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    Study Guide for Book Clubs: Alias Grace: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #27
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: Alias Grace: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #27
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: Alias Grace: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #27
    Ebook109 pages3 hours

    Study Guide for Book Clubs: Alias Grace: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #27

    By Kathryn Cope

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    About this ebook

    Whether you are a member of a book club, or simply reading Alias Grace for pleasure, this clear and concise guide, written by a specialist in literature, will greatly enhance your reading experience. A comprehensive guide to Margaret Atwood's acclaimed novel Alias Grace, this discussion aid includes a wealth of information and resources: useful literary and historical context; an author biography; a plot synopsis; analyses of themes & imagery; character analysis; thirty-six thought-provoking discussion questions; recommended further reading and even a quick quiz. For those in book clubs, this useful companion guide takes the hard work out of preparing for meetings and guarantees productive discussion. For solo readers, it encourages a deeper examination of a multi-layered text.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKathryn Cope
    Release dateFeb 23, 2018
    ISBN9781386760306
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: Alias Grace: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #27
    Author

    Kathryn Cope

    Kathryn Cope graduated in English Literature from Manchester University and obtained her master’s degree in contemporary fiction from the University of York. She is the author of Study Guides for Book Clubs and the HarperCollins Offical Book Club Guide series. She lives in the Staffordshire Moorlands with her husband, son and dog.

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      Book preview

      Study Guide for Book Clubs - Kathryn Cope

      Study Guide for Book Clubs:

      Alias Grace

      By Kathryn Cope

      Study Guide for Book Clubs: Alias Grace

      Copyright © 2017 Kathryn Cope

      All Rights Reserved

      Contents

      Introduction

      Margaret Atwood

      Plot Synopsis

      Historical Context

      Style

      Themes & Imagery

      Characters

      Questions for Discussion

      Quiz Questions

      Quiz Answers

      Further Reading

      Bibliography

      About the Author

      Introduction

      There are few things more rewarding than getting together with a group of like-minded people and discussing a good book. Book club meetings, at their best, are vibrant, passionate affairs. Each member will bring along a different perspective and ideally there will be heated debate.

      A surprising number of book club members, however, report that their meetings have been a disappointment. Even though their group loved the particular book they were discussing, they could think of astonishingly little to say about it. Failing to find interesting discussion angles for a book is the single most common reason for book group discussions to fall flat. Most book groups only meet once a month and a lacklustre meeting is frustrating for everyone.

      Study Guides for Book Clubs were born out of a passion for reading groups. Packed with information, they take the hard work out of preparing for a meeting and ensure that your book group discussions never run dry. How you choose to use the guides is entirely up to you. The author biography, historical, and style sections provide useful background information which may be interesting to share with your group at the beginning of your meeting. The all-important list of discussion questions, which will probably form the core of your meeting, can be found towards the end of this guide. To support your responses to the discussion questions, you may find it helpful to refer to the ‘Themes’ and ‘Character’ sections.

      A detailed plot synopsis is provided as an aide-memoire if you need to recap on the finer points of the plot. There is also a quick quiz - a fun way to test your knowledge and bring your discussion to a close. Finally, if this was a book that you particularly enjoyed, the guide concludes with a list of books similar in style or subject matter.

      Be warned, this guide contains spoilers. Please do not be tempted to read it before you have read the original novel as plot surprises will be well and truly ruined.

      Kathryn Cope, 2017

      Margaret Atwood

      Life

      Margaret Atwood, Canada’s most celebrated novelist, is now in her seventies. She was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1939. As the daughter of a forest entomologist, she spent the early years of her life living in the wilds of North Quebec.

      After taking her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, Atwood gained a master’s degree from Radcliffe College, Massachusetts, in 1962. She went on to teach English and then held a variety of academic posts while writing. As well as being made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Atwood has been awarded sixteen honorary degrees; the Order of Ontario; the Norwegian Order of Literary Merit; and the Booker Prize. Throughout her life, she has been a vocal campaigner for human rights and environmental causes. She has enthusiastically embraced new writing technologies when many established authors have been wary or hostile towards them. A regular contributor to Twitter, Atwood has also used digital fiction platforms to launch her work and helped to develop the LongPen: a