Now That You Mention It
Kristan Higgins, 2017
Harlequin
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781335903358
Summary
Kristan Higgins welcomes you home in this witty, emotionally charged novel about the complications of life, love and family.
One step forward. Two steps back.
The Tufts scholarship that put Nora Stuart on the path to becoming a Boston medical specialist was a step forward. Being hit by a car and then overhearing her boyfriend hit on another doctor when she thought she was dying? Two major steps back.
Injured in more ways than one, Nora feels her carefully built life cracking at the edges. There’s only one place to land: home.
But the tiny Maine community she left fifteen years ago doesn’t necessarily want her. At every turn, someone holds the prodigal daughter of Scupper Island responsible for small-town drama and big-time disappointments.
With a tough islander mother who’s always been distant, a wild-child sister in jail and a withdrawn teenage niece as eager to ditch the island as Nora once was, Nora has her work cut out for her if she’s going to take what might be her last chance to mend the family.
Balancing loss and opportunity, dark events from her past with hope for the future, Nora will discover that tackling old pain makes room for promise … and the chance to begin again. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1965
• Raised—Whiteyville, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., College of the Holy Cross
• Awards—2 RITA Awards
• Currently—lives in Durham, Connecticut
Kristan Higgins is the New York Times, Publishers Weekly and USA Today bestselling author or nearly 20 books. Her works books have been translated into more than 20 languages. She has received dozens of awards and accolades, including starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The New York Journal of Books and Kirkus.
Kristan lives in Connecticut with her heroic firefighter husband, two atypically affectionate children, a neurotic rescue mutt and an occasionally friendly cat. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) Many readers will relate to the family saga and rough past, and the light romance and humor sprinkled throughout will suit a wide audience. Readers won't want to put down this highly recommended title. —Brooke Bolton, Boonville-Warrick Cty. P.L., IN
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Nora has lots to unpack and sift through, but figuring out who she is…is a powerful, entertaining journey. Balancing emotion, humor, and a redemptive theme, Higgins hits all the right notes with precision, perception, and panache.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Now That You Mention It … then take off on your own:
1. How would you describe Nora Stuart? Why is she dissatisfied with her life, a life that would be the envy of many? She has it all, doesn't she?
2. Follow-up to Question 1: How has Nora's upbringing on Scupper Island shaped her life? In what ways is the past (and its people) still a part of her life — even though she'd rather not admit it?
3. As the novel progresses and our knowledge of Nora deepens, what stands out about her most to you? What do you find especially striking about her personality — the way she relates to the world around her?
4. What is Nora's relationship with her mother and with her sister Lily? Describe both women.
5. What about the other characters: Nora's niece Poe, Sully and Audrey, and her school pal Xiaowen? Whom do you like most?
6. Talk about the community's reaction to Nora's return. Why do the islanders dislike, or at least resent, her? Should Nora feel guilty for winning the scholarship and for Luke Fletcher's subsequent downward spiral? Or is guilt a normal human response?
7. Did the book make you laugh? The dinner party on the houseboat, for instance? Or the ham dinner at Nora's mother's house? The witty banter back and forth between characters? Maybe Nora's internal monologues? Does "Oh fuckety fucking McFuckster" qualify? Anything else?
8. How does Nora change during the course novel? How does she eventually make peace with her family, her past, and her own identity? What does she learn?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Deep River
Karl Marlantes, 2019
Grove Atlantic Press
725 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802125385
Summary
Karl Marlantes’s debut novel Matterhorn has been hailed as a modern classic of war literature. In his new novel, Deep River, Marlantes turns to another mode of storytelling—the family epic—to craft a stunningly expansive narrative of human suffering, courage, and reinvention.
In the early 1900s, as the oppression of Russia’s imperial rule takes its toll on Finland, the three Koski siblings—Ilmari, Matti, and the politicized young Aino—are forced to flee to the United States.
Not far from the majestic Columbia River, the siblings settle among other Finns in a logging community in southern Washington, where the first harvesting of the colossal old-growth forests begets rapid development, and radical labor movements begin to catch fire.
The brothers face the excitement and danger of pioneering this frontier wilderness—climbing and felling trees one-hundred meters high—while Aino, foremost of the books many strong, independent women, devotes herself to organizing the industry’s first unions. As the Koski siblings strive to rebuild lives and families in an America in flux, they also try to hold fast to the traditions of a home they left behind.
