Red Hook Road 
Ayelet Waldman, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
343 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385517867

Summary
As lyrical as a sonata, Ayelet Waldman’s follow-up novel to Love and Other Impossible Pursuits explores the aftermath of a family tragedy.

Set on the coast of Maine over the course of four summers, Red Hook Road tells the story of two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, and of the ways in which their lives are unraveled and stitched together by misfortune, by good intentions and failure, and by love and calamity.

A marriage collapses under the strain of a daughter’s death; two bereaved siblings find comfort in one another; and an adopted young girl breathes new life into her family with her prodigious talent for the violin.

As she writes with obvious affection for these unforgettable characters, Ayelet Waldman skillfully interweaves life’s finer pleasures—music and literature—with the more mundane joys of living. Within these resonant pages, a vase filled with wildflowers or a cold beer on a hot summer day serve as constant reminders that it’s often the little things that make life so precious. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 11, 1964
• Where—Jerusalem, Israel
• Raised—Montreal, Canada; Rhode Island; Ridgewood, New
   Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Weslyan University; J.D., Harvard   
   University
• Currently—lives in Berkeley, California

Ayelet (eye-YELL-it—"gazelle") Waldman is novelist and essayist who was formerly a lawyer. She is noted for her self-revelatory essays, and for her writing (both fiction and non-fiction) about the changing expectations of motherhood. She has written extensively about juggling the demands of children, partners, career and society, in particular about combining paid work with modern motherhood, and about the ensuing maternal ambivalence.

Waldman is the author of seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and has published four novels of general interest, Daughter's Keeper (2003), Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006) Red Hook Road, (2010), and Love and Treasure (2014), as well as a collection of personal essays entitled Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009).

Personal Life
Waldman was born in Jerusalem, Israel. After the 1967 Six-Day War, when she was two and a half, her family moved to Montreal, Canada, then to Rhode Island, finally settling in Ridgewood, New Jersey. By then she was in sixth grade.

Waldman graduated from Wesleyan University, where she studied psychology and government and studied in Isreal for her her junior year. She returned to Israel after college, to live on a kibbutz, but finding it unsatisfying returned to the US. She entered Harvard University and earned her a J.D. in 1991 (she was a class-mate of Barack Obama’s).

After receiving her law degree, Waldman clerked for a federal court judge and worked in a large corporate law firm in New York for a year.

In 1993 she married Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon, whose novels include The Yiddish Policemen's Union, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Wonder Boys. They met on a blind date, when both were living in New York City. They were engaged in three weeks and married a year later, in 1993.

After moving to California with Chabon, Waldman became a public defence lawyer and later taught law at the University of California at Berkeley. She left the legal profession altogether after the birth of her second child and, although she still calls herself a lawyer on her tax returns, says she will not be returning to the legal profession—preferring to work at home with her husband and their now four children.

Writing
She and Chabon work from the same office in the backyard of their home, often discussing and editing each other's work—critiquing each other's work in what Chabon has called a "creative freeflow."

While working as a university professor, Waldman attempted to research legal issues with a view to writing articles for legal journals and thus increasing her chances of a tenured job teaching law. She has said that every time she tried to write those scholarly articles she because bored or intimidated, so she began writing fiction instead.

Waldman has said that her fiction is all about being a bad mother. She has said she chose to write because it was not as time-consuming a career as the law, it gave her something to do during nap times, kept her entertained, because it gave her a way of putting off going back to work full-time. She has also written several times about her 2002 diagnosis of bipolar disorder, a disease that runs in her family, and has spoken publicly on parenting while having a mental illness. She has said, "When I write about being bipolar, I feel queasy and ashamed, but I also feel really strongly that I shouldn't feel this way, that this is a disease, like diabetes."

Waldman started writing mystery novels, thinking they would be “easy ... light and fluffy." At first she wrote in secret, then with her husband's encouragement. She has said that she chose mysteries because they are primarily about plot. Her Mommy-Track" series, seven mysteries in all, features "part-time sleuth and full-time mother" Juliet Applebaum.

She has also published three literary novels of general interest: Daughter's Keeper (2003) drew on Waldman's experience as a criminal defense lawyer and features a young woman who inadvertently becomes involved in the trafficking of drugs; Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006) is about a Harvard-educated lawyer dealing with a precocious step-son and the loss of a newborn child to SIDS; and Red Hook Road (2010) revolves around two bereaved families in a small village in Maine.

Waldman has also published short stories in McSweeney's anthologies, as well as essays in the New York Times, Guardian (UK), San Francisco Chronicle, Elle Magazine, Vogue, Allure, Cookie, Child, Parenting, Real Simple, Health and other publications.

