Shelter
Jung Yun, 2016
Picador Books
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250075611
Summary
You can never know what goes on behind closed doors.
Kyung Cho is a young father burdened by a house he can’t afford. For years, he and his wife, Gillian, have lived beyond their means. Now their debts and bad decisions are catching up with them, and Kyung is anxious for his family’s future.
A few miles away, his parents, Jin and Mae, live in the town’s most exclusive neighborhood, surrounded by the material comforts that Kyung desires for his wife and son. Growing up, they gave him every possible advantage—private tutors, expensive hobbies—but they never showed him kindness. Kyung can hardly bear to see them now, much less ask for their help.
Yet when an act of violence leaves Jin and Mae unable to live on their own, the dynamic suddenly changes, and he’s compelled to take them in.
For the first time in years, the Chos find themselves living under the same roof. Tensions quickly mount as Kyung’s proximity to his parents forces old feelings of guilt and anger to the surface, along with a terrible and persistent question: how can he ever be a good husband, father, and son when he never knew affection as a child?
As Shelter veers swiftly toward its startling conclusion, Jung Yun leads us through dark and violent territory, where, unexpectedly, the Chos discover hope.
Shelter is a masterfully crafted debut novel that asks what it means to provide for one's family and, in answer, delivers a story as riveting as it is profound. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1972
• Where—South Korea
• Raised—Fargo, North Dakota, USA
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.A., University of Pennsylvania; M.F.A.,
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
• Currently—lives in Amherst, Massachusetts
Jung Yun was born in South Korea and grew up in North Dakota. She received her B.A. in Asian Studies at Vassar College and went on to the University of Pennsylvania where she earned a Master's in Public Administration.
Career
From there Yun headed to New York City where, after a number of years, she became deputy director for the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts Redevelopment Corporation. Working 90- to 100-hour weeks, she came to realize that, as much as she loved her work, she wanted a different life—in particular, a writing life. So in her early 40s, Yun applied to the M.F.A. program at the University of Massachusetts and in 2007 graduated with her second Masters, this one in writing.
Today, Yun serves as the director of New Faculty Initiatives at the UMass Amherst Institute for Teaching Excellence and Faculty Development.
Writing
Shelter, her first novel appeared in 2016 to solid, even superlative, reviews.
Other work has appeared in Tin House (the "Emerging Voices" issue); The Best of Tin House: Stories, edited by Dorothy Allison; and the Massachusetts Review; and she is a recipient of an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize and an Artist's Fellowship in fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband. (Adapted from the publisher and from the UMass Department of English profile.)
Book Reviews
Gripping.... Yun shows how, although shelter doesn’t guarantee safety and blood doesn’t guarantee love, there’s something inextricable about the relationship between a child and a parent…. Shelter is captivating.
New York Times Book Review
The combination of grisly James Patterson thriller and melancholic suburban drama shouldn’t work at all. Yet Ms. Yun pulls it off...The proximity of Kyung's parents and the atmosphere of grief and panic launch him on a spiral of self-destruction that’s impossible to turn away from.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
[A] beautifully crafted, deeply moving first novel.
Chicago Tribune
I read the greater part of Jung Yun's Shelter in a 14-hour sitting, interrupted by only five hours of sleep. I was on a trip, with other people, but I couldn't do anything until I was finished; Yun's debut may be a family drama, but it has all the tension of a thriller. It's a sharp knife of a novel―powerful and damaging, and so structurally elegant that it slides right in...it gets better and richer with every page...Like the writer's version of a no-hitter, Shelter is a marvel of skill and execution, tautly constructed and played without mercy.
Steph Cha - Los Angeles Times
In other hands, this material could fall apart or lose steam, but Jung Yun keeps it together through pitch-perfect, but flawed narrator Kyung and a high-tension storyline.... An unexpected page-turner.
Toronto Globe and Mail
Yun's emotional perspicacity and tensile prose combine to turn it into something deeper than mere family melodrama.... Shelter emerges as rich and multi-layered.
Toronto Star
Jung Yun dazzles in her haunting debut.
US Weekly
[A] fearless and thrilling debut.
Town & Country
The tension inside Kyung [is] visceral....Yun skillfully makes his unraveling feel fast-paced and urgent.
Entertainment Weekly
Yun keeps the suspense and family drama racing neck and neck.... Shelter is a suspenseful, illuminating first novel.
Jane Ciabattari - BBC.com
What follows is the unfolding of a horrific and complicated crime―not to mention a horrific and complicated hidden family history.
