Next of Kin
Joanna Trollope, 1996
Penguin Group USA
331 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425184745
Summary
Joanna Trollope, adored for her pithy tales that deal with the nuances of human nature and emotion, continues her tradition with Next of Kin, the story of a family coping with the death of a loved one. When Californian Caro Meredith became an English farmer’s wife, she hoped it would help her find the happiness and stability her childhood lacked. But when she dies 24 years later, some well-kept secrets emerge that devastate her adopted daughter, Judy, her husband, Robin, and a host of in-laws.
As those who knew Caro mourn her passing, they find themselves pulled together by the commonality of their grief, even as they are torn apart by the forces of change brought about by startling revelations. It will take an outsider—Judy’s new roommate, Zoe—to help the family heal and move on. But first they must face some of the painful truths locked inside their own hearts. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Carolyn Harvey (pen name)
• Birth—December 9 1943
• Where—Gloucestershire, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Awards—Order of the British Empire (OBE), 1996
• Currently—lives in London, England
Joanna Trollope (born in her grandfather's rectory in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire), is an English novelist. She was educated at Reigate County School for Girls, followed by St Hugh's College, Oxford. She is distantly related to Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope and is a cousin of the writer and broadcaster James Trollope.
From 1965 to 1967, she worked at the Foreign Office. From 1967 to 1979, she was employed in a number of teaching posts before she became a writer full-time in 1980. Trollope was formerly married to the television dramatist Ian Curteis. Trollope's books are generally upmarket family dramas and romances that somewhat transcend these genres via striking realism in terms of human psychology and relationships. Several of her novels have been adapted for television. The best-known is The Rector's Wife.
Trollope is the author of the novels Girl from the South, Next of Kin, Marrying the Mistress, Other People's Children, The Best of Friends, and A Spanish Lover, as well as The Choir and The Rector's Wife, which were both adapted for Masterpiece Theatre. Writing as Caroline Harvey, she is also the author of the historical novels The Brass Dolphin, Legacy of Love, and A Second Legacy. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Readers of Trollope (Marrying the Mistress, Other People's Children) have come to expect the unexpected, and this latest novel is no exception. It begins grimly, with the funeral of Caro Meredith, wife of a dairy farmer in the English Midlands. Caro's death is merely the prelude, however, to a series of shattering events for those she left behind from husband Robin and daughter Judy, a magazine "subeditor," to brother-in-law Joe and his wife, Lyndsay, to Robin's parents, Dilys and Harry. The arrival of Judy's unconventional roommate, Zoe, brings a measure of openness to this emotionally closed family and gives Robin some small amount of the love that he lacked throughout his marriage. Nevertheless, despite the transformative nature of tragedy, particularly for Judy, who chucks her London life, and Lyndsay, both of whom become farmers, the novel lacks the leavening that characterizes most of Trollope's work, and some readers may find it heavy going. Buy where Trollope is popular. —Francine Fialkoff
Library Journal
The popular Trollope (Marrying the Mistress, 2000, etc.) again deftly profiles ordinary men and women learning to adapt as their lives are disrupted by change and loss. Life on the Meredith family's two farms has been pretty predictable. They're not the most beautiful spreads in England, but they've offered solace to Robin, who runs Tideswell, and younger brother Joe, along with parents Harry and Dilys, who farm Dean's Place. But this seeming serenity is, as usual, only superficial. When Caro, Robin's American wife, dies from a brain tumor, the thin fabric of the Merediths' lives disintegrates. Judy, adopted daughter of Caro and Robin, is angry with her father because she feels he mistreated her mother, seeming cool and indifferent. Robin has his own sorrows, as well as financial worries, and Joe, long depressed, feels that with Caro gone he can no longer escape his demons. The pace of events accelerates when Zoe, a photographer who shares a flat with Judy in London, comes down for a weekend, then moves in and becomes Robin's lover. Soon he's telling her about his loveless marriage, and she's also befriending Dilys—a friendship that comforts the crusty matriarch when Joe commits suicide, Harry has an accident, and all learn that they may have to leave the farm. Robin has large debts too (farming is not cheap), and Trollope makes a quiet, heartfelt plea for those who love the land and till it. The Merediths must adapt if they're to survive, Dilys ruefully concludes: change, together with loss and growth, is life. This would all be more compelling if Caro and Zoe didn't both seem more like necessary plot catalysts than memorable characters; Caro's influence on the Merediths never becomes clear, and Zoe is a very sketchy figure. Still, despite its flaws: a refreshingly unsentimental story about people trying, not always successfully, to do what's right.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell, 2004
Random House
509 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375507250
Summary
In this audacious and dazzling novel, Mitchell weaves history, science, humor, and suspense through six separate but related narratives, each set in a different time and place, each written in a different prose style, and each broken mid-action only to be concluded in the second half of the book.