Controversy
Waldmen became the center of controversy for an essay, "Motherlove," in which she wrote, "I love my husband more than I love my children." She went on to say that she could survive the death of her children, but not that of her husband, and summarized her ideal family dynamic as follows: "He [her husband, Chabon] and I are the core of what he cherishes ... the children are satellites, beloved but tangential.” The essay led to extensive and vitriolic debate on television shows like "The View" and "Oprah" (on which she was a guest). (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Some of these relationships seem unlikely, but Waldman knits them together with the pleasing symmetry of a doily, her cool attention to the quotidian details of food, furnishings and personal dress forming a sturdy backdrop for the novel's occasionally soap-operatic plot turns. She also constructs an impressive parallel between the vocations of shipbuilding and playing a stringed instrument. But…what is ultimately prized here is the restoration of domestic harmony… Red Hook Road has its bumps, but readers will enjoy the ride.
Alexandra Jacobs - New York Times

This engagingly complex examination of two close families is a leap ahead for the essayist and author.
O Magazine

Waldman (Love and Other Impossible Pursuits) delivers a dense story of irreparable loss that tracks two families across four summers. After John Tetherly and Becca Copaken die in a freak car accident an hour after their wedding, their families are left to bridge stark class and cultural divides, and eventually forge deep-rooted bonds thanks to the twin deities of love and music. Becca's family is well off, from New York, and summers in Red Hook, Maine, a small coastal town where John's blue-collar single mother, Jane, cleans houses for a living. They interact, awkwardly, over how to bury the couple, the staging of an anniversary party, and over Jane's adopted niece, whose amazing musical talent makes a connection to Becca's ailing grandfather, a virtuoso violinist, who agrees to give her lessons. Becca's younger sister, Ruthie, a Fulbright scholar, meanwhile, falls in love with John's younger brother, Matt, the first Tetherly to go to college, before he drops out to work at a boatyard and finish restoring his brother's sailboat, which he plans on sailing to the Caribbean. Though Waldman is often guilty of overwriting here, the narrative is well crafted, and each of the characters comes fully to life.
Publishers Weekly

It's a beautiful summer day in Maine and perfect weather for the smiling young couple who just got married. Never mind that the groom's mother, Jane, doesn't really like John's marrying a "from awayer"—the name the locals give to people who just spend their summers in East Red Hook near the water. Jane is a Tetherly and, having lived her whole life in East Red Hook, considers her family real Mainers. The bride's mother, Iris Hewins Copaken, insists that she is native since her family's summer home was built in 1879, but since she and husband Daniel spend most of their time in New York City, Jane doesn't see it that way. Now, the guests are waiting for the young couple to show up, but when John's brother, Matt, arrives with two policemen, life as the Tetherlys and Copakens knew it ends. Over the course of four summers, they work through grief, new beginnings, and more loss. Verdict: Waldman has written a tale of two families forced together through love and tragedy. Fans of Waldman's work and readers who enjoy family sagas will find this book a pleasure. —Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH
Library Journal

Critics diverged over Waldman's dissection of the aftermath of tragedy, loneliness, and grief. While some felt drawn in by the intriguing plot, characters, and portrait of grief, no matter how bleak, others felt hoodwinked by an overly depressing, cliched story of fairytale romance and family relationships gone terribly awry.
Bookmarks Magazine

[A] lyrical tale of love and loss...Waldman's startling premise—a newly married couple dies in an automobile accident enroute to their reception—sets the scene for this searing, soul-searching examination of human emotions and reactions
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 Red Hook Road:

1. Why might Waldman have chosen to open her novel with the taking of photos after the wedding? What effect does the scene have on the emotional impact of the accident?

2. How would you describe Iris Copaken, mother of the bride?

3. What about Jane Tetherley, mother of the groom—how would you describe her? How does she feel toward Iris? Is Jane's opinion accurate...or does it stem from resentment?

4. Waldman describes a funny—and very human—reaction that always seems to occur whenever Jane talks to Iris. Jane makes Iris...

so uncomfortable that she inevitably found herself fulfilling what she imagined to be Jane's worst expectations of the fancy-pants New York from-away....her voice crept into a high shrill register and she said the most absurd things.

Why does Jane make Iris uncomfortable? Does the passage excuse Iris's behavior—perhaps make her transgressions not so intentional but rather a result of anxiety?

5. How does each of the different characters—parents and siblings—cope with grief?

6. What does Emil Kimmelbrod do for the families? What does he teach them? What have the Holocaust and his music taught Emil about life and death?

7. How—and why—does Waldman draw the parallel between boatbuilding and playing a stringed instrument?

8. How do the two families differ—how does Waldman use them to reflect the clash of culture and class?

9. Can Iris ever truly belong to the Maine community she loves...to which she has such deep ties? Is it her personality that keeps her an outsider, a "from-away," or the fact that the family spends only its summers there?

10. What are the fault lines in Iris and Daniel's marriage? Talk about the impact of the accident on the couple. Absent the tragedy of losing their daughter, would the two have split...or remained together?

11. Care to comment on this passage?

A long marriage, like a classic wooden boat, could be a thing of grace, but only if great effort was devoted to its maintenance.

12. Is the novel's end satisfying...or too much melodrama?

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


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Deep Creek
Dana Hand, 2010
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
308 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547237480


Summary
Idaho Territory, June 1887. A small-town judge takes his young daughter fishing, and she catches a man. Another body surfaces, then another. The final toll: over 30 Chinese gold miners brutally murdered. Their San Francisco employer hires Idaho lawman Joe Vincent to solve the case.

Soon he journeys up the wild Snake River with Lee Loi, an ambitious young company investigator, and Grace Sundown, a metis mountain guide with too many secrets. As they track the killers across the Pacific Northwest, through haunted canyons and city streets, each must put aside lies and old grievances to survive a quest that will change them forever.

Deep Creek is a historical thriller inspired by actual events and people: the 1887 massacre of Chinese miners in remote and beautiful Hells Canyon, the middle-aged judge who went after their slayers, and the sham race-murder trial that followed. This American tragedy was long suppressed and the victims nearly forgotten; Deep Creek teams history and imagination to illuminate how and why, in a seamless, fast-moving tale of courage and redemption, loss and love. A dazzling new novel for fans of Leif Enger, Lisa See, and Ivan Doig. (From the publisher.)