Marie Claire
In her intense debut, Jung explores the powerful legacy of familial violence and the difficulty of finding the strength and grace to forgive.... Despite some lengthy asides, especially in the novel’s first half, that threaten to drown the narrative momentum in emotional reflection, a lot happens in this family drama rife with tension and unexpected ironies.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [L]ike Celeste Ng's superlauded best seller, Everything You Never Told Me, also about a dysfunctional mixed-race family's tragedy, this work should find itself on best-of lists, among major award nominations, and in eager readers' hands everywhere. —Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Library Journal
Yun too frequently explains what would have been more effectively described, leaving the book a little flat. Yun's characters don't merely desire walls and a roof, although houses have a powerful and intelligent presence here. A diverse and nuanced cast of characters seeks shelter from pain and loneliness in this valiant portrayal of contemporary American life.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What were your initial impressions of Kyung Cho in the opening scene of the novel? How did your understanding of him as a father, husband, and parent change as you read on?
2. Financial debt plays a major role in Kyung and Gillian’s lives. What other kinds of debts are present in this novel? And how do these obligations influence the ways in which the characters interact with each other?
3. How do the various houses in Shelter reflect their owners' personalities? In what ways do they provide a sense of security for their owners (or reinforce their insecurities)?
4. As first generation immigrants, Jin and Mae came to the U.S. to pursue their idea of the American Dream. As a “1.5 generation” immigrant (someone who immigrated at a very young age), how is Kyung’s version of the dream similar to, or different from, his parents’?
5. Kyung thinks of his mother, Mae, as someone “who never believed she was capable of anything.” In what ways does your perception of Mae align with or contradict his image of her?
6. Gillian suggests that it would have been understandable if Kyung had simply ended his relationship with his parents. Why might it be difficult for adult children of abusive and/or neglectful parents to simply relinquish their caretaking responsibilities?
7. Which parent does Kyung seem to resent more? His father, who was the source of such trauma during the first eighteen years of his life? Or his mother, who influenced many of his choices during the last eighteen years?
8. Kyung notes that Jin treats his grandson, Ethan, very differently than he treated Kyung as a child. Is this a selfish act on Jin’s part? Or a selfless one?
9. Both of Kyung’s parents seem drawn to religion for different reasons. What are some of those reasons? And why does Kyung reject the church and the people associated with it so strongly?
10. Connie says that he knew “not even five minutes after meeting [Kyung]— that nothing was ever going to make [him] happy.” How does the idea of happiness differ for each character? And how do characteristics like race, gender, religion, age, and class influence those differences?
11. In the final scene, Kyung begins to see his father in a more sympathetic light. In what ways is that sympathy earned or not earned?
12. What do you hope for the main characters by the novel's end?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The North Water
Ian McGuire, 2016
Henry, Holt & Co.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250118141
Summary
A nineteenth-century whaling ship sets sail for the Arctic with a killer aboard in this dark, sharp, and highly original tale that grips like a thriller.
Behold the man: stinking, drunk, and brutal. Henry Drax is a harpooner on the Volunteer, a Yorkshire whaler bound for the rich hunting waters of the arctic circle.
Also aboard for the first time is Patrick Sumner, an ex-army surgeon with a shattered reputation, no money, and no better option than to sail as the ship's medic on this violent, filthy, and ill-fated voyage.
In India, during the Siege of Delhi, Sumner thought he had experienced the depths to which man can stoop. He had hoped to find temporary respite on the Volunteer, but rest proves impossible with Drax on board. The discovery of something evil in the hold rouses Sumner to action.
And as the confrontation between the two men plays out amid the freezing darkness of an arctic winter, the fateful question arises: who will survive until spring?
With savage, unstoppable momentum and the blackest wit, Ian McGuire's The North Water weaves a superlative story of humanity under the most extreme conditions. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1963-64
• Where—Hull, England, UK
• Education—M.A., University of Sussex; Ph.D., University of Virginia
• Currently—lives in Manchester, England
Ian McGuire grew up near Hull, England. He studied at the University of Manchester, the University of Sussex where he earned his M.A., and the University of Virginia where he earned his Ph.D. in 19th-century American literature.
He has taught at Manchester University since 1996, first as a lecturer in American Literature and more recently as a lecturer in Creative Writing. He now co-directs the Centre for New Writing.
Writing
His first novel, Incredible Bodies (2006), a spoof of academic life and ambition, was described as "hugely entertaining" and "a 21st century Lucky Jim" by the (London) Times. The Sunday Times found it "very funny and disconcertingly sad," while John Mullan in the New Statesman referred to it as a "refreshingly low-minded campus novel."
His second novel, The North Water (2016) draws on his knowledge of American literature, particularly Melville. A thriller/adventure/survival narrative, the Independent called it "a stunning achievement, by turns great fun and shocking, thrilling and provocative" as well as "one of the finest books of the year."
McGuire has written and published on Whitman, Melville and Howells, and is particularly interested in the American realist tradition from the 1880s to the present day. In addition, his stories have been published in Chicago Review, Paris Review, and elsewhere. (Adapted from the publisher and Manchester Centre for New Writing.)