Layered with fascinating historical detail, this is a novel that breathes deeply of the sun-dappled forest and bears witness to the stump-ridden fields the loggers, and the first waves of modernity, leave behind.
At its heart, Deep River is an ambitious and timely exploration of the place of the individual, and of the immigrant, in an America still in the process of defining its own identity. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1945
• Where—Seaside, Oregon, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.A., Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar)
• Currently—lives in Woodinville, Washington, USA
Karl Marlantes is the author of Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, a New York Times Top 10 Bestseller published in 2010. The New York Times declared Matterhorn "one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam." Matterhorn received the 2011 Washington State Book Award in the Fiction category.
The novel is based on Marlantes' experiences in the Vietnam War, where he served as a lieutenant and received various meritorious service awards from the United States Marine Corps. Marlantes first received a National Merit Scholarship to attend Yale University and was then a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. The decorations he was awarded while serving in the Marines include the Navy Cross, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts and ten Air Medals.
Marlantes was awarded the Navy Cross for an action in Vietnam in which he, as a company commander, led an assault on a North Vietnamese bunker complex on a hilltop. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Marlantes conveys the… dangerous romance of logging superbly. His descriptions of logging itself—the ingenious mechanics of taking down trees and the skill of experienced loggers—are wonderfully detailed, dramatic and exhilarating…. Mighty physical, social and economic forces operate the plot of this novel, buffeting its characters, raising them up, flinging them down, twisting their fates together. Deep River is a big American novel.
Wall Street Journal
Deep River is an engrossing and commanding historical epic about one immigrant family’s shifting fortunes…a feat of lavish storytelling.
Washington Post
As a portrait of a complicated American era, and one family’s mighty struggle against it, the novel is both fascinating and fierce. And well worth the hours it asks of its reader.
San Francisco Chronicle
Deep River is an engrossing and commanding historical epic about one immigrant family’s shifting fortunes.… [The novel is] alert to the resonances between the past and present… [and] a feat of lavish storytelling…. [But] Marlantes' big-picture storytelling can come at the expense of its line-by-line prose…. [It] could use some better sentences. But we could also use more spirited novels like Deep River.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Inspired by family history, Marlantes offers a sprawling, painstakingly realistic novel about Finnish immigrants in the Pacific Northwest during the first half of the 20th century.… Marlantes’s epic is packed with intriguing detail…, making for a vivid immigrant family chronicle.
Publishers Weekly
Following the eye-catching debut novel Matterhorn…, Marlantes shifts his attention from the Vietnam War to the early 1900s [and an immigrant family of] loggers… along Washington’s grand Columbia River…. A welcome publication, with Matterhorn published nearly a decade ago.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Marlantes poignantly depicts the intimacies of personal dramas that echo the twentieth century’s unprecedented political storms and yet in surprising ways reprise Finland’s oldest mythologies…. An unforgettable novel.
Booklist
Marlantes moves from the jungles of Vietnam to the old-growth forests of Washington in this saga of labor and love.…The story is long and has its longueurs, but Marlantes carefully builds an epic world…. A novel that sometimes struggles under its own weight but that's well worth reading.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, 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)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Immortalists
Chloe Benjamin, 2018
Penguin Group
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735213180
Summary
If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?
It’s 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.
The prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in ’80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.
A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1988
• Where—San Francisco, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Vassar; M.F.A., University of Wisconsin
• Awards—Edna Ferber Book Award
• Currently—lives in Madison, Wisconsin
Chloe Krug Benjamin was born in San Francisco, CA. Her first novel, The Anatomy of Dreams (2014), received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was long listed for the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her second novel, The Immortalists (2018) is published in over 13 countries, and TV/film rights have sold to the Jackal Group.
A graduate of Vassar College and of the M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Chloe also teaches workshops on the business of publishing, from writing a novel to finding a literary agent. She lives with her husband in Madison, Wisconsin. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) An imaginative and satisfying family saga…. The four Gold siblings are wonderful creations, and in Benjamin’s expert hands their story becomes a moving meditation on fate, faith, and the family ties that alternately hurt and heal.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) The narratives [Benjamin] offers are intriguingly intertwined and beautifully rendered.… Thought-provoking and entertaining.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Bewitching and provocative.… Benjamin has created mesmerizing characters and richly suspenseful predicaments in this profound and glimmering novel of death’s ever-shocking inevitability and life’s wondrously persistent whirl of chance and destiny.