A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation—the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.
In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity’s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 12, 1969
• Where—Southport, Lancashire, UK
• Education—B.A., M.A., University of Kent
• Awards—John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
• Currently—lives in County Cork, Ireland
David Mitchell is an English novelist, the author of several novels, two of which, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has lived in Italy, Japan and Ireland. Mitchell currently lives with his wife Keiko Yoshida and their two children in Ardfield, Clonakilty in County Cork, Ireland.
Early life
Mitchell was born in Southport in Merseyside, England, and raised in Malvern, Worcestershire. He was educated at Hanley Castle High School and at the University of Kent, where he obtained a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature. He lived in Sicily for a year, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England, where he could live on his earnings as a writer and support his pregnant wife.
Work
Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), moves around the globe, from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-Millennial New York City, as nine narrators tell stories that interlock and intersect. The novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His two subsequent novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. In 2007, Mitchell was listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World.
In 2012 his novel Cloud Atlas was made into a film. In recent years he has also written opera libretti. Wake, based on the 2000 Enschede fireworks disaster and with music by Klaas de Vries, was performed by the Dutch Nationale Reisopera in 2010. For his other opera, Sunken Garden, he collaborated with the Dutch composer Michel van der Aa. It premiered in 2013 with the English National Opera.
Mitchell's sixth novel, The Bone Clocks, was released on September 2nd, 2014. In an interview in The Spectator, Mitchell said that the novel has "dollops of the fantastic in it", and is about "stuff between life and death." The book was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.
Personal
In a Random House essay, Mitchell wrote:
I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I'd spent the last six years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself.
Mitchell has the speech disorder of stammering and considers the film The King's Speech (2010) to be one of the most accurate portrayals of what it's like to be a stammerer: "I'd probably still be avoiding the subject today had I not outed myself by writing a semi-autobiographical novel, Black Swan Green, narrated by a stammering 13 year old."
One of Mitchell's children is autistic, and in 2013 he and wife Keiko translated into English a book written by a 13-year-old Japanese boy with autism, The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism.
List of works
Novels
Ghostwritten (1999)
number9dream (2001)
Cloud Atlas (2004)
Black Swan Green (2006)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)
The Bone Clocks (2014)
Slade House (2015)
Utopia Avenue (2020)
(Bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/4/2014.)
Book Reviews
To write a novel that resembles no other is a task that few writers ever feel prepared to essay. David Mitchell has written such a novel—or almost has. In its need to render every kind of human experience, Cloud Atlas finds itself staring into the reflective waters of Joyce's Ulysses. Just as Joyce, in the scene that takes place in the cabman's shelter, found the hidden beauty of cliche-filled prose, so Mitchell does with his Luisa Rey story.
Tom Bissell - New York Times
Hopscotching over centuries, Cloud Atlas likewise jumps in and out of half a dozen different styles, all of which display the author's astonishing talent for ventriloquism, and end up fitting together to make this a highly satisfying, and unusually thoughtful, addition to the expanding "puzzle book" genre.
Jeff Turrentine - Washington Post
Mitchell’s virtuosic novel presents six narratives that evoke an array of genres, from Melvillean high-seas drama to California noir and dystopian fantasy. There is a naïve clerk on a nineteenth-century Polynesian voyage; an aspiring composer who insinuates himself into the home of a syphilitic genius; a journalist investigating a nuclear plant; a publisher with a dangerous best-seller on his hands; and a cloned human being created for slave labor. These five stories are bisected and arranged around a sixth, the oral history of a post-apocalyptic island, which forms the heart of the novel. Only after this do the second halves of the stories fall into place, pulling the novel’s themes into focus: the ease with which one group enslaves another, and the constant rewriting of the past by those who control the present. Against such forces, Mitchell’s characters reveal a quiet tenacity. When the clerk is told that his life amounts to “no more than one drop in a limitless ocean,” he asks, “Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”
The New Yorker
At once audacious, dazzling, pretentious and infuriating, Mitchell's third novel weaves history, science, suspense, humor and pathos through six separate but loosely related narratives. Like Mitchell's previous works, Ghostwritten and number9dream (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize), this latest foray relies on a kaleidoscopic plot structure that showcases the author's stylistic virtuosity. Each of the narratives is set in a different time and place, each is written in a different prose style, each is broken off mid-action and brought to conclusion in the second half of the book. Among the volume's most engaging story lines is a witty 1930s-era chronicle, via letters, of a young musician's effort to become an amanuensis for a renowned, blind composer and a hilarious account of a modern-day vanity publisher who is institutionalized by a stroke and plans a madcap escape in order to return to his literary empire (such as it is). Mitchell's ability to throw his voice may remind some readers of David Foster Wallace, though the intermittent hollowness of his ventriloquism frustrates. Still, readers who enjoy the "novel as puzzle" will find much to savor in this original and occasionally very entertaining work. Lots of buzz and a friendly paperback price will ensure strong sales, but like other fashionable tomes (think Pynchon's Mason & Dixon) Mitchell's novel may be more admired than read.
