My Antonia...

This great American novel tells the story of several immigrant families who move to rural Nebraska. Antonia is the eldest daughter of the Shimerdas and is a bold and free-hearted young woman who becomes the center of narrator Jim Burden's attention. The story has many elements but clearly documents the struggles of the hard-working immigrants that homesteaded the prairies, and does a particularly fine job covering the hardships that women faced in that difficult environment. My Antonia also provides Willa Cather with a platform to make some comments on women's rights while weaving a story where romantic interests are ultimately bandied about by the uncontrolled changes that occur in people's lives. The final book of Willa Cather's prairie trilogy, My Antonia, is considered her greatest accomplishment. My Antonia was first published in 1918.

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks's Year of Wonders describes the 17th-century plague that is carried from London to a small Derbyshire village by an itinerant tailor. As villagers begin, one by one, to die, the rest face a choice: do they flee their village in hope of outrunning the plague or do they stay? The lord of the manor and his family pack up and leave. The rector, Michael Mompellion, argues forcefully that the villagers should stay put, isolate themselves from neighboring towns and villages, and prevent the contagion from spreading. His oratory wins the day and the village turns in on itself. Cocooned from the outside world and ravaged by the disease, its inhabitants struggle to retain their humanity in the face of the disaster. The narrator, the young widow Anna Frith, is one of the few who succeeds. With Mompellion and his wife, Elinor, she tends to the dying and battles to prevent her fellow villagers from descending into drink, violence, and superstition. All is complicated by the intense, inexpressible feelings she develops for both the rector and his wife. Year of Wonders sometimes seems anachronistic as historical fiction; Anna and Mompellion occasionally appear to be modern sensibilities unaccountably transferred to 17th-century Derbyshire. However, there is no mistaking the power of Brooks's imagination or the skill with which she constructs her story of ordinary people struggling to cope with extraordinary circumstances.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't put out fires--they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury's vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal--a place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and ideas are bad. Fire Captain Beatty explains it this way, "Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs.... Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

Guy Montag is a book-burning fireman undergoing a crisis of faith. His wife spends all day with her television "family," imploring Montag to work harder so that they can afford a fourth TV wall. Their dull, empty life sharply contrasts with that of his next-door neighbor Clarisse, a young girl thrilled by the ideas in books, and more interested in what she can see in the world around her than in the mindless chatter of the tube. When Clarisse disappears mysteriously, Montag is moved to make some changes, and starts hiding books in his home. Eventually, his wife turns him in, and he must answer the call to burn his secret cache of books. After fleeing to avoid arrest, Montag winds up joining an outlaw band of scholars who keep the contents of books in their heads, waiting for the time society will once again need the wisdom of literature.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown

First published in 1970, this extraordinary book changed the way Americans think about the original inhabitants of their country. Beginning with the Long Walk of the Navajos in 1860 and ending 30 years later with the massacre of Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, it tells how the American Indians lost their land and lives to a dynamically expanding white society. During these three decades, America's population doubled from 31 million to 62 million. Again and again, promises made to the Indians fell victim to the ruthlessness and greed of settlers pushing westward to make new lives. The Indians were herded off their ancestral lands into ever-shrinking reservations, and were starved and killed if they resisted. It is a truism that "history is written by the victors"; for the first time, this book described the opening of the West from the Indians' viewpoint. Accustomed to stereotypes of Indians as red savages, white Americans were shocked to read the reasoned eloquence of Indian leaders and learn of the bravery with which they and their peoples endured suffering. With meticulous research and in measured language overlaying brutal narrative, Dee Brown focused attention on a national disgrace. Still controversial but with many of its premises now accepted, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee has sold 5 million copies around the world. Thirty years after it first broke onto the national conscience, it has lost none of its importance or emotional impact. --John Stevenson

Tirra Lirra by the River, by Jessica Anderson

Nora Porteous has spent most of her life waiting to escape. Fleeing from her small-town family and then from her stifling marriage to a mean-spirited husband, Nora arrives finally in London where she creates a new life for herself as a successful dressmaker.