Booklist
[T]he fortuneteller’s death dates is inexplicably credulous, though suggestions of a self-fulfilling prophecy muddy the waters a bit.… Benjamin’s premise situates her novel in magical territory, but the spell doesn't quite work,
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The Immortalists explores the degree to which we shape our own destinies — do you believe that the siblings’ fate was preordained? Why or why not?
2. The novel takes place in very different settings — 1960s New York City, the San Francisco dance scene, glitzy Las Vegas hotels. In what ways do these locations affect the characters? Why do you think all four of the siblings moved away from New York City?
3. The Immortalists is narrated by the four siblings in separate sections. What was your reading experience when you switched sections? Did you identify more closely with certain siblings?
4. The power of belief — whether it be magic, religious faith, or storytelling — is an important theme in the novel. How does belief affect each of the siblings? What is different or similar about the stories they tell themselves?
5. At its heart, The Immortalists is a family love story, exploring both past and future generations of the Gold family. In what ways does family history shape us? What kind of legacies do the four siblings leave behind?
6. How do magic and reality blur in the novel? Were there any particular moments that seemed to defy logic? Why are certain characters drawn to magic and the unknowable more than others?
7. Discuss the siblings’ significant others: Raj, Mira, and Robert. How are their lives affected by the prophecy? How do romantic and familial relationships interact and contrast in The Immortalists?
8. At the end of the novel, Gertie tells Varya about the beauty and freedom in uncertainty, questioning why her children believed the fortune teller. Did you believe the fortune teller? What gives the fortune teller her power? What freedoms does uncertainty bring?
9. What do you imagine happens to Varya after the book ’s ending? How have her views on longevity and death changed?
10. Would you want to find out the date of your death? How would you live your life differently if you had this information?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Right Swipe
Alisha Rai, 2019
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062878090
Summary
Alisha Rai returns with a sizzling new novel, in which two rival dating app creators find themselves at odds in the boardroom but in sync in the bedroom.
Rhiannon Hunter may have revolutionized romance in the digital world, but in real life she only swipes right on her career—and the occasional hookup. The cynical dating app creator controls her love life with a few key rules:
— Nude pics are by invitation only
— If someone stands you up, block them with extreme prejudice
— Protect your heart
Only there aren't any rules to govern her attraction to her newest match, former pro-football player Samson Lima. The sexy and seemingly sweet hunk woos her one magical night… and disappears.
Rhi thought she'd buried her hurt over Samson ghosting her, until he suddenly surfaces months later, still big, still beautiful—and in league with a business rival. He says he won't fumble their second chance, but she's wary. A temporary physical partnership is one thing, but a merger of hearts?
Surely that’s too high a risk. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Alisha Rai pens award-winning contemporary romances and her novels have been named Best Books of the Year by Washington Post, NPR, Amazon, Entertainment Weekly, Kirkus, and Cosmopolitan Magazine. When she’s not writing, Alisha is traveling or tweeting. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
The plot… feels propulsive and complex…. Much rests on [Rhiannon and Samson's] memories of the strong chemistry they discovered in their first night together. At first this feels like a bit of an emotional shortcut, but the real depth—and much of the book's joy—comes from the natural growth of their mutual trust and connection. It's especially intriguing to watch Rhiannon open up. She's prickly and often emotionally closed-off, but vulnerable, too. She slips between stereotypes, always more complicated than she seems.
New York Times Book Review
(Starred review) [A] luscious contemporary series launch.… Both Rhi and Samson are learning how to enjoy life and balance each other beautifully as they face realistic conflicts and tantalizing romance and sensuality. This winning novel will enhance any romance reader’s collection.
Publishers Weekly
Best-selling author Rai taps into the modern dating-app scene with hilarious, horrifying, and relatable results, blending contemporary social issues, such as sexual harassment in the workplace and CTE brain injuries in sports, into the story. —Melanie C. Duncan, Washington Memorial Lib., Macon, GA
Library Journal
Rai turns up the heat and finds the funny in modern dating…. But it’s not all steamy, as the characters have issues with trust and love, making them vulnerable both to each other and the public.… Rai scores a touchdown.
Booklist
[A] new series by a writer known for her expansive view of what a romance novel can do…. Rai addresses heavy issues without sacrificing passionate sensuality or emotional connection.… An ex-football player woos an entrepreneur in a high-tech romance that proves respect is the most potent love drug.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, 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)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Autumn (Seasonal Quartet)
Ali Smith, 2016 (U.S., 2017)
Knopf Doubleday
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101969946
Summary
Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.
