February Reading Groups round-up
Looking for ideas for new titles to read with your reading circle or book group? Let us help. Here are some titles which have reading guides ready and waiting for you to stimulate discussion and debate.
The Suicide Shop by Jean Teulé
Has your life been a failure? Let’s make your death a success! With the twenty-first century just a distant memory and the world in environmental chaos, many people have lost the will to live. And business is brisk at The Suicide Shop. Run by the Tuvache family for generations, the shop offers an amazing variety of ways to end it all, with something to fit every budget. The Tuvaches go mournfully about their business, taking pride in the morbid service they provide. Until the youngest member of the family threatens to destroy their contented misery by confronting them with something they’ve never encountered before: a love of life.
Reading group questions
- One of the author’s aims in writing The Suicide Shop was to take any possible glamour out of the idea of suicide. Do you think he succeeds in this?
- Would you say that the main message of the book concerns the power of happiness to change things for the better?
- Why do you think the book was not set in an actual place?
- The Suicide Shop is billed as a black comedy. Do you think that is correct?
- What do you think the book tells us about family relationships and the influence we have on our children?
- Why do you think the book ended the way it did?
The Last Station, by Jay Parini
1910. Anna Karenina and War and Peace have made Leo Tolstoy the world’s most famous author. But fame comes at a price. In the tumultuous final year of his life, Tolstoy is desperate to find respite, so leaves his large family and the hounding press behind and heads into the wilderness. Too ill to venture beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believes his last days will pass in peaceful isolation. But the battle for Tolstoy’s soul will not be so simple.
Reading group questions
- How should we balance our commitment to love and family with our calling to make an impact in the world?
- Think about this quote in terms of each of the main characters: “Everything I know I know only because I love.”
- Does Leo and Sofya’s relationship seem realistic? How much of the novel do you think is based on fact, and what parts might the author have had to fill in? Why might an author sometimes alter the truth for a book?
- Do you think Tolstoy is justified in his leaving Sofya at the end of the book?
- The Last Station was recently adapted into a film starring Helen Mirren and James McAvoy. What qualities about the book do you feel lend themselves to a cinematic treatment?