Book Reviews
[A] great white shark of a book—swift, terrifying, relentless and unstoppable…[McGuire's] exhaled his knowledge of literature into a gripping thriller that pulses with echoes of countless classics, from Melville's Moby-Dick…to Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket…Mr. McGuire is such a natural storyteller—and recounts his tale here with such authority and verve—that The North Water swiftly immerses the reader in a fully imagined world…it is also genuinely suspenseful, its plot catapulting dangerously toward a fateful confrontation between Drax and Sumner…. [McGuire] has written an allusion-filled novel that still manages to feel original, a violent tale of struggle and survival in a cinematically beautiful landscape reminiscent of the movie The Revenant but rendered with far more immediacy and considerably less self-importance.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Ian McGuire's riveting and darkly brilliant novel The North Water…feels like the result of an encounter between Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy in some run-down port as they offer each other a long, sour nod of recognition…. McGuire has an extraordinary talent for picturing a moment, offering precise, sharp, cinematic details. When he has to describe complex action, he manages the physicality with immense clarity. He writes about violence with unsparing color and, at times, a sort of relish…. There is an intensity in the way [the characters] live, breathe, and respond to the world that etches them more deeply on the page and on the imagination of the reader…It is possible at certain moments to sense the battle between [Sumner and Drax] as a clash between darkness and light, good and evil. It is a mark of McGuire's subtlety as a novelist, however, that he leaves this in the shadows while placing at the forefront enough felt life and closely imagined detail to resist any simple categories. He allows each of the two men their due strangeness and individuality.
Colm Toibin - New York Times Book Review
Mesmerizing.... Told in grisly language that calls to mind Cormac McCarthy, The North Water begs such ontological questions as: What profit it a man who saves his skin but misplaces his soul?
Wall Street Journal
It is a vivid read, full of twists, turns, period detail and strong characters. The setting is original too, and the description of harpooning and flensing of a whale have been forever etched on my memory. This melodramatic blood and urine-stained tale is an enjoyable contrast to most literary fiction.
The Times (UK)
Uncompromising in its language, relentless in the unfolding of its blood-soaked narrative, this is not a novel for the squeamish, but it has exceptional power and energy.
Sunday Times (UK)
Terrific, seamed with pitch black humour and possessed of a momentum that's kept up to the final, unexpected but resoundingly satisfying scene….[I]nspired.
Daily Mail (UK)
The strength of The North Water lies in its well-researched detail and persuasive descriptions of the cold, violence, cruelty, and the raw, bloody business of whale-killing.
Guardian (UK)
Compared with this savage tale of Arctic survival, Leonardo DiCaprio’s bear-wrestling ordeal in The Revenant looks like something out of A. A. Milne…. McGuire expertly arranges all this mayhem, and the narrative is horrifically gripping. The North Water is smoothly readable despite the horrors it depicts, and that’s testament to the quality of McGuire’s prose. Such fine writing might have been lifted from the pages of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
Independent on Sunday (UK)
The North Water is a conspiracy thriller stuffed into the skin of a blood-and-guts whaling yarn.... The novel is a stunning achievement, by turns great fun and shocking, thrilling and provocative.... Behold: one of the finest books of the year.
Independent (UK)
McGuire delivers one bravura set-piece after another…. The North Water has, in places, a Conrad–Melville undercurrent, but for the most part it is Dickens’s influence that is most keenly felt….This is a stunning novel, one that snares the reader from the outset and keeps the tightest grip until its bitter end.
Financial Times (UK)
McGuire’s prose is fresh and vivid and his novel as a whole is atmospheric and intellectually fecund. Its surface might be awash with blood; but beneath it flows a current of dark and transporting beauty.
Spectator (UK)
Beware: this book is quite a ride. The violence is ghastly, the queasy sense of moral decay all-pervasive. McGuire makes Quentin Tarantino look like Jane Austen….the language has a harsh, surprising beauty that contrasts the spectacular setting with the greedy bankrupt men who force their way northward, armed with harpoons for slaughter.
New Statesman (UK)
McGuire’s novel is a dark, brilliant yarn set on a 19th-century Yorkshire whaler in the dead of winter.... There is no light, no letup in this gruesome tale, so there is great significance in the rare but moving acts of kindness and camaraderie between these men in peril. An amazing journey.
Publishers Weekly
McGuire delivers not only arresting depictions of bloody destruction, but moments of fine prose that recall Seamus Heaney's harsh music, as when an iceberg is described as "an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor." For noirish thrills in an unusual setting, McGuire has the goods and the gore, but this book—graphic in its violence, language, and sexual references—is not for the squeamish.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if they're made available. In the meantime, use these to kick off a discussion for The North Water...then take off on your own:
1. Reviewers have talked about the gruesome writing in The North Water. Were you disturbed by its blood and gore, its overt descriptions of violence? Is the violence sensationalized or is it important to the story? Does it, perhaps, reflect the novel's world view of a life that, in Thomas Hobbes's famous words, is "nasty, brutish, and short"—a world beset with fear, pain, and death?