Two old friends—Daniel, a centenarian, and Elisabeth, born in 1984 — look to both the future and the past as the United Kingdom stands divided by a historic, once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand-in-hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.
A luminous meditation on the meaning of richness and harvest and worth, Autumn is the first installment of Ali Smith’s Seasonal quartet, and it casts an eye over our own time: Who are we? What are we made of?
Shakespearean jeu d’esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s pop art. Wide-ranging in time-scale and light-footed through histories, Autumn is an unforgettable story about aging and time and love — and stories themselves. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Inverness, Scotland, UK
• Education—University of Abderdeen; Cambridge University
• Awards—Whitbread Award
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, England
Ali Smith is a Scottish writer who won the Whitbread Award in 2005 for her novel, The Accidental. To date, she has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times and the Orange Prize twice.
She was born to working-class parents, raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD that she never finished.
She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She then became a full-time writer and now writes for The Guardian, Scotsman, and Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Cambridge, England, with her partner filmmaker Sarah Wood.
Works
Smith is the author of several works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World (2001), which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize in 2001. She won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002. ♦ The Accidental (2007) won the Whitbread Award and was also short-listed for both the Man Booker and Orange Prize. ♦ Her 2011 novel, There But For The, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize and named as a Best Book of the Year by both the Washington Post and Boston Globe. ♦ How to Be Both (2014) was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Her story collections include Free Love, which won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Whole Story and Other Stories.
In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 2009, she donated the short story "Last" (previously published in the Manchester Review Online) to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the "Fire" collection. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/20/2014.)
Book Reviews
Ali Smith has a beautiful mind. [Autumn is] unbearably moving in its playful, strange, soulful assessment of what it means to be alive at a somber time.
New York Times
Beautiful, subtle.… Brimming with humanity and bending, despite everything, toward hope.
New York Times Book Review
Delights in puns and lyric reveries. For a book about decline and disintegration, Autumn remains irrepressibly hopeful about life, something "you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you."
Wall Street Journal
Shimmers with wit, melancholy, grief, joy, wisdom, small acts of love and, always, wonder at the seasons.
Boston Globe
Smith regales us with endless wordplay.… Autumn is the first installment of Smith’s ‘Seasonal’ quartet. If this brilliantly inventive and ruminative book is representative of what is to come, then we should welcome Smith’s winter chill whatever the season.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
It is undoubtedly Smith at her best.… This book sets Smith’s complex creative character in stone: puckish yet elegant, angry but comforting. Long may she remain that way.
Times (UK)
Already acknowledged as one of the most inventive novelists writing in Britain today, with her new novel, Autumn, Ali Smith also proves herself to be one of the country’s foremost chroniclers, her finger firmly on the social and political pulse.
Independent (UK)
An ambitious, multi-layered creation.… Smith is convincing as both a 12-year-old girl proud of her new rollerblades and a man living in a care home.… The story is rooted in autumn, and Smith writes lyrically about the changing seasons.… An energising and uplifting story.
Evening Standard (UK)
Proving Smith’s ambition and scope, Autumn is the first in a four-part series (the other titles will be Spring, Winter and Summer).… If the first instalment is anything to go by, the series is destined to become a canon classic.… That Smith has done so with such impressive sleight of hand, and with such expediency, is incredible.
Irish Independent
Smith writes in a liltingly singsong prose that fizzes with exuberant punning and wordplay.… Compellingly contemporary.… [An] appeal to conscience and common humanity—intergenerational, interracial, international — in these deeply worrying times.
Irish Times
Knits together an astonishing array of seemingly disparate subjects.… Free spirits and the lifeforce of art — along with kindness, hope, and a readiness "to be above and beyond the foul even when we’re up to our eyes in it" — are, when you get down to it, what Smith champions in this stirring novel.
NPR
Smith’s novel plays an intimate melody against a broader dissonance, probing the friendship between an art historian and an aging songwriter as they grapple with personal predicaments and a perilous world.
Oprah Magazine
In Britain, Smith has won the Whitbread, the Goldsmiths, and the Costa prizes, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker three times. American readers ought to be better acquainted with her genius.… This ambitious four-novel sequence will end with summer and Smith in her element. If we are all very lucky, perhaps the world will catch up with her there, too.