Publishers Weekly
In what must rank among the year's more ambitious novels, Mitchell (Ghostwritten) presents six quasicliffhanger stories in six different time periods. Beginning with a mid-19th-century Pacific voyage, the book then vaults to an early 20th-century composer who cuckolds his mentor, a 1970s reporter pursued by hitmen when she joins forces with a company whistleblower, a put-upon editor trapped inside a home for the aged, a servant clone interrogated about her travels to the outside world, and, finally, a return to the Pacific, only centuries later in a post-civilization world. Got it? Now tie up the cliffhangers in reverse order, going backward in time. The stories have a loose connecting theme of pursuing freedom and justice, and Mitchell has a gift for creating fully realized worlds with a varied cast of characters. However, there are patches of rough sledding; while the clever construction serves to highlight the novel's big ideas, the continual interruptions may distance the average reader. After slogging through five half-stories, the author has the bravery (or foolishness?) to relate the sixth in an invented dialect for a long stretch. The book has received good press in the United Kingdom, but perhaps sensing a smaller audience, the U.S. publisher offers a trade paperback original at a "try me" price. Libraries may wish to do so for their more adventurous readers of literary fiction. —Marc Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA
Library Journal
Critics on both sides of the Atlantic rave over Cloud Atlas.... Many of the accolades focus on his flair for setting and character.... [T]he technical expertise that allows Mitchell to adopt a different genre for each of his six storylines—gets him into a little trouble. The New York Times Book Review complains that Mitchell’s writing...[can] render his work coldly impressive rather than “fallibly human.” However, most reviewers found Mitchell’s unorthodox structure captivating.
Bookmarks Magazine
Great Britain's answer to Thomas Pynchon outdoes himself with this maddeningly intricate, improbably entertaining successor to Ghostwritten (2000) and Number9Dream (2002). Mitchell's latest consists of six narratives set in the historical and recent pasts and imagined futures, all interconnected whenever a later narrator encounters and absorbs the story that preceded his own. In the first, it's 1850 and American lawyer-adventurer Adam Ewing is exploring endangered primitive Pacific cultures (specifically, the Chatham Islands' native Moriori besieged by numerically superior Maori). In the second, "The Pacific Diary of Adam Ewing" falls (in 1931) into the hands of bisexual musician Robert Frobisher, who describes in letters to his collegiate lover Rufus Sixsmith his work as amanuensis to retired and blind Belgian composer Vivian Ayrs. Next, in 1975, sixtysomething Rufus is a nuclear scientist who opposes a powerful corporation's cover-up of the existence of an unsafe nuclear reactor: a story investigated by crusading reporter Luisa Rey. The fourth story (set in the 1980s) is Luisa's, told in a pulp potboiler submitted to vanity publisher Timothy Cavendish, who soon finds himself effectively imprisoned in a sinister old age home. Mitchell then moves to an indefinite future Korea, in which cloned "fabricants" serve as slaves to privileged "purebloods"-and fabricant Sonmi-451 enlists in a rebellion against her masters. The sixth story, told in its entirety before the novel doubles back and completes the preceding five (in reverse order), occurs in a farther future time, when Sonmi is a deity worshipped by peaceful "Valleymen"-one of whom, goatherd Zachry Bailey, relates the epic tale of his people's war with their oppressors, the murderous Kona tribe. Each of the six stories invents a world, and virtually invents a language to describe it, none more stunningly than does Zachry's narrative ("Sloosha's Crossin' and Ev'rythin' After"). Thus, in one of the most imaginative and rewarding novels in recent memory, the author unforgettably explores issues of exploitation, tyranny, slavery, and genocide. Sheer storytelling brilliance. Mitchell really is his generation's Pynchon.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Cloud Atlas:
1. What is Cloud Atlas about? What are the questions the book explores—its primary thematic concerns?
2. Is this a cautionary tale...a prognosis...a diagnosis? In Mitchell's tales, what do humans seem bent on doing to one another...and why? With little left at the end, what, if anything, remains?
