "apocalyptic parody of Norman Rockwell"—a novel, that is, of spiky pleasure and signal resonance. —Donna Seaman
Bookblist
(Starred review.) A post-apocalyptic novel in which Hig, who only goes by this mononym, finds not only survival, but also the possibility of love.... Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out some hope that human relationships can be redemptive.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The prose style of The Dog Stars is clipped, terse, often fragmented. Why would Heller choose this way of writing this particular story? In what ways is it fitting?
2. At the beginning of Chapter III, the narrator wonders why he’s telling this story. What might be his motivations? Who does he imagine his audience will be?
3. Hig says that Bangley “had been waiting for the End all his life.... He didn’t do anything that wasn’t aimed at surviving” [p. 71]. He also clearly enjoys killing people. In what ways is Hig different from Bangley? How did “the End” affect him? How does he feel about killing?
4. How and why does Hig’s relationship with Bangley change over the course of the novel?
5. Jasper’s death is a turning point for Hig. How and why does it affect him so powerfully?
6. When Cima’s father asks Hig why he came to their canyon—why he flew beyond the point of no return—Hig can’t find an answer. What might have prompted Hig to take that risk? What was he looking for?
7. When they decide to take a ewe and a ram with them on the plane, Hig says, “Like the Ark. Here we go” [p. 273]. He says it jokingly, but does the novel offer a sense of hope that life on the planet might continue, postapocalypse? What other biblical references occur in the novel?
8. The Dog Stars is a serious book about a devastating subject, but what are some of its more lighthearted moments? Why is it important that the book have this mixture of tenderness and violence, anxiety and peace?
9. What has caused the end of human civilization in the novel? Why have the scattered survivors become so savage? Does the postapocalyptic world Heller presents seem accurate and likely, given the state of the world today?
10. Why is Hig’s relationship with Cima so important in the novel? What makes it particularly touching, given what each of them has suffered?
11. The novel’s ending is ambiguous. Cima, Hig, Bangley, and Pops have formed a kind of family, the spruce and aspen are coming back, eagles and hawks are flourishing, but the trout and elk are gone, water is disappearing, and mysterious jets are flying overhead. What might happen next, or in the next ten years, for these characters and the world they live in?
12. Why does Heller conclude The Dog Stars with Hig’s favorite poem “When Will I Be Home?” by Li Shang-Yin? Why is this a fitting way to end the story? In what ways is the novel about the longing for home?
13. What does the novel imply about human nature, after the constraints of civilization have been removed? What does it suggest about the possible consequences of the way we are living now?
14. What similarities does The Dog Stars share with other recent dystopian novels like The Hunger Games and The Road? In what important ways does it differ from them?
(Questions issued by publisher.)