2. Describe Henry Drax. Is he a monster? The Devil himself? He insists that "the law is just a name they give to what a certain kind of men prefer." What does he mean, and what are the ways in which he acts according to that belief?
3. How do the opening scenes with Drax portend future events or, at the very least, set the novel's narrative tone? What other events foreshadow, or hint at, future plot developments?
4. Patrick Sumner is the book's hero. How does he react to the dishonest, violent men who surround him? Talk about the secret Sumner harbors and the ways it has influenced his life decisions. What are his reasons for joining the whaling expedition? How does he change over the course of the voyage?
5. What do we gradually come to learn about Captain Bownlee?
6. The book suggests that the assertion of decency and morality in the face of corruption and violence is futile. Is that an overly cynical or dark assessment of this story? Is it representative of life in general?
7. Follow-up to Question 6: What is the moral response when horror is at the core of existence as it is on this ship...and in this story?
8. If you've read Moby-Dick or Conrad's Lord Jim or Heart of Darkness, can you identify some of the parallels found in McGuire's novel?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Beekeeper's Daughter
Santa Montefiore, 2014
Simon & Schuster
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781471101014
Summary
A family rocked by tragedy, a love that lives through time, a story that will stay in your heart.
Dorset, 1933: Grace Hamblin is growing up on a beautiful rural estate. The only child of the beekeeper, she knows her place and her future—until her father dies unexpectedly and leaves her bereft and alone.
Alone, that is, except for the man she loves, whom she knows she can never have.
Massachusetts, 1973: Grace's beautiful, impetuous daughter Trixie Valentine is in love. Jasper is wild and romantic, a singer in a band on the brink of stardom. Then tragedy strikes and he must return to his home in England, promising to come back to Trixie one day, if only she will wait for him.
Weighed down by memories, unaware of the secrets that bind them, both mother and daughter are searching for lost love. To find what they are longing for they must confront the past, and unravel the lies told long ago. (From the publisher.)
Many thanks to Dorothy Huges of The Dirty Dogs Book Club who submitted this book—and the Reading Guide—to LitLovers.
Author Bio
• Birth—February 2, 1970
• Where—Winchester, England, UK
• Education—Exeter University
• Currently—lives in London and Dummer Hampshire, Englad
Santa Montefiore is a British author, born in Winchester, England. Her parents are Charles Palmer-Tomkinson, formerly High Sheriff of Hampshire, and Patricia Palmer-Tomkinson (nee Dawson), of Anglo-Argentine background.
The family is a substantial land-owner in Leicestershire. Santa Montefiore said that growing up on the family farm gave her an "idyllic Swallows and Amazons childhood." She also describes her upbringing as "sheltered Sloaney."
Her father and other members of her family represented Great Britain in skiing at Olympic level. Her sister, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, is well known as an "It girl" and charity patron.
Education
She was educated at the Hanford School from the age of eight to twelve and then at the Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset where, in the sixth form, she became Head of her house (a role of responsibility similar to a prefect). She attended Exeter University where she read Spanish and Italian.
Career
Prior to publishing any novels, she worked in London, first in public relations for the outfitters Swaine Adeney and later for the jeweller Theo Fennell. She also worked as a shop assistant in Farmacia Santa Maria Novella, the perfumery, and in events for Ralph Lauren.
She sent her first manuscript to several literary agents, using a nom de plume in order to distance herself from her sister. Only one agent expressed an interest, but this led to a bidding war between several publishers, ending with a six-figure advance.
Since 2002, Montefiore has published at least one novel a year. Four of her books are set in Argentina, where she spent 1989 as a gap year teaching English. Her books have been characterised as "beach-read blockbusters," selling over two million copies in 20 translations.
She counts as her literary influences The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, and the authors Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Mary Wesley, Eckhart Tolle, and Daphne du Maurier. Isabel Allende is important to her as well.
Personal life
Montefiore is married to writer and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. They were brought together by the historian Andrew Roberts, who thought "they would be absolutely perfect for each other because they were the only two people he knew who could remember the words to "Evita" by heart." She says of their marriage:
Sebag and I do bring out the best in each other. I wouldn’t have written if not for him and he might not have written books either, as he was a ladies’ man, always chasing girls, but now his home life is stable and sorted. We write in the same house, in separate offices and he helps me with plots. I think you have to be a team. Laughter is everything. Mr Darcy would have been so boring to live with—you don’t want to live with someone who is smouldering all the time.
Santa converted to Judaism before the marriage. The wedding was held at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, with which her husband's family have been associated for generations. Their long-time friends, Charles, Prince of Wales, and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, attended the wedding.