Now in her seventies, Nora returns to Queensland to settle into her childhood home.

But Nora has been away a long time, and the people and events of her past are not at all like she remembered them. And while some things never change, Nora is about to discover just how selective her 'globe of memory' has been.

Tirra Lirra by the River is a moving account of one woman's remarkable life, a beautifully written novel which displays the lyrical brevity of Jessica Anderson's award-winning style.

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award.

"An American Childhood," by Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard remembers. She remembers the exhilaration of whipping a snowball at a car and having it hit straight on. She remembers playing with the skin on her mother's knuckles, which "didn't snap back; it lay dead across her knuckle in a yellowish ridge." She remembers the compulsion to spend a whole afternoon (or many whole afternoons) endlessly pitching a ball at a target. In this intoxicating account of her childhood, Dillard climbs back inside her 5-, 10-, and 15-year-old selves with apparent effortlessness. The voracious young Dillard embraces headlong one fascination after another--from drawing to rocks and bugs to the French symbolists. "Everywhere, things snagged me," she writes. "The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world." From her parents she inherited a love of language--her mother's speech was "an endlessly interesting, swerving path"--and the understanding that "you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself," not for anyone else's approval or desire. And one would be mistaken to call the energy Dillard exhibits in An American Childhood merely youthful; "still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day," she writes, "as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive."

The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

When Edgar Drake is summoned to the British War Office and asked to tune an eccentric major's 1840 Erard grand piano in the jungles of Burma, he is both confused and intrigued. The year is 1886, and the British Empire is attempting to tighten its control of its colonies in the Far East, to fend off French rivals in the Mekong Delta, and to quell the resistance of a confederacy of local Shan tribes in northern Burma. Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll has established an important foothold in Mae Lwin, employing unconventional methods—reciting poetry and playing music—to negotiate treaties with Burmese opponents of British rule. He has demanded that a grand piano be hauled through the jungle and now requires a tuner to be sent to him as well. Such eccentric behavior causes the major to be regarded by some as a genius and by others as a suspicious renegade, but, as Edgar soon realizes, his actions may conceal even stranger truths. As Edgar embarks on his first trip abroad, the beauty and mystery of Burma, its entrancing landscape, its customs and music, and an exotic woman named Khin Myo cast a spell that he cannot resist. After his task is completed, Edgar decides to stay on with Anthony Carroll—a choice that will change his life as he becomes entangled in a series of events and emotions that spin dangerously out of control.


Written in a prose capable of both historical precision and mystical lushness, The Piano Tuner explores British colonialism at a moment of crisis and the ill fortune of a man who confuses "the cause of music" with the cause of empire.

Topics for Discussion
1. In briefing Edgar Drake about Anthony Carroll, Colonel Killian tells him, "there are men who get lost in the rhetoric of our imperial destiny, that we conquer not to gain land and wealth but to spread culture and civilization" [p. 18]. Is this true of Carroll? Is he motivated to spread Western culture, via music, to the East? Is it true of Edgar? What does the novel suggest about the purpose of imperialism?

2. Why does Edgar decide to accept a mission to travel thousands of miles to tune a piano in a remote and dangerous jungle at the furthest outreaches of the British Empire? Why does his wife, Katherine, encourage him to go?

3. Why is Anthony Carroll viewed with such a mixture of reverence and suspicion by the British military? In what ways does his behavior defy convention?

4. As he contemplates his voyage to Burma, Edgar views London on a foggy night: "He could see the vague line of the shore, the vast, heavy architecture that crowded the river. Like animals at a waterhole, he thought, and he liked the comparison" [p. 23]. Why is this a particularly apt simile for Edgar to use at this moment? Where else in the novel does Mason reveal the depth of Edgar's consciousness through his impressions?