Author Bios
Dana Hand is the pen name of Will Howarth and Anne Matthews, who live and work in Princeton, NJ. Under their own names, they have published eighteen nonfiction books on American history, literature, and public issues. Deep Creek is their first novel.

• Will Howarth is an authority on the history and literature of travel, places, and nature. He served as editor-in-chief of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, chaired The Center for American Places and, in over forty years at Princeton, explored nature-culture conflicts in courses ranging from pre-colonial America to postmodern fiction. As historian and critic, he specializes in trans-Atlantic romanticism, literary nonfiction, and the environmental humanities. As free-lance writer, he has covered assignments for many national periodicals. He first learned of the events at Deep Creek in 1981, while on assignment in Idaho for National Geographic.

• Anne Matthews writes about American places facing sudden and often unwanted change. Where the Buffalo Roam, on the depopulating Great Plains, was a Pulitzer finalist in nonfiction. Bright College Years, a New York Times Notable Book, examines the American campus. Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City describes the wilding of urban spaces and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. She served on the Library of America editorial board for the two-volume collection, Reporting World War II. A contributing editor for American Scholar and Preservation, she has lectured and taught at Princeton, Columbia, and New York University. (From the authors' website.)

Book Reviews
Deep Creek is a gripping, spooky historical novel...highly ambitious and compelling, much more complex than it might appear from paraphrase. The dual authorship of this novel [Dana Hand is the pen name of Will Howarth and Anne Matthews] may have something to do with the fact that it's twice as good as it might have been otherwise
Carolyn See - Washington Post

The 1887 massacre of more than 30 Chinese gold miners in a remote area of the Idaho territory provides the real-life foundation for this engrossing look at racial prejudice and the settling of the West, the first novel from Hand (the pen name for William Howarth and Anne Matthews). After police judge Joe Vincent and his 10-year-old daughter, Nell, find a body while fishing, more brutally mutilated bodies turn up along the Snake River. The Sam Yup Company, a Chinese labor exchange, hires Vincent to find the culprits. Lee Loi, an ambitious investigator, and Grace Sundown, a Metis mountain guide who shares a past with Vincent, join the hunt. The three track a murderous crew through remote canyons and towns. The plot soon evolves into an insightful look at how Chinese immigrants and American Indians became the targets of rage and violence. The subsequent capture and trial of the killers illustrate that how the West was won was neither simple nor fair to minorities.
Publishers Weekly

Chinese gold miners are massacred in the Wild West, and the pursuit of their killers proves arduous. Writing under a joint pseudonym, nonfiction authors Will Howarth and Anne Matthews base their first novel on "actual events" (per their epigraph). The miners' bodies, horribly mutilated, are carried down the Snake River to Lewiston, Idaho Territory, in June 1887. Joe Vincent, the 56-year-old county judge, is asked to investigate, a tough assignment because feeling against Chinese immigrants is running strong. But Joe is a decent guy, and the case assumes new urgency when Lee Loi offers him $1,500 to pursue it. The young, Westernized Chinese man is an emissary of the Sam Yup, the powerful San Francisco company that had bankrolled the miners' expedition. Joe and Lee venture upriver with mysterious, exotic tracker Grace Sundown, the child of a French father and a Nimipu (Nez Perce) mother. They quickly identify the killers: seven white horse rustlers living in a cabin near the mining operation, led by a criminal psychopath named Blue Evans. The versatile Joe goes undercover to gather evidence and barely escapes with his life. This much is straightforward, but the story has more eddies and cross-currents than the Snake. What is the connection between the Sam Yup and John Vollmer, the county's biggest landowner? Between Vollmer and Evans? What intrigue is Joe's estranged wife Libby up to, and what has transpired between Joe and Grace? There are exciting moments for the odd trio of investigators as they elude Evans and the angry spirits of several dozen dead miners, but then the narrative sags disastrously with an account of the 1877 war against the Nez Perce, in which Joe participated. Two-thirds of the way through, we're still getting his back story. The authors' clipped prose works well for the action passages, much less so for the complex, see-sawing relationship between Joe and Grace. The makings of a fine novel, obscured by poor pacing and plotting.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
(Be sure to check out the authors' website for additional information—maps, historical profiles, and more.)

1. The story emerges from four actions: Lee asks Joe to lead an investigation; Henry asks Grace to come and help; after a ten-year absence, Grace agrees; and Joe consents to let Grace serve as river guide. What motives, evident and secret, impel these events?

2. Joe is a lawyer and investigator, able to examine bits of evidence and find cause-effect patterns. But certain liars can fool him entirely. Why?

3. Grace is quick, intuitive, learned, and bitter. What are the sources of her frustrations?

4. At first, Lee Loi is cheerful, self-centered, and cocky. What are the sources of his confidence? Why are his views so conventional?

5. A refrain in Joe's life is How much of that is true? The recurring answer: As much as you want it to be. Why are the crimes at Deep Creek so important to him?

6. On the return journey to Deep Creek, we learn that Grace has second sight and strange abilities. How does this side of her affect relations with others, especially Joe?

7. When and why does Lee begin to change? What role does he play after the river trips?

8. When do the three investigators truly become a team?

9. How do the Chinese miners behave, as individuals and as a group? Are they strange, alien, or clannish, as their detractors claimed? What aspects of their lives are most surprising?