The Montefiores have two children, Lily and Sasha. They spend the week in London and the weekends at a house on her parents' estate at Dummer, Hampshire. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/7/2016 .)
Book Reviews
Heartwarming and believable.... [T]he perfect book to remind the reader of how love in the moment is all consuming, yet provides a wonderful memory and lessons later in life.
Portland Book Review
An epic romance...exquisite...the fictional island of Tekanasset and its colorful residents come to life with each turn of the page.
Associated Press
Lyrical...achingly beautiful...keep the tissue box handy.... Escapism on the highest order.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. The Beekeeper’s Daughter opens with Rudyard Kipling’s “The Bee-Boy’s Song.” Why do you think Santa Montefiore chose to begin the book with this poem? How does it relate to the story? Discuss how bees play a major role throughout the book.
2. In the beginning of The Beekeeper’s Daughter, Belle Barlett, Evelyn Durlacher, Sally Pearson and Blythe Westrup are playing bridge at the golf course and gossiping about Trixie Valentine and Suzie Redford going off with a band for the weekend. Why do you think the women found this so scandalous?
3. What do you make of Big and her friendship with Grace? Does Big give Grace good advice? Discuss Big’s role in the lives of the Valentines.
4. Are her Trixie’s parents right to be concerned about her relationship with Jasper? Do you think their affair is true love or a summer fling? Why is Grace so protective of her daughter’s heart?
5. Grace has a close relationship with her father, Arthur. How has he influenced her? Do you think she would have married Freddie without his influence?
6. When Grace is fourteen, she meets Rufus Duncliffe, son and heir of the Marquess of Penselwood. Grace places a bee on Rufus and later Freddie. Describe how Rufus and Freddie react. Who do you think is better suited for Grace? Who does Grace truly love?
7. The Beekeeper’s Daughter follows two story lines—Grace’s and Trixie’s. Were you drawn to one more than the other? How are Grace and Trixie similar? How are they different?
8. When Jasper’s brother dies in a car accident, he must return to England. Jasper asks Trixie to wait for him. Grace cries when Trixie tells her the news, but for a different reason than Trixie thinks. Discuss why Grace reacts the ways she does?
9. Trixie never loved another man after Jasper. What qualities do you think Jasper possesses that Trixie never found in another man? Do you think it was typical in that time for a woman to entirely focused on her career and not marry?
10. Is there a theme to each part of the book? Was this an effective way to tell the story? Why or why not?
12. Duty comes up in several ways during the course of the novel. Big tells Grace, “It’s your duty as a wife to stand by his side on all matters.” To which Grace replies, “I do hate that word.” Discuss what duty to means to Grace, Rufus, Freddie, and Jasper. Has a sense of duty positively or negatively affected their lives?
14. When Grace is tending to her bees she often feels a presence. On her wedding day, Grace thinks she sees her mother. Where else do ghosts or spirits make an appearance in the novel? Discuss the importance of spirits in the novel.
15. We learn that Grace is dying from an inoperable brain tumor. Is the author drawing a connection between one’s health and avoiding the past?
16. Grace and Freddie are both holding on to the past and harboring secrets. Why do you think they keep their secrets for so long? Are there other characters with hidden pasts?
17. Grace’s and Trixie’s pasts collide in a surprising twist. What drives Trixie to uncover her mother’s past? How does Trixie confront her own past in the process?
18. Love is a major theme in the novel: romantic love, familial love, first love, lost love. Is it possible to be in love with two people at the same time? Do you think the characters in the book find the love they want?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Maestra
L.S. Hilton, 2016
Penguin Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399184260
Summary
With the cunning of Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne, and as dangerous as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander, the femme fatale of this Talented Mr. Ripley–esque psychological thriller is sexy, smart, and very, very bad in all the best ways.
By day, Judith Rashleigh is a put-upon assistant at a prestigious London art house.
By night, she’s a hostess at one of the capital’s notorious champagne bars, although her work there pales against her activities on nights off.
TO GET WHAT SHE WANTS
Desperate to make something of herself, Judith knows she has to play the game. She’s transformed her accent and taught herself about wine and the correct use of a dessert fork, not to mention the art of discretion.
She’s learned to be a good girl. But when Judith is fired for uncovering a dark secret at the heart of the art world—and her honest efforts at a better life are destroyed—she turns to a long-neglected friend. A friend who kept her chin up and back straight through every slight: Rage.
SHE WILL CROSS EVERY LINE
Feeling reckless, she accompanies one of the champagne bar’s biggest clients to the French Riviera, only to find herself alone again after a fatal accident.
Tired of striving and the slow crawl to the top, Judith has a realization: If you need to turn yourself into someone else, loneliness is a good place to start. And she’s been lonely a long time.