5. Edgar writes to Katherine that the "entire trip has already coated itself in a veneer of seeming, a dreamlikeness" [p. 146]. In what ways is this true? What gives Edgar's experiences an otherworldly quality? What role do his dreams play in the novel?

6. During the tiger hunt, Captain Witherspoon spots some egrets and asks if he can shoot them. "Not here," Captain Dalton tells him. "The egrets are part of the founding myths of Pegu. Bad luck to shoot them, my friend." To which Witherspoon replies, "Superstitious nonsense. . . . I thought we were educating them to abandon such beliefs" [p. 94]. What does this exchange suggest about the British attitude toward colonial subjects in Burma? About the cultural differences between the British and Burmese?

7. What is the significance of the boy to whom Edgar gives a coin being accidentally shot by Captain Witherspoon? Why does Edgar refer to the coin as "a symbol of responsibility, of misplaced munificence, a reminder of mistakes, and so a talisman" [p. 104]? In what sense does Edgar inherit the boy's "fortune"?

8. How is Edgar perfectly suited to the task set for him by Anthony Carroll? How do his dreaminess, his propensity for getting lost, his clumsiness, and his political naïveté all serve Carroll's ends?

9. After he's been away from London for several months, Edgar writes to Katherine that he has changed, although, he admits "What this change means I don't know, just as I don't know if I am happier or sadder than I have ever been." He also says, "There is a purpose in all of this . . . although I do not know yet what it is" [p. 252]. How has Edgar changed? What has changed him? What is his real purpose in Burma?

10. What kind of woman is Khin Myo? Is her attraction to Edgar real or feigned? What is her relationship to Anthony Carroll? How is she related to the woman with the parasol at the beginning and end of the story? Is she, as Nash-Burnham suggests in the ghostly conversation in the guardhouse, Edgar's "creation," a part of his "imaginings" [p.302]?

11. Music is a recurring theme in The Piano Tuner, from the hauntingly beautiful song the Man with One Story hears in the desert, to the love ditty Anthony Carroll plays on a flute to fend off attackers in the jungle, to the Bach fugue Edgar plays for the sawbwa, to the call of insects scraping their wings in the jungle. What roles does music play in the novel? How does it affect its listeners? What is its ultimate importance in the story?

12. After Edgar escapes from the guardhouse, he reads the note that Carroll had given him—a passage from his translation of The Odyssey about the Lotus-Eaters who "forget the way home" [p. 310]. In what ways has Edgar "tasted" of the lotus? Why does he find Burma so alluring? What does the lotus signify in this context?

13. Why does Edgar cut the piano loose from its moorings and send it down the Salween River in a rainstorm? In what way is this striking image—a grand piano floating downriver on an unmanned raft and being "played" by the rain—suggestive of the novel's larger themes?

14. What accounts for The Piano Tuner's elusive, hard-to-pin-down quality? What remains mysterious after the book is finished? How does Mason's prose style contribute to the sense of ambiguity that pervades the novel?

15. At the end of the novel, Captain Nash-Burnham tells Edgar that Anthony Carroll is a traitor to England and suggests a number of possible roles for the Doctor: "Anthony Carroll is an agent working for Russia, He is a Shan nationalist, He is a French spy, Anthony Carroll wants to build his own kingdom in the jungles of Burma" [p. 301]. Edgar thinks Carroll is a genius and a peacemaker. Which of these interpretations is correct? Does the novel present enough evidence to decide?

16. Why does Mason begin and end the novel with the image of the sun and a parasol? What symbolic or cultural values might these images represent?

17. What does the novel as a whole suggest about the British Empire—its effects on colonized peoples and on those who try to rule them—in the late nineteenth century? How is this historical portrait relevant to our own time and the political and cultural conflicts between the West and the Middle East?

18. The Piano Tuner participates in a tradition of literary works that try to fathom colonized cultures vastly different from the author's own. What features does Daniel Mason's novel share with such predecessors as E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, or George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant"? How is it different from these works?