10. Duty and honor take many forms. Is Joe a patriot? Is Jackson? Is Grace a good daughter? Is Nell? Why will Dow and Yap never break their promise to Elder Boss?

11. Why is Libby Leland so calculating and controlling? Why is she so successful?

12. Why is Blue Evans such a natural leader of men? What were his motives at Deep Creek?

13. How would Vollmer tell this story? How would Libby?

14. Why are so many of the characters wanderers, or exiles? What makes a family?

15. After the trial, each character experiences a process of compensation. Explain.
(Questions courtesy of authors' website.)

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The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini, 2003
Penguin Group USA
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594631931  


Summary
I sat on a bench near a willow tree and watched a pair of kites soaring in the sky. I thought about something Rahim Khan said just before he hung up, almost as an afterthought, "There is a way to be good again.

Amir and Hassan are childhood friends in the alleys and orchards of Kabul in the sunny days before the invasion of the Soviet army and Afghanistan’s decent into fanaticism. Both motherless, they grow up as close as brothers, but their fates, they know, are to be different. Amir’s father is a wealthy merchant; Hassan’s father is his manservant. Amir belongs to the ruling caste of Pashtuns, Hassan to the despised Hazaras.

This fragile idyll is broken by the mounting ethnic, religious, and political tensions that begin to tear Afghanistan apart. An unspeakable assault on Hassan by a gang of local boys tears the friends apart; Amir has witnessed his friend’s torment, but is too afraid to intercede. Plunged into self-loathing, Amir conspires to have Hassan and his father turned out of the household.

When the Soviets invade Afghanistan, Amir and his father flee to San Francisco, leaving Hassan and his father to a pitiless fate. Only years later will Amir have an opportunity to redeem himself by returning to Afghanistan to begin to repay the debt long owed to the man who should have been his brother.

Compelling, heartrending, and etched with details of a history never before told in fiction, The Kite Runner is a story of the ways in which we’re damned by our moral failures, and of the extravagant cost of redemption. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—March 04, 1965
• Where—Kabul, Afghanistan
• Education—B.S., Santa Clara University; M.D., University
  of California, San Diego School of Medicine
• Currently—lives in northern California

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. His father was a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and History at a large high school in Kabul. In 1970, the Foreign Ministry sent his family to Tehran, where his father worked for the Afghan embassy. They lived in Tehran until 1973, at which point they returned to Kabul.

In July of 1973, on the night Hosseini’s youngest brother was born, the Afghan king, Zahir Shah, was overthrown in a bloodless coup by the king’s cousin, Daoud Khan. At the time, Hosseini was in fourth grade and was already drawn to poetry and prose; he read a great deal of Persian poetry as well as Farsi translations of novels ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series.

In 1976, the Afghan Foreign Ministry once again relocated the Hosseini family, this time to Paris. They were ready to return to Kabul in 1980, but by then Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion of the Soviet army. The Hosseinis sought and were granted political asylum in the United States. In September of 1980, Hosseini’s family moved to San Jose, California. They lived on welfare and food stamps for a short while, as they had lost all of their property in Afghanistan. His father took multiple jobs and managed to get his family off welfare.

Hosseini graduated from high school in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Biology in 1988. The following year, he entered the University of California-San Diego’s School of Medicine, where he earned a Medical Degree in 1993. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and began practicing Internal Medicine in 1996. His first love, however, has always been writing.

In 2003, Hosseini published The Kite Runner, which became a runaway bestseller and film in 2007. He followed up with his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns in 2007, also a bestseller. His third novel, And the Mountians Echoed, was published in 2013.

Hosseini has vivid, and fond, memories of peaceful pre-Soviet era Afghanistan, as well as of his personal experiences with Afghan Hazaras. One Hazara in particular was a thirty-year-old man named Hossein Khan, who worked for the Hosseinis when they were living in Iran. When Hosseini was in the third grade, he taught Khan to read and write. Though his relationship with Hossein Khan was brief and rather formal, Hosseini always remembered the fondness that developed between them.

In 2006, Hosseini was named a goodwill envoy to the UNHCR, The United Nations Refugee Agency. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:

• During his years in the U.S., Hosseini has soaked in more than his share of American culture. He professes to be a fan of such U.S. institutions as the music of Bruce Springsteen and football. Still, he admits that he simply cannot appreciate baseball, saying, "I think that to fully appreciate baseball, it helps to have been born in the U.S."

• When it comes to chickens, Hosseini is a chicken. "I'm terrified of chickens," the writer confesses. "Absolutely petrified. This intense and irrational fear is, I believe, caused by the memory of a black hen we owned in Kabul when I was a child. She used to peck her own chicks to death as soon as the eggs hatched."

• When Hosseini isn't writing or tending to one of his patients, he enjoys games of no-limits Texas hold 'em poker with his brother and friends.

• When asked what book most influenced him, here is what he had to say:

I remember reading The Grapes of Wrath in high school in 1983. My family had immigrated to the U.S. three years before, and I had spent the better part of the first two years learning English. John Steinbeck's book was the first book I read in English where I had an "Aha!" moment, namely in the famed turtle chapter. For some reason, I identified with the disenfranchised farm workers in that novel—I suppose in one sense, they reminded me of my own country's traumatized people. And indeed, when I went back to Afghanistan in 2003, I met people with tremendous pride and dignity under some very bleak conditions; I suspect I met a few Ma Joads and Tom Joads in Kabul.