Maestra is a glamorous, ferocious thriller and the beginning of a razor-sharp trilogy that introduces the darkly irresistible Judith Rashleigh, a femme fatale for the ages whose vulnerability and ruthlessness will keep you guessing until the last page. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• AKA—Lisa Hilton
• Birth—December 15, 1974
• Where—Liverpool, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Currently—London, England
Lisa Hilton grew up in the north of England and read English at New College, Oxford, after which she studied History of Art in Florence and Paris. After eight years in New York, Paris and Milan, she returned to England and now lives in London with her daughter Ottavia.
Biographies
Hilton has written three historical biographies on royal subjects: ♦ The Real Queen of France: Athenais and Louis XIV (2002) ♦ Mistress Peachum's Pleasure: The Life of Lavinia Fenton, Duchess of Bolton (2006) ♦ Queens Consort: England's Medieval Queens (2008).
Horrors of Love (2011) is a biographical treatment of 20th-centiury English novelist and socialite Nancy Mitford and her love affair with Gaston Palewski.
Novels
Hilton has written several novels: ♦ The House With The Blue Shutters (2010) ♦ Wolves in Winter (2012) ♦ The Stolen Queen (2015) ♦ Maestra (2016). The latter, written under the name L.S. Hilton, is the first in a trilogy about femme fatale Judith Rashleigh, her sexual adventures and misadventures.
Journalism
In addition to authoring books, Hilton also works as a journalist. She has written for the Spectator, Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, Vogue, Tatler, Elle, Daily Beast, Evening Standard, Observer, Independent and Daily Telegraph. She writes a monthly restaurant column for the British cultural and political affairs magazine Standpoint. (Adapted from the author's website and Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/19/2016.)
Book Reviews
Maestra features a feisty, morally complex and sharp heroine who may appeal to fans of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.
New York Times
An unpredictable London auction house assistant turned high-class escort slips effortlessly into the world of the glamorous and wealthy, crossing international borders and leaving destruction in her wake (5 Killer Books for 2016).
Wall Street Journal,
Maestra will be one of this year’s most talked-about novels…Judith may well be [a] more interesting character [than Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley].... Will Judith’s dreams come true, or will her crimes catch up with her? We won’t know right away. At least two more of her adventures remain...more mayhem, more art—and certainly more sex—lie ahead for insatiable Judith and for all those consenting adults who will delight in her endless ups and downs.
Washington Post
What makes a woman who’ll do anything to get what she wants so threatening...and thrilling?... It’s Judith’s modes of retaliation that make her a radical heroine. She deploys a uniquely female arsenal...weaponizing femininity.... It’s hard not to feel vicariously empowered by a woman unapologetically in pursuit. Let’s call her the Sheryl Sandberg of sociopaths, leaning in to the hilt.
Oprah Magazine
[J]ubilantly mordant.... Already optioned for the big screen by Amy Pascal, [Maestra is] the story of a twenty-first-century femme fatale as lethal as Tom Ripley and as seductive as [Lauren] Bacall.
Vogue
As readable as any crime thriller, but also clearly belongs in the literary tradition of Moll Flanders and Vanity Fair.
Sunday Times (UK)
Meet Judith, an art-house assistant who'll make you root for the bad girl once you really get to know her.
Marie Claire
The name Judith Rashleigh will be on everyone's lips, just like Amy Dunne (Gone Girl) and Lisbeth Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) were in summers past.... Thank the book gods that L.S. Hilton's Maestra is only the first installment in a series.
Redbook
You're going to want to hurry up and read this R-rated psychological thriller before it hits the big screen—it's already been optioned by Columbia Pictures. Think 50 Shades of Grey meets The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Allure.com
(Starred review.) [D]deliciously Highsmithian thriller, the first of a trilogy.... As Judith assumes and sheds identities...during a twisty series of increasingly treacherous escapades (several X-rated), Hilton artfully conjures a glossy world where just about everything—and everyone—has its price.
Publishers Weekly
Judith is a female Tom Ripley (Patricia Highsmith's con artist protagonist)—doing all she can to survive and further her entree into the upper echelon of society. Verdict: The first of a planned trilogy, Hilton's debut is not for the faint of heart as Judith's exploits—from sex parties to murders—are described graphically.... [A] scandalous, thrilling tour through Europe and the art world. —Lynnanne Pearson, Skokie P.L., IL
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Delicious....at once glamorous, edgy, decadent (like rich but somewhat bitter dark chocolate), erotic, and irresistible. Judith Rashleigh is just full of surprises. She is ruthless and, yet...vulnerable.... [M.aestra] is a gift for readers who delight in vengeful female protagonists. The detailed sex scenes will also appeal to fans of the Fifty Shades series.
Booklist
Hilton's novel about a woman with exotic sexual appetites, and a penchant for murdering those who cross her, mixes blood and sex the way a bartender slaps together martinis.... Billed as erotic suspense, this is not a book for suspense fans; it's more a portrait of a sociopathic woman with a voracious appetite for sexual adventure.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss Judith’s childhood. How does her background shape her character?