Slate
[A] splendid free-form novel — the first in a seasonally themed tetralogy.… Eschewing traditional structure and punctuation, the novel charts a wild course through uncertain terrain, an approach that excites and surprises in equal turn.… Smith, always one to take risks, sees all of them pay off yet again.
Publishers Weekly
At the heart of Man Booker Prize nominee Smith’s new novel is the charming friendship between a lonely girl and a kind older man who offers her a world of culture. This novel of big ideas and small pleasures is enthusiastically recommended.
Library Journal
A girl's friendship with an older neighbor stands at the center of this multifaceted meditation on aging, art, love, and affection.… Smith has a gift for drawing a reader into whatever world she creates.… [Autumn is] compelling in its emotional and historical freight, its humor, and keen sense of creativity and loss.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How is the story rooted in autumn? Why do you think Ali Smith decided to write a quartet of books about the seasons, the changing of the seasons, and the passing of time? Why did she start with autumn?
2. How is the book obsessed with time? "Time travel is real. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute" (p. 175).
3. Ali Smith stated in an interview with her British publishers:
The way we live, in time, is made to appear linear by the chronologies that get applied to our lives by ourselves and others, starting at birth, ending at death, with a middle where we’re meant to comply with some or other of life’s usual expectations, in other words the year to year day to day minute to minute moment to moment fact of time passing. But we’re time-containers, we hold all our diachrony, our pasts and our futures (and also the pasts and futures of all the people who made us and who in turn we’ll help to make) in every one of our consecutive moments / minutes / days / years, and I wonder if our real energy, our real history, is cyclic in continuance and at core, rather than consecutive.
Do you agree with the author that our history and thus our stories, individual and collective, are cyclical rather than chronological? Discuss this description of time.
4. The novel proceeds with flashbacks interspersed with the present rather than in a consecutive, chronological narrative. Why? And how does this connect with the author’s view on how we perceive time?
5. Describe the friendship between Elisabeth and Daniel and how it evolves through time and the novel. How is their relationship at the heart of the novel? Why does he always ask her, "What are you reading?"
6. How does their friendship revolve around stories, art, and literature?
7. What is the novel saying about creativity and creating and about witnessing and experiencing art and literature? And what is the novel saying about nature and our interactions with it?
8. Describe the relationship of Elisabeth and her mother. How does the relationship blossom by the end of the novel? Why does it change?
9. In Autumn, what is the importance of art and the human connections that come out of art and creativity? Give some examples.
10. How is Autumn collage-like and thus similar to the art of Pauline Boty?
11. Why do you think the author has chosen this real-life artist as a character and inspiration in this novel? What do Boty and her vision and art represent for Daniel and Elisabeth and how does she connect to the themes of Autumn?
12. Continuing with the collage theme, discuss Daniel’s wordplay and intermixing of college and collage. What do you think of the idea of college being a collage of different classes and experiences?
13. Why does the book open with a reference to Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and then there’s a longer reference to a divided country filled with polarities: "All across the country, people felt legitimized. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked" (p. 60)? What are the two cities or polarities in the novel?
14. Smith alludes to and mentions many other authors and literary works as well: William Shakespeare, John Keats, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell. Discuss them and why they are relevant to this novel.
15. Many reviewers have called this novel the first post-Brexit novel. What does this mean? How has England changed after the Brexit vote? How does this tie into the United States’ 2016 election, or does it?
16. Find instances of tree imagery throughout the novel and discuss the various descriptions. How do the imagery and arboreal allusions connect with autumn and the changing seasons theme?
17. What is the novel saying about storytelling? "There’s always, there’ll always be, more story. That’s what story is" (p. 193).
18. Daniel tells Elisabeth, "So, always try to welcome people into the home of your story" (p. 119). Does this show that our stories don’t belong to us alone? Do you think this is a call by the author for inclusion and diversity rather than building fences and keeping people out?
19. Why doesn’t Daniel tell Elisabeth about his experience during World War II? "I know nothing, nothing really, about anyone" (p. 171). Can we ever know everything about another person?
20. How does Autumn fuse the present with the past?
21. What is the importance of politics and the effects of politics on the layperson in this novel? What does the fence and defying the fence represent?
22. Both Daniel and Elisabeth’s mother talk about lying to and being lied to by Daniel: "The power of the lie… Always seductive to the powerless" (p. 114). Elisabeth’s mother: "I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to any more" (p. 57). What are both of them talking about? And what is the connection of lies and truth in the novel?
23. On what note, despair or hope, does the novel end and why?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)