Book Reviews 
This is a top book club read, many claiming it as one of their favorites. And for good reason.... The first third of the book shows us a world of enchantment. We see Afghanistan in the 1960's and early '70’s, a long-lost land of brilliant skies and lushly cultivated gardens. Once the storyline moves to the U.S., the book takes a more prosaic turn.
A LitLovers LitPick  (July '07)

In The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini gives us a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence — forces that continue to threaten them even today.
Edward Hower - The New York Times

Intimate account of family and friendship, betrayal and salvation that requires no atlas or translation to engage and enlighten us.
The Washington Post

Hosseini's stunning debut novel starts as an eloquent Afghan version of the American immigrant experience in the late 20th century, but betrayal and redemption come to the forefront when the narrator, a writer, returns to his ravaged homeland to rescue the son of his childhood friend after the boy's parents are shot during the Taliban takeover in the mid '90s. Amir, the son of a well-to-do Kabul merchant, is the first-person narrator, who marries, moves to California and becomes a successful novelist. But he remains haunted by a childhood incident in which he betrayed the trust of his best friend, a Hazara boy named Hassan, who receives a brutal beating from some local bullies. After establishing himself in America, Amir learns that the Taliban have murdered Hassan and his wife, raising questions about the fate of his son, Sohrab. Spurred on by childhood guilt, Amir makes the difficult journey to Kabul, only to learn the boy has been enslaved by a former childhood bully who has become a prominent Taliban official.

The price Amir must pay to recover the boy is just one of several brilliant, startling plot twists that make this book memorable both as a political chronicle and a deeply personal tale about how childhood choices affect our adult lives. The character studies alone would make this a noteworthy debut, from the portrait of the sensitive, insecure Amir to the multilayered development of his father, Baba, whose sacrifices and scandalous behavior are fully revealed only when Amir returns to Afghanistan and learns the true nature of his relationship to Hassan. Add an incisive, perceptive examination of recent Afghan history and its ramifications in both America and the Middle East, and the result is a complete work of literature that succeeds in exploring the culture of a previously obscure nation that has become a pivot point in the global politics of the new millennium. (June 2) Forecast: It is rare that a book is at once so timely and of such high literary quality. Though Afghanistan is now on the media back burner, its fate is still of major interest and may become even more so as the U.S.'s nation-building efforts are scrutinized.
Publishers Weekly

This painful, moving, remarkable debut novel depicts the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of a deeply flawed protagonist. Growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan, Amir feels unloved by his widowed father, who seems to care more for Hassan, the son of their Hazara servant, Ali. Amir and Hassan are close but not quite friends. On what should have been the best day of his young life, when he wins a kite-flying contest and finally some respect from his father, Amir betrays Hassan and becomes haunted by guilt. Amir comes to California when the Soviets invade his country but returns years later to rescue Hassan's orphaned son from the Taliban and redeem himself. Hosseini, a physician in the San Francisco area, has a wonderful gift for developing distinctive characters and creating a strong sense of place. While far from polished, his narration offers a profound sincerity that might have been missing with a professional reader. A sad and violent yet beautiful and unforgettable story; highly recommended for all collections, especially those with interests in the American immigrant experience. —Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr.
Library Journal

Here’s a real find: a striking debut from an Afghan now living in the US. His passionate story of betrayal and redemption is framed by Afghanistan’s tragic recent past. Moving back and forth between Afghanistan and California, and spanning almost 40 years, the story begins in Afghanistan in the tranquil 1960s. Our protagonist Amir is a child in Kabul. The most important people in his life are Baba and Hassan. Father Baba is a wealthy Pashtun merchant, a larger-than-life figure, fretting over his bookish weakling of a son (the mother died giving birth); Hassan is his sweet-natured playmate, son of their servant Ali and a Hazara. Pashtuns have always dominated and ridiculed Hazaras, so Amir can’t help teasing Hassan, even though the Hazara staunchly defends him against neighborhood bullies like the "sociopath" Assef. The day, in 1975, when 12-year-old Amir wins the annual kite-fighting tournament is the best and worst of his young life. He bonds with Baba at last but deserts Hassan when the latter is raped by Assef.

And it gets worse. With the still-loyal Hassan a constant reminder of his guilt, Amir makes life impossible for him and Ali, ultimately forcing them to leave town. Fast forward to the Russian occupation, flight to America, life in the Afghan exile community in the Bay Area. Amir becomes a writer and marries a beautiful Afghan; Baba dies of cancer. Then, in 2001, the past comes roaring back. Rahim, Baba’s old business partner who knows all about Amir’s transgressions, calls from Pakistan. Hassan has been executed by the Taliban; his son, Sohrab, must be rescued. Will Amir wipe the slate clean? So he returns to the hell of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and reclaims Sohrab from aTaliban leader (none other than Assef) after a terrifying showdown. Amir brings the traumatized child back to California and a bittersweet ending. Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing spectacle of hard-won personal salvation. All this, and a rich slice of Afghan culture too: irresistible.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. The novel begins with Amir's memory of peering down an alley, looking for Hassan who is kite running for him. As Amir peers into the alley, he witnesses a tragedy. The novel ends with Amir kite running for Hassan's son, Sohrab, as he begins a new life with Amir in America. Why do you think the author chooses to frame the novel with these scenes? Refer to the following passage: "Afghans like to say: Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end...crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis [nomads]." How is this significant to the framing of the novel?