2. At one point Judith reflects that "wealth creeps under your epidermis like poison. It invades your posture, your gestures, the way you carry yourself" (p. 112). Does wealth change Judith? Would she be different if she had been born rich? How does the novel portray people born into wealth?
3. Do you like Judith? Why or why not? What surprised you the most about her character?
4. Judith is never described physically in the novel. Why do you think this is? How do you picture her?
5. In the beginning of the novel Judith reveals, "Rage had always been my friend.... Rage had kept my back straight; rage had seen me through the fights and the slights" (p. 64). At what points in the novel does Judith turn to rage? How does rage shape Judith’s decisions? Can you relate to her frustrations? Why or why not?
6. What does Renaud’s relationship with Judith reveal about her character? Did you guess where their relationship was going?
7. Discuss the portrayal of sex in the novel. How does Judith’s sexuality inform your understanding of her character? Would you react differently to the sex scenes if Judith were a man? Why or why not?
8. Judith is a woman who decides unapologetically to own herself—her body, her desires, her ambitions. In what ways does her character challenge conventional expectations for women? How did you feel reading her transgressive behavior? Is Maestra a feminist novel?
9. Judith relates to other women in a variety of ways throughout the novel. Were you shocked by how some of those relationships develop over the course of the novel?
10. On page 160, Judith tells us, "Later, I had a lot of time to think about when I’d made the decision. Had it been swelling inside me all along, waiting, like a tumor?" Was there one moment in the novel in which you saw her character change? If so, when? If not, why?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Mothering Sunday: A Romance
Graham Swift, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101947524
Summary
A luminous, intensely moving tale that begins with a secret lovers’ assignation in the spring of 1924, then unfolds to reveal the whole of a remarkable life.
Twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild has worked as a maid at an English country house since she was sixteen. For almost all of those years she has been the clandestine lover to Paul Sheringham, young heir of a neighboring house.
The two now meet on an unseasonably warm March day—Mothering Sunday—a day that will change Jane’s life forever.
As the narrative moves back and forth from 1924 to the end of the century, what we know and understand about Jane—about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, remembers—expands with every vividly captured moment.
Her story is one of profound self-discovery, and through her, Graham Swift has created an emotionally soaring, deeply affecting work of fiction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 4, 1949
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Dulwich College; Cambridge; University of York
• Awards—Booker Prize; James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Currently—lives in London, England
Graham Colin Swift is a well-known British author and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). He was born in London, England and educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York. He was a friend of poet Ted Hughes.
Some of his works have been made into films, including Last Orders, which starred Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland which starred Jeremy Irons.
Last Orders was a joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the Booker Prize in 1996, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
Waterland was set in The Fens; it is a novel of landscape, history and family, and is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English Literature syllabus in British schools.
Works
1980 - The Sweet-Shop Owner
1982 - Shuttlecock (Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize)
1983 - Waterland
1988 - Out of This World
1992 - Ever After
1996 - Last Orders (Booker Prize)
2003 - The Light of Day
2007 - Tomorrow
2009 - Making an Elephant: Writing from Within
2012 - Wish you Were Here
2016 - Mothering Sunday
(Author bio from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Swift describes events long in the past in a way that gives them intense and permanent presentness. The vividly lost quality of the day is conveyed through a series of repeating motifs. The phone call, white orchids in the Sheringhams' hall, Paul's bedsheets. The story has an unmoored, dreamy quality, which captures the way such days become lodged in the recollections of youth…[Swift's] lush, sorrowful prose gives considerable pleasure.
Sophie Gee - New York Times Book Review
[A] dazzling read: sexy, stylish, subversive. You finish it and immediately read it again, because, like War and Peace, it’s a marvelous novel of possibilities.
Jackie McGlone - Herald (Scotland)
Masterful...[Swift] performs a complex enough conjuring trick, creating a perfect small tragedy with all the spring and tension of a short story, spinning around it a century of consequences with so light a touch that they only brush against the charmed centre.... Mothering Sunday is both a dissection of the nature of fiction and a gripping story; a private catastrophe played out in the quiet drawing rooms of the English upper middle-class, the drama that unfolds is all the more potent for its containment.... The narrative...accumulates the saturated erotic intensity of a Donne sonnet.... Mothering Sunday is bathed in light; and even when tragedy strikes, it blazes irresistibly.... Swift’s small fiction feels like a masterpiece.
Christobel Kent - Guardian (UK)
An almost musical quality, like a Bach prelude and fugue reworking and reinventing themes and ideas...both unsettling and deeply affecting. Mothering Sunday is a powerful, philosophical and exquisitely observed novel about the lives we lead, and the parallel lives—the parallel stories—we can never know.... It may just be Swift’s best novel yet.