3. Why does Mitchell use the structure he does? What might he be hoping to achieve through the six (or twelve) interrelated stories, each based on a specific genre: epistolary, mystery, farce, sci-fi, post-apocolyptic? What is the effect, then, of reversing the tales and going backward?
4. How do each of the tales fit together...forward and backward. Put the pieces of the puzzle together—showing how one story links to another. How, for instance, is Luisa Rey in t connected to Frobisher?
5. What is the significance of the title, "Cloud Atlas"?
6. What are some of the neologisms used in the sci-fic chapters on Sonmi~451—and how do they reflect our use of language today?
7. Which was your favorite tale...and least favorite?
8. What was your experience reading the work: did you find the structure disruptive and confusing...and did you enjoy picking up the linkage between the stories and seeing how it played out by the end?
8. Have you read other dystopian...or post-apocolytpic works? If so, how do they compare with Cloud Atlas?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Next Thing on My List
Jill Smolinski, 2007
Crown Publishers
204 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307351296
Summary
Meet June Parker. She works for L.A. Rideshare, adores her rent-stabilized apartment in Santa Monica, and struggles with losing a few pesky pounds.
But June’s life is about to change.
After a dark turn of events involving Weight Watchers, a chili recipe, and a car accident in which her passenger, Marissa, dies, June finds herself in possession of a list Marissa has written, “20 Things to Do By My 25th Birthday.” Even though they barely knew each other, June is compelled by both guilt and a desire to set things right and finish the list for Marissa.
The tasks before her range from inspiring (Run a 5K), to daring (Go braless), to near-impossible (Change someone’s life), and as June races to achieve each goal before the deadline, she learns more about her own life than she ever bargained for.
Funny, engaging, and heartwarming, The Next Thing on My List features a loveable, relatable heroine and a story with plenty of humor and heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—in Troy, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.A., Central Michigan University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California, area
Jill Smolinski is the author of the novels The Next Thing on My List and Flip-Flopped, as well as nine non-fiction titles on subjects including origami, travel games and supermodels. Her work has appeared in major women's magazines, as well as in an anthology of short stories, American Girls About Town. A transplanted midwesterner, she now lives in Los Angeles with her son (From the publishers.)
Extras
• At six years of age, Jill was invited to participate in a young authors conference because of a short story she wrote. From then on, she wanted to be a writer.
• She actually works, as June does, for a non-profit group that promotes carpooling or bus-riding. "Over the years, I've become somewhat of a rideshare expert—I can rattle off statistics and facts about carpooling in California so extensively...that I'm rarely invited to dinner parties anymore." (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Fresh and fun to read.... The details of [June’s] life are set out with a deft, light touch.
Boston Globe
Smolinski follows up her debut, Flip-Flopped, with an airy, hit and mostly-miss novel about one rudderless woman's accidental journey of self-discovery. After a Weight Watchers meeting, narrator June Parker offers a ride home to newly svelte Marissa Jones, and the two hit it off until Marissa dies in a nasty one-car accident. When June runs into Marissa's hot brother at the cemetery six months after the crash, she makes a rash promise to carry out the dead girl's list of 20 things to do before she turned 25 (even though June is 34). The challenges that follow—running a 5K, kissing a stranger, "dare to go braless"—serve less to improve June's life than to highlight how unfortunate it is that she's taken up a stranger's goals instead of her own. Smolinski's Los Angeles is a well-executed set—June tilts at windmills as a writer for a ride-sharing nonprofit—but the most human characters in it are June's tyrannical and calculating boss and her secretly sensitive, underused brother. Though completing the list is a transformative experience for June, the leadup fizzles.