2. The strong underlying force of this novel is the relationship between Amir and Hassan. Discuss their friendship. Why is Amir afraid to be Hassan's true friend? Why does Amir constantly test Hassan's loyalty? Why does he resent Hassan? After the kite running tournament, why does Amir no longer want to be Hassan's friend?

3. Early in Amir and Hassan's friendship, they often visit a pomegranate tree where they spend hours reading and playing. "One summer day, I used one of Ali's kitchen knives to carve our names on it: 'Amir and Hassan, the sultans of Kabul.' Those words made it formal: the tree was ours." In a letter to Amir later in the story, Hassan mentions that "the tree hasn't borne fruit in years." Discuss the significance of this tree.

4. We begin to understand early in the novel that Amir is constantly vying for Baba's attention and often feels like an outsider in his father's life, as seen in the following passage: "He'd close the door, leave me to wonder why it was always grown-ups time with him. I'd sit by the door, knees drawn to my chest. Sometimes I sat there for an hour, sometimes two, listening to their laughter, their chatter." Discuss Amir's relationship with Baba.

5. After Amir wins the kite running tournament, his relationship with Baba undergoes significant change. However, while they form a bond of friendship, Amir is still unhappy. What causes this unhappiness and how has Baba contributed to Amir's state of mind? Eventually, the relationship between the two returns to the way it was before the tournament, and Amir laments "we actually deceived ourselves into thinking that a toy made of tissue paper, glue, and bamboo could somehow close the chasm between us." Discuss the significance of this passage.

6. As Amir remembers an Afghan celebration in which a sheep must be sacrificed, he talks about seeing the sheep's eyes moments before its death. "I don't know why I watch this yearly ritual in our backyard; my nightmares persist long after the bloodstains on the grass have faded. But I always watch, I watch because of that look of acceptance in the animal's eyes. Absurdly, I imagine the animal understands. I imagine the animal sees that its imminent demise is for a higher purpose." Why do you think Amir recalls this memory when he witnesses Hassan's tragedy in the alleyway? Amir recollects the memory again toward the end of the novel when he sees Sohrab in the home of the Taliban. Discuss the image in the context of the novel.

7. America acts as a place for Amir to bury his memories and a place for Baba to mourn his. In America, there are "homes that made Baba's house in Wazir Akbar Khan look like a servant's hut." What is ironic about this statement? What is the function of irony in this novel?

8. What is the significance of the irony in the first story that Amir writes? After hearing Amir's story, Hassan asks, "Why did the man kill his wife? In fact, why did he ever have to feel sad to shed tears? Couldn't he have just smelled an onion?" How is his reaction to the story a metaphor for Amir's life? How does this story epitomize the difference in character between Hassan and Amir?

9. Why is Baba disappointed by Amir's decision to become a writer? During their argument about his career path, Amir thinks to himself: "I would stand my ground, I decided. I didn't want to sacrifice for Baba anymore. The last time I had done that, I had damned myself." What has Amir sacrificed for Baba? How has Amir "damned himself"?

10. Compare and contrast the relationships of Soraya and Amir and their fathers. How have their upbringings contributed to these relationships?

11. Discuss how the ever-changing politics of Afghanistan affect each of the characters in the novel.

12. On Amir's trip back to Afghanistan, he stays at the home of his driver, Farid. Upon leaving he remarks: "Earlier that morning, when I was certain no one was looking, I did something I had done twenty-six years earlier: I planted a fistful of crumpled money under the mattress." Why is this moment so important in Amir's journey?

13. Throughout the story, Baba worries because Amir never stands up for himself. When does this change?

14. Amir's confrontation with Assef in Wazir Akar Khan marks an important turning point in the novel. Why does the author have Amir, Assef, and Sohrab all come together in this way? What is this the significance of the scar that Amir develops as a result of the confrontation? Why is it important in Amir's journey toward forgiveness and acceptance?

15. While in the hospital in Peshawar, Amir has a dream in which he sees his father wrestling a bear: "They role over a patch of grass, man and beast...they fall to the ground with a loud thud and Baba is sitting on the bear's chest, his fingers digging in its snout. He looks up at me, and I see. He's me. I am wrestling the bear." Why is this dream so important at this point in the story? What does this dream finally help Amir realize?

16. Amir and Hassan have a favorite story. Does the story have the same meaning for both men? Why does Hassan name his son after one of the characters in the story?

17. Baba and Amir know that they are very different people. Often it disappoints both of them that Amir is not the son that Baba has hoped for. When Amir finds out that Baba has lied to him about Hassan, he realizes that "as it turned out, Baba and I were more alike than I'd never known." How does this make Amir feel about his father? How is this both a negative and positive realization?

18. When Amir and Baba move to the States their relationship changes, and Amir begins to view his father as a more complex man. Discuss the changes in their relationship. Do you see the changes in Baba as tragic or positive?

19. Discuss the difference between Baba and Ali and between Amir and Hassan. Are Baba's and Amir's betrayals and similarities in their relationships of their servants (if you consider Baba's act a betrayal) similar or different? Do you think that such betrayals are inevitable in the master/servant relationship, or do you feel that they are due to flaws in Baba's and Amir's characters, or are they the outcome of circumstances and characters?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Patron Saint of Liars 
Ann Patchett, 1992
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
356 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061339219


Summary
St. Elizabeth's is a home for unwed mothers in the 1960s. Life there is not unpleasant, and for most, it is temporary. Not so for Rose, a beautiful, mysterious woman who comes to the home pregnant but not unwed. She plans to give up her baby because she knows she cannot be the mother it needs. But St. Elizabeth's is near a healing spring, and when Rose's time draws near, she cannot go through with her plans, not all of them. And she cannot remain forever untouched by what she has left behind...and who she has become in the leaving.

More
In The Patron Saint of Liars, Rose is a young wife of three years who concludes she married by mistake, that she misinterpreted teenage lust as a sign from God. Newly pregnant and unable to continue a life with a man she doesn't love, Rose decides to leave. She abandons her quiet, inoffensive husband and their life at the southern California seaside of the 1960s.

Rose plots to give up the baby for adoption, never telling her husband. And to punish herself, she will also give up the mother she adores, the one person she really loves. Leaving without notice, she drives east to Kentucky and soon realizes that any new life will be a deception and she will be a liar for the rest of her life.

Rose's destination is the sanctuary of St. Elizabeth's Home for Unwed Mothers in Habit, Kentucky. St. Elizabeth's is a refuge but also a place of liars and "leavers," for all of the girls who come will leave, and most will lie about where they've been and what has happened. Unlike the other young women, Rose is married but chooses to tell no one. She plans to wait out her pregnancy, give over the baby to adoption, and then move on.

But St. Elizabeth's keeps Rose for years. In the once elegant Hotel Louisa, the home is near the site of a healing spring run dry, a spring that still exerts a little magic. Rose learns to cook for the girls who come and go and befriends the saintly Sister Evangeline, who knows people's troubles and sees their futures.

Rose decides to keep her baby and marries Son, the groundskeeper, and once again begins a small life with a man she doesn't love. Her daughter Cecelia, or Sissy, grows up at St. Elizabeth's among the nuns, a devoted father, and successive waves of unwed mothers. Sissy longs for her mother's love and attention and wonders about her past.

Most of the odd and troubled characters fascinate and confound us. In the end, Rose surprises us one more time, and Sissy grows up, showing herself neither a liar nor a "leaver." (Both summaries from the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1963
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Raised—Nashville, Tennessee
• Education—B.A., Sarah Lawrence College; M.F.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellowship; PEN/Faulkner Award; Orange Prize
• Currently—lives in Nashville, Tennessee


Ann Patchett is an American author of both fiction and nonfiction. She is perhaps best known for her 2001 novel, Bel Canto, which won her the Orange Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award and brought her nationwide fame.

Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her mother is the novelist Jeanne Ray. Her father, Frank Patchett, who died in 2012 and had been long divorced from her mother, served as a Los Angeles police officer for 33 years, and participated in the arrests of both Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan. The story of Patchett's own family is the basis for her 2016 novel, Commonwealth, about the individual lives of a blended family spanning five decades.

Education and career
Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls run by the Sisters of Mercy. Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College and took fiction writing classes with Allan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. She managed to publish her first story in The Paris Review before she graduated. After college, she went on to the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa

For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine, writing primarily non-fiction; the magazine published one of every five articles she wrote. She said that the magazine's editors could be cruel, but she eventually stopped taking criticism personally. She ended her relationship with the magazine following a dispute with one editor, exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!"

In 1990-91, Patchett attended the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was there she wrote The Patron Saint of Liars, which was published in 1992 (becoming a 1998 TV movie). It was where she also met longtime friend Elizabeth McCracken—whom Patchett refers to as her editor and the only person to read her manuscripts as she is writing.

Although Patchett's second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994, her fourth book, Bel Canto, was her breakthrough novel. Published in 2001, it was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and won the PEN/Faulkner Award and Britain's Orange Prize.

In addition to her other novels and memoirs, Patchett has written for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Oprah Magazine, ELLE, GQ, Gourmet, and Vogue. She is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories.

Personal
Patchett was only six when she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and she lives there still. She is particularly enamored of her beautiful pink brick home on Whitland Avenue where she has lived since 2004 with her husband and dog. When asked by the New York Times where would she go if she could travel anywhere, Patchett responded...

I've done a lot of travel writing, and people like to ask me where I would go if I could go anyplace. My answer is always the same: I would go home. I am away more than I would like, giving talks, selling books, and I never walk through my own front door without thinking: thank-you-thank-you-thank-you.... [Home is] the stable window that opens out into the imagination.

In 2010, when she found that her hometown of Nashville no longer had a good book store, she co-founded Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes; the store opened in November 2011. In 2012, Patchett was on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is a vegan for "both moral and health reasons."

In an interview, she once told Barnes and Noble that the book that influenced her writing more than any other was Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow.

I think I read it in the tenth grade. My mother was reading it. It was the first truly adult literary novel I had read outside of school, and I read it probably half a dozen times. I found Bellow's directness very moving. The book seemed so intelligent and unpretentious. I wanted to write like that book.

Books
1992 - The Patron Saint of Liars
1994 - Taft
1997 - The Magician's Assistant
2004 - Truth and Beauty: A Friendship
2001 - Bel Canto
2007 - Run
2008 - What Now?
2011 - State of Wonder; The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
2013 - This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
2016 - Commonwealth
2019 - The Dutch House
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/5/2016.)