Hannah Beckerman - Observer (UK)
Swift has written a book that is not just his most moving and intricate but his most engrossing, too.... At the narrative level, Mothering Sunday has a lot in common with earlier works of historical fiction—Ian McEwan’s pair of novels about a moment that resonates across the decades, Atonement and On Chesil Beach, and David Miller’s Today.
Leo Robson - Financial Times (UK)
This is the story of a woman’s becoming, as she discovers her power and possibility. It is a lot to pack into such a slim and tidy volume. But for all the detailed examination of character and the bold sweep of time, there is not a word wasted.... A lesson in poetic brevity.... There is a lulling quality to the movement between sections of the book—rhythms and repetitions, the ebb and flow of a tide, the wearing down of rock to form sand on a beach.... This is a rare read indeed.
Ellah Allfrey - Spectator (UK)
A dazzling novel...beautiful.... A vanished world is resurrected with superb immediacy. The shires gentry and their servants move around the pages with solid authenticity.... Wonderfully accomplished...an achievement.
Peter Kemp - Sunday Times (UK)
( Starred review.) [T]his elegiac tale offers a haunting portrait of lives in a world in transition.... [Swift's] depiction of a fragile caste clinging to traditions that define their sense of noblesse oblige...is poignant and moving—as is his intimation of a brilliant personal destiny that rises from the ashes of a tragically bygone social order.
Publishers Weekly
Jane, servant in a great house in the waning Downton days of 1924, can no longer see Paul, a young man from the neighboring house about to be married. What happens next is not Jane's piteous unwinding but the story of an orphan who begins life in service and eventually becomes a great writer and mistress of culture.
Library Journal
( Starred review.) A perfect gem of a novel. With his unmistakable gift for detailed exactitude and emotional subtlety, Swift lightly touches on weighty issues of loss and abandonment, boldness and survival. The antidote to Downton Abbey’s prolonged manor-house soap opera, Swift’s succinct rags-to-riches tale of a young woman’s unexpected metamorphosis is a rich and nuanced evocation of an innocent yet titillating time. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
( Starred review.) In England of 1924, a maid who knows her affair with an estate owner's son must end, ...is a marvelous creation who can seem wry, world-weary, innocent, or lusty, bringing to mind Molly Bloom. Swift has fun with language, with class conventions, and with narrative expectations in a novel where nothing is as simple or obvious as it seems at first.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What do you think attracts Jane to Paul? What are the needs that each fulfills for the other? Why is it important to see them together in “utter mutual nakedness” at first, and often through the lens of animal metaphors?
2. The novel focuses exclusively on Jane’s point of view, but she is not a first-person narrator. What is the effect of this slight narrative distance between the reader and narrator, and what might it say about Jane’s ultimate profession as a novelist?
3. What is the significance of Mothering Sunday for each of the characters, and what does the meaning of the day reveal about Jane’s sense of self? Is Jane more liberated or saddened by the reminder of her own orphanhood and lack of a mother?
4. Discuss the hierarchy within the Nivens’ household. How does the employment of Jane and Cook Milly at Beechwood fit into the sense that Britain is changing and modernizing? What’s the difference between older and younger generations of servants vis-a-vis their respect for hierarchy, and between the servants at Beechwood versus Upleigh?
5. What’s informative about reading this story through a from the perspective of a maid—someone whose job it is to both pay close attention to details and to ignore them?
6. Why does Jane feel able to push the limits of her freedom as a maid, and how does she do so with the Nivens and Paul? To what degree does she feel bound to her role, down to her “ghostly maid’s clothes,” and does that change over the course of her life?
7. How would you describe Jane’s sense of humor?
8. Describe the different relationships between parents and children in the novel. How does the constant reminder of the holiday of Mothering Sunday, and of Paul and Emma’s wedding, throughout the book complicate those traditional family ties, including marriage itself? And what does that say about the way tradition will carry through into the future?
9. The novel is structured in short vignettes that move back and forth in time, in intervals big and small. What are the effects of this mode of storytelling on the book’s feeling of suspense, and of how we learn about Jane?
10. Why is it so important to Jane not to define what is true or not true in her writing, especially given her fierce love of books, which, she claims, are a way people “escape the troubles of their lives”?
11. Where does Jane gain the greatest sense of belonging? Does she yearn more for inclusion or independence, to possess or to be possessed? Consider the statement that "life itself...was the sum of its possessions," and what this means for Jane in particular, a servant with an extreme paucity of belongings
12. Did you always trust Jane’s observations, memories, interpretations of events? If not, what made you question them, and/or the reliability of memory in general throughout the novel?
13. Did you get the impression that Jane ever felt guilty about Paul’s accident? Does the novel suggest that the characters were more at the mercy of fate or free will?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)