Publishers Weekly
After June Parker offers a ride to Marissa, a virtual stranger, her passenger dies in a freak accident. Filled with guilt, June compares her own lackluster life as a mid-level L.A. Rideshare employee to the promise of Marissa, who had just lost 100 pounds and bought her first pair of sexy shoes. June knows this because she salvaged Marissa's list of "20 Things To Do by My 25th Birthday" from the crash, and those were the only two items crossed off. When June runs into Marissa's very attractive brother, she panics, telling him that she is finishing the list herself in Marissa's honor. At this point, of course, she must give up her procrastinating ways. She has six month to complete the tasks, and the challenge teaches her to embrace life and brings her closer to her friends, family, and coworkers. While the plot may sound like a recipe for unbridled sentimentality, in Smolinski's (Flip-Flopped) talented hands, June's odyssey is funny, charming, and moving. This well-paced novel with carefully crafted characters may appeal to readers of Merrill Markoe and Laura Zigman. Highly recommended.
Library Journal
June Parker's life is meandering along until a freak car accident leaves Marissa, her 24-year-old passenger, dead and June wracked with guilt. June discovers a list Marissa had been keeping.... Clever and winning, Smolinski's novel will have readers rooting for June as they eagerly turn the pages to keep up with her progress on the list. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist
Smolinski's follow-up to Flip-Flopped (2002) offers a surprisingly un-morbid account of an underachieving young woman who decides to live out another's unrealized dreams after a tragic car accident. Technically, a piece of furniture toppling off a truck caused the crash that killed 24-year-old Marissa Jones. But June Parker can't help but feel responsible, since she had given Marissa a lift home from a Weight Watchers meeting. The guilt amplifies when June discovers a list in Marissa's purse detailing the 20 things she wanted to do before her 25th birthday. Throwing herself with gusto into completing tasks that range from silly ("go braless") to heartbreaking ("change someone's life"), June finds that they give her lackluster life a focus it has been missing. She mentors an inner city "little sister," trains for and finishes a 5K race, even finds a way for her childless brother and his wife to adopt a baby. Along the way, she grows closer to Marissa's older brother Troy, a helicopter traffic reporter with surfer-boy good looks. He not only helps June check off certain items, such as taking Marissa's mom and grandmother to Las Vegas to see Wayne Newton, but his high-flying job inspires her to do something that just might revolutionize her stalled career. As she powers through Marissa's list, June realizes that her own dreams need tending and tries to break some patterns that have held her back for far too long. Smolinski crafts a believable heroine, and her chipper carpe-diem message may have readers devising their own Top 20s. Sweet, though not particularly memorable.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Marissa died soon after she lost 100 pounds. Was the timing of this was significant to the story, and if so, in what way?
2. Why do you think the author had June complete someone else’s life list and not write it as a woman completing her own?
3. Which items on the list were most challenging to June? Which would you have the hardest time completing? Did any appeal to you?
4. Have you ever written a “life list?” If so, what sort of items were on it, and have you completed any of them? If you haven’t, why not?
5. Life lists aim to help people live more dynamically by doing things—how does fit in with your philosophy of what makes a person’s life important?
6. After the accident, June says that there are two types of horrible events: the type that make you grab life by the throat and never take it for granted, and the type that make you watch a lot of reality TV. Was her reaction realistic? How would you feel if a passenger died when you were driving?
7. What did you think about the relationship between June and Deedee? How would June’s experience have been different if she’d been given the type of “Little Sister” she’d been
expecting?
8. At Sebastian’s party, guests who learn about the list assume that Marissa must have been unhappy if she was fat. Were they being, as one woman put it, “size-ist?” or it is impossible to be overweight and happy in this society?
9. What characteristics attracted June to Troy? Do you think she would have been drawn to him if he wasn’t a traffic reporter? If he wasn’t Marissa’s brother?
10. Several of the items on the list were open to interpretation—do you think June did it in a way Marissa would have liked? What other ways might she have completed some of the tasks on the list?
11. If someone you loved died (or has died), what dream of his or hers would you most want to see fulfilled? What dream of yours do you fear might never happen if you died suddenly?
12. By the end of the book, June feels that she’s changed. What do you think had the biggest impact on her transformation?
(Questions from the author's website.)
Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn
Margaret Campbell Barnes, 1949
Sourcebooks
382 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781402211751
Summary
The enigmatic Anne Boleyn comes to life in this charming, brilliant portrayal by acclaimed British novelist Margaret Campbell Barnes.
The infamous love of King Henry VIII and the mother of Queen Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn undertook a rocky journey from innocent courtier to powerful Queen of England. A meticulous researcher, Margaret Campbell Barnes immerses readers in this intrigue and in the lush, glittery world of the Tudor Court.
The beauty and charms of Anne Boleyn bewitched the most powerful man in the world, King Henry VIII, but her resourcefulness and cleverness were not enough to stop the malice of her enemies. Her swift rise to power quickly became her own undoing.
The author brings to light Boleyn's humanity and courage, giving an intimate look at a young woman struggling to find her own way in a world dominated by men and adversaries. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1892
• Where—Sussex, England, UK
• Death—April 1, 1962
• Where—Isle of Wight, UK
• Education—small private schools
Margaret Campbell Barnes lived from 1891 to 1962. She was the youngest of ten children born into a happy, loving family in Victorian England. She grew up in the Sussex countryside, and was educated at small private schools in London and Paris.
Margaret was already a published writer when she married Peter, a furniture salesman, in 1917. Over the next twenty years a steady stream of short stories and verse appeared over her name (and several noms de plume) in leading English periodicals of the time, Windsor, London, Quiver, and others. Later, Margaret's agents, Curtis Brown Ltd, encouraged her to try her hand at historical novels. Between 1944 and 1962 Margaret wrote ten historical novels. Many of these were bestsellers, book club selections, and translated into foreign editions.
Between World Wars I and II Margaret and Peter brought up two sons, Michael and John. In August 1944, Michael, a lieutenant in the Royal Armoured Corps, was killed in his tank, in the Allied advance from Caen to Falaise in Normandy. Margaret and Peter grieved terribly the rest of their lives. Glimpses of Michael shine through in each of Margaret's later novels.
In 1945 Margaret bought a small thatched cottage on the Isle of Wight, off England's south coast. It had at one time been a smuggler's cottage. But to Margaret it was a special place in which to recover the spirit and carry on writing. And write she did. All together, over two million copies of Margaret Campbell Barnes's historical novels have been sold worldwide. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Barnes gives us a sympathetic version of Anne—an alluring beauty who dazzles two European courts, French and English, with her lively wit, keen intelligence and remarkable grace. Imperious and a schemer, to be sure, but not the grasping monster of Philippa Gregory's book. (Read more...)
A LitLovers LitPick (Sept. '10)
The current Tudormania makes Barnes' historical fiction (My Lady of Cleves, etc.) as welcome today as in 1949, when this novel first appeared. Barnes lucidly envisions the well-documented events of Henry VIII's second wife's brilliant short-lived career: her education in manners, dress and dance at the French court; her tutoring in political scheming by powerful relatives who wish to be more powerful still; her determination not to end up a discarded royal mistress like her older sister. She offers credible interpretations of undocumented aspects of the Boleyn legend (such as Anne's sixth finger) and convincingly depicts Anne as she manipulates Henry to divorce Katherine, break with his chief advisor Cardinal Wolsley and abandon the Catholic Church. She's less good on Anne's relationship with poet-ambassador Thomas Wyatt, and on her loss of Henry's affection: in Barnes's old-school retelling of the journey from courtship to queenship to execution, sexual innuendo stops at innuendo. But she vividly depicts Anne's hopes and fears in an age where royal marriages were brokered like a cattle fair, and beheading could befall even a Queen.
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 Brief Gaudy Hour:
1. Talk about the way in which women in this era, including the two Boleyn daughters, were used as tokens to advance the status and fortunes of families.
2. Aside from her beauty (which was not considered as great as her sister Mary's), what makes Anne Boleyn so appealing to men? What attracts the King?
3. What drives Anne's desire to bring down Cardinal Wolsey? How does she manipulate his downfall?
4. How—and why—does Anne manage to keep the King at bay and out of her bed? What logic does she use upon Henry that makes him agree with her? What do you think might have happened had she agreed to sexual relations before marriage?
5. What are Anne's feelings toward Henry? Does she love him? Why is she so determined to marry him...and attain the title of Queen?
6. Follow-up on Question #5: Perhaps the more significant question is what drives Anne? Is she merely grasping and ambitious, or frightened? In what way is her security/safety bound up with her advancement?
7 What does Anne discover during her visit with Harry Percy six years after they are parted?
8. Talk about Anne's treatment of Catherine of Aragon and her daughter Princess Mary? What possesses Anne to dispense with mourning and celebrate Catherine's death? Why is Henry so angry with her when he interrupts the masque?
9. What affect does the incident of Princess Mary's curtsey on the balcony have on Anne as she and Henry are leaving after visiting to their daughter Elizabeth? Why doesn't Henry pay a visit to Mary?