Book Reviews
Unanticipated pregnancy makes liars out of young women, this thoughtful first novel shows, as they try to rationalize, explain, and accept what is happening to them. When she arrives at St. Elizabeth's, a home for pregnant girls in Habit, Kentucky, Rose Clinton seems as evasive and deceptive as the other unwed mothers. But Rose is different: she has a husband whom she has deserted. Unlike most St. Elizabeth's visitors, she neither gives up her baby nor leaves the home, staying on as cook while her daughter grows up among expectant mothers fantasizing that they, too, might keep their infants. The reader learns from Rose how she came to St. Elizabeth's, but it is her doting husband and rebellious daughter who reveal her motives and helpless need for freedom. Together, the three create a complex character study of a woman driven by forces she can neither understand nor control. —Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib.
Library Journal

Patchett's first novel, set in rural Kentucky in a castle-like home for unwed mothers—where a good woman finds she cannot lie her way beyond love—has a quiet summer-morning sensibility that reminds one of the early work of Anne Tyler. Within the security of everydayness, minds and hearts take grievous risks. "Maybe I was born to lie," thinks Rose, who, after a three- year marriage to nice Tom Clinton, realizes that she's misread the sign from God pointing to the wedding: she married a man she didn't love. From San Diego, then, Rose drives—"nothing behind me and nothing ahead of me"—all the way to Kentucky and St. Elizabeth's home for unwed mothers, where she plans to have the baby Tom will never know about, and to give it clean away. But in the home, once a grand hotel, Rose keeps her baby, Cecilia; marries "Son," the handyman ("God was right after all...I was supposed to live a small life with a man I didn't love"); and becomes the cook after briefly assisting that terrible cook, sage/seeress, and font of love, Sister Evangeline. The next narrative belongs to Son, a huge man originally from Tennessee—like Rose, gone forever from home—who recounts the last moments of his fiance's life long ago (Sister Evangeline absolves him of responsibility) and who loves Rose. The last narrator is teenaged Cecilia, struggling to find her elusive mother within the competent Rose, who's moved into her own house away from husband and daughter. Like Rose years before, her daughter considers the benefits of not knowing "what was going on"...as the recent visitor—small, sad Tom Clinton—drives off, and Cecilia knows that Rose, who left before he came, will never return. In an assured, warm, and graceful style, a moving novel that touches on the healing powers of chance sanctuaries of love and fancy in the acrid realities of living.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In The Patron Saint of Liars, the author uses the voices of Rose, Son, and Cecelia (Sissy) to tell the story. How does each voice reveal a distinct and unique character? Is each voice believable? What are the advantages or disadvantages to building a novel through multiple voices?

2. Discuss the many references to "leaving," to breaking connections to home, family, and responsibilities. Who are the "leavers" and who are the ones left? Can you find evidence of what Rose, Son, and Sissy think about all the leaving? Finally, who turns out to be a "stayer," and why is that important?

3. When first pregnant, Rose looks for a place "where women had babies and left them behind, like pieces of furniture too heavy to move." Does her concept of a child evolve during her drive to Kentucky, upon her arrival at St. Elizabeth's, and during the months before her delivery? Is there evidence of a changing attitude after Cecelia is born?

4. Beginning with Rose's first lie of omission, discuss the lies and liars in the novel. Relate the last lie, Son's lie to Sissy, to the structure of the novel and to the cycle of lies. You might ask, "Are all lies equal?"

5. Contrast the picture of southern California with that of St. Elizabeth's in Habit, Kentucky. How does the author achieve the sense of place? Is one place more real than the other? Is one more allegorical?

6. How does the author use the search for signs to move the story forward? Compare Rose's sign to marry with her sign to keep her baby. What about Lorraine's sign? Do you prefer to read the signs as messages from an external source or as the subconscious wishes of the characters? Are Son's tattoos signs of a different sort?

7. Describe the mother/daughter relationship between Rose and her mother. Is there evidence that Rose's mother is a good and loving mother? How is the relationship Rose has with Cecelia different, and why?

8. "Driving is the most important thing you can learn," Rose tells Sissy. "It's the secret of the universe." Explain Rose's impulse to drive. How has it been important to her, and why should she recommend it to Sissy? Does it relate to depression, escape, pilgrimage, or something else?

9. Rose tells us, "I have always taken names very seriously, people or places." How does the author use names to enrich the novel? Consider the names St. Elizabeth, Habit, Rose, Son, among others. What do you think about the controversy over Cecelia as a name? Do you know Rose's mother's name? -- who uses it and who does not?

10. Discuss Sister Evangeline. Can you make a case that she is the model for motherhood? Think about her relationship to St. Elizabeth's, to Rose, to the girls who come and go, to the unborn, to her own mother. Is it significant that she is a seer? That her hands bleed?

11 .Describe Sissy's evolution from child to greater maturity. How does she progress? What do you see for her future?

12. How would you evaluate Rose's treatment of her two husbands? Do you sympathize with Thomas Clinton and Son? Can you understand Rose's behavior? Is she emotionally detached, selfish, cruel, just an independent woman? Does she have any model for marriage?

13. Rose advises Billy, "You should do whatever you want to, whatever you can live with best." Does Rose apply this philosophy to her own decisions? What does "whatever you can live with best" really mean to her?

14. Some readers may find an orderly resolution to the story, perhaps in Sissy's last thoughts about staying at St. Elizabeth's or Son's certainty that "Sissy made everything worthwhile." Other readers see odd people and troubled relationships that are ambiguous. What do you think? Do you find order? Or, alternatively, do you accept equivocal characters and motivations?
(Questions from the publisher.)

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