1. Explore the narration of the book. From whose points of view is the story told? What common reflections and observations do these characters offer and what kinds of experiences have they shared? Did one voice resonate with you more than the others? If so, why?
2. Why do you think the author chose to open the story from the viewpoint of Professor Malcolm Miller? What does Malcolm say is the “most durable and the most alarming” truth he “ha[s] garnered from [his] long and rather unsatisfactory life” (4)? What do you think he means when he says: “We need no new landscapes but only new eyes” (4)? According to him what is the “engine of [our] deception” (4)?
3. What emotions does Malcolm say he “remember[s] most vividly” (11) from the time of his sister Sophy’s death? How does he feel now about the way he reacted in “Agnes’s hour of need” (11) and what might this reveal about his character?
4. Malcolm tells readers that he and Sophy “were certainly very eager to do the right thing at all times” (17). “I still am,” he says (17). Do you think Malcolm did the right thing by not delivering Sophy’s letter to Joe? What were his reasons for refraining from doing so and what has made him change his mind? Do you believe he made the right choice sharing the letter with Agnes after so much time had passed?
5. How does the novel treat—or interpret, as the title suggests—the motif of love? What forms of love are represented in the book? How would you say the story challenges our preconceptions of love, and how does love come to be defined by novel’s end?
6. “Professor Freud . . . knew a thing or two and one thing he knew well is that it is not so easy to keep the past back where it belongs since it tends to leak into the present all the time” (41), Joe observes. Consider how the author creates a dialogue about memory and our relationship with the past. Agnes asks, “How could I trust my memory if it could create fictions to fill in the gaps” (118). How reliable is memory and what can be learned even from the ways in which our mind fills in these gaps? For instance, what does Elfie mean when she says, “these fictions . . . may bring [her mother] closer to the truth” (129)?
7. When Joe “think[s] of Agnes during her hours of therapy” (43) what does he “recall most vividly” (43)? What does he confess was “the source of [his] osmotic love for [Agnes]” (47)? How do we find this mirrored by Agnes in her own observations about what she may really be seeking in a lover?
8. What does Joe consider “something of a talisman for [him] . . . a touchstone for the value of [his] life (54) and how does he think that his “work with Agnes dislodged him from this pattern” (54)? Does he ever find his way back to this touchstone, or is it replaced with something new?
9. Explore the setting of the novel. How do the garden and the beach help to reinforce major themes of the book or otherwise support or reveal the mental or emotional states of the main characters? What do these settings reveal about the relationship the characters have with the natural world?
10. Consider the ways in which the novel offers commentary about the lasting impact of war and the subsequent social structures of the twentieth century. What does the novel teach us about the postwar generation? Why did Agnes’s mother Sophy choose to marry her husband rather than to follow her heart back to Dr. Joseph Bradshaw? What does the book offer on the subject of the war’s legacy and generational trauma?
11. How does the book explore loss? What kinds of loss are examined in the story and how do the characters cope with the various forms of loss they experience? What does the book offer on the subject of grief? Does it seem to suggest how healing can happen or whether catharsis is even possible?
12. “For me facts are slippery things” (95), says Agnes. How does the novel address the themes of ambiguity and ambivalence and resist the notion of a world where everything is good or bad, black and white?
13. How does the book treat notions of morality and goodness? For instance, do you believe that there are any villains in the story? Does the novel suggest what determines whether a person is “good”—or whether there is such a thing as goodness at all? As the characters confront moral choices, what seems to motivate them in their decision-making?
14. Each of the three narrators recalls Spinoza’s critique of free will. Joe says, “If I felt as though I was making choices in the following years maybe I was simply following the trajectory that my encounter with Agnes had set me on” (54). Does the book ultimately answer the question of whether there is such a thing as free will? If free will does not exist, does the book suggest what might take its place?
15. While attending her daughter Elfie’s wedding Agnes opines that “there was more kindness, more tolerance, and more sheer generosity, more grace . . . in imperfect unions . . . than in many more orthodox partnerships” (131). Do you agree with her? Why or why not?
16. The novel contains many references to therapy and psychoanalysis, but what does the book reveal on the subject of self-reflection and self-analysis? How good are the characters at understanding themselves and their own lives and relationships? Does the novel ultimately illuminate what might facilitate or lead us to self-growth and self-awareness?
Suggestions for Further Reading
The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue by Edna O’Brien
Ethics by Benedict de Spinoza
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
The Heart of Winter by Jonathan Evison
The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind by Frank Tallis
Not That Sort of Girl by Mary Wesley
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle by Carl Jung
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
Grove Press