10. What does Anne finally come to realize about herself...what self-awareness does she gain?
11. Was Anne victim...or a "tragic" figure, who succumbed as a result of an inner flaw?
12. How does this Anne compare with more recent treatments of her in historical fiction, especially in Philippa Gregory's account in The Other Boleyn Girl ... or in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Great House
Nicole Krauss, 2010
W.W. Norton & Co.
289 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393079982
Summary
For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet’s daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer’s life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944.
Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. As the narrators of Great House make their confessions, the desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared.
Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change?
Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Reared —Old Westbury, Long Island, USA
• Education—Stanford University; Oxford University
• Awards—William Saroyan Int'l. Prize; Prix du Meilleur Livre
Etranger (France); Edward Lewis Wallant Award
• Currently—Brooklyn, New York
Nicole Krauss is an American author of several novels: Forest Dark (2017), Great House (2010), The History of Love (2005), and Man Walks into a Room (2002). Her work has achieved wide acclaim, with The New York Times referring to her as "one of America's most important authors."
Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories (2003 and 2008). Her novels have been translated into thirty-five languages.
Krauss was born in New York City to an English mother and an American father who grew up partly in Israel. Krauss's maternal grandparents were born in Germany and Ukraine and later emigrated to London. Her paternal grandparents were born in Hungary and Slonim, Belarus, met in Israel, and later emigrated to New York. Many of these places are central to Krauss's 2005 novel, The History of Love, and the book is dedicated to her grandparents.
At the age of 14 Krauss became serious about writing. Until she began her first novel in 2002, Krauss wrote and published mainly poetry.
Education
Krauss enrolled in Stanford University in 1992, and that fall she met Joseph Brodsky who worked closely with her on her poetry over the next three years. He also introduced her to such writers as Italo Calvino and Zbigniew Herbert, who would have a lasting influence.
In 1999, three years after Brodsky died, Krauss produced a documentary about his work for BBC Radio 3, traveling to St. Petersburg where she stood in the "room and a half" where he grew up, made famous by his essay of that title. Krauss majored in English and graduated with Honors, winning a number of undergraduate prizes for her poetry as well as the Dean's Award for academic achievement. She also curated a reading series (with Fiona Maazel) at the Russian Samovar, a NYC restaurant co-founded by Brodsky.
In 1996, she was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and enrolled in a Masters program at Oxford University where she wrote her thesis about the American artist Joseph Cornell. During the second year of her scholarship she attended the Courtauld Institute in London, where she received a Masters in Art History, specializing in seventeenth-century Dutch art, and writing a thesis on Rembrandt.
In 2004, Krauss married the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. They live in Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, and have two children. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
An elegiac novel...achieved through exquisitely chosen sensory details that reverberate with emotional intensity. Here [Krauss] gives us her tragic vision pure. It is a high-wire performance, only the wire has been replaced by an exposed nerve, and you hold your breath, and she does not fall.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein - New York Times Book Review
To me the most resonant sections of Nicole Krauss' widely anticipated third novel, Great House, are those narrated by Aaron, an aging Israeli who still hasn't figured out how to relate to one of his adult sons.... The two chapters he narrates pulse with his hot-blooded heartbeat; the drama of his family rises to the level of the epic because he makes it so. As for the rest of the novel, it's well done enough, nicely written and full of cogent insights, but compared with Aaron, it feels as if it's taking place behind a sheet of glass.
David L. Ulin - Los Angeles Times
Nicole Krauss' latest novel, Great House, is precisely the kind of work of art for which the phrase "oddly compelling" was invented. Like her celebrated best-seller, The History of Love, this new novel contemplates love, loss and the oppressive weight of memory on those left behind. The plot here, though, is even murkier than it was in The History of Love.... I'm not sure what it all adds up to; I'm not even sure that Great House has one cohesive theme. But I'm willing to tolerate this confusion because of the isolated moments of psychological illumination that Krauss provides through her startling language. Reading Great House is like being lost in a pitch black room (an image that Krauss gives us more than once here) and then suddenly having a dusty corner of that room brilliantly lit up and exposed.
Maurreen Corrigan - National Public Radio
The most heartbreaking part of Great House is having to finish it.... As the mysteries of this beautifully written novel come spooling out, you’ll marvel at how profoundly one brilliantly crafted extended metaphor involving a mute wooden artifact can remind us what it means to be alive.
Elle
This stunning work showcases Krauss's consistent talent. The novel consists of four stories divided among eight chapters, all touching on themes of loss and recovery, and anchored to a massive writing desk that resurfaces among numerous households, much to the bewilderment and existential tension of those in its orbit, among them a lonely American novelist clinging to the memory of a poet who has mysteriously vanished in Chile, an old man in Israel facing the imminent death of his wife of 51 years, and an esteemed antiques dealer tracking down the things stolen from his father by the Nazis. Much like in Krauss's The History of Love, the sharply etched characters seem at first arbitrarily linked across time and space, but Krauss pulls together the disparate elements, settings, characters, and fragile connective tissue to form a formidable and haunting mosaic of loss and profound sorrow.
Publishers Weekly
In this latest from Krauss (The History of Love), a huge old desk with many drawers becomes the symbol of love and loss for a host of characters from different countries and time periods. There is the New York woman who has written all her novels at the desk, which she was keeping for a Chilean poet who has since disappeared. Then there are the poet's daughter, who comes back years later to claim the desk; the antiques dealer who tracks down meaningful items from people's pasts; the brother and sister who live isolated in a Jerusalem home filled with other people's furniture; the elderly couple in England who live with the desk and a horrible secret; and the dictatorial father who desperately tries to understand his creative son. Verdict: While each character's story is engrossing, the connection among them is at times impossible to follow. Still, Krauss deals with heavyweight themes—the Holocaust, the different ways people cope with suffering, the special cruelty of fathers, the costs of creativity—with meditative, insightful prose that makes for an intense and memorable reading experience. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Krauss’ masterful rendition of character is breathtaking, compelling.... This tour de force of fiction writing will deeply satisfy fans of the author’s first two books and bring her legions more. —Ellen Loughran
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Great House:
1. What is this book about? How does the desk—and its 19 drawers—serve as a metaphor? A metaphor...for what?
2. The book explores the burden of memory and loss. In what way are Krauss's characters trapped by their past? What, in fact, does it mean to become a prisoner of the past? Apply that thought/question to your own life.
3. Spend time talking about each of the stories: narrators and characters. How are they related to the desk—what is the desk's importance to each?
4. Which of the narrators or characters are most sympathetic? Which ones are least sympathetic? Which story do you find most engaging? Least engaging?
5. Who is "Your Honor"—the judge whom Nadia addresses? What is the question that Nadia is pursuing in Israel? What epiphany does Nadia finally attain?
6. Recall Arthur's meditation on life's impermanence: he saw his life as...
a giant empty field where every day a circus erected and dismantled itself...from top to bottom, but never the same circus, so what hope did we really have of ever making sense of ourselves, let alone another?
What does he mean? Does his observation resonate with you? How is that observation played out over and over throughout this book?
7. Talk about Lotte's secret—and why she never shared it with her husband. Why had she never shared her secret with Arthur? Why did she do what she did? Why at the end does Arthur do what he does with the scrap of paper?
8. Why Aaron and his story about Dov included as a narrator in this work? What is the significance of the chapter title his narration, "True Kindness"? What do you think will happen when he arrives at the hospital?
9. What is the thematic significance of George Weisz's observation about his role in locating goods looted by the Nazis:
My business has always been to listen.... Like a doctor, I listen without saying a word. But there's one difference: when all of the talking is through, I provide a solution. It's true, I can't bring the dead back to life. But I can bring back the chair they once sat in, the bed where they slept.
10. What power does Weisz have over his Yoav and Leah? Why do they behave so submissively toward him? Why does Leah withhold the location of the desk from her father?
11. How do you understand the last sentences of the book. Disappointment...and relief—for what...and why?
11. Does the desk work as an organizing principle for this novel? Or does it make for a structually clumsy and confusing story?
12. What is the significance of the title, "Great House"?
13. In a New Yorker magazine interview (June 14, 2010), Krauss says that good fiction has the "ability to remind us of ourselves, of who we are in our essence, and at the same instant to deliver a revelation." Does Great House fulfill that goal for you?
14. Maureen Corrigan (NPR review) refers to Krauss as a "fiction pioneer...giving us readers the thrill of seeing the novel stretched into amorphous new shapes." Do you agree that Krauss is a "pioneer"—does this novel break new ground? Why...or why not?
15. Is this book too cerebral—too intellectually driven—to hold your attention? Do you wish it had a stronger plot? Or do you find Krauss's philosophical explorations compelling?
16. If you've read Krauss's previous book, The History of Love, how do the two novels compare with each other? What similarities do they share?
17. Nicole Krauss is married to Jonathan Safran Foer. Is that cool, or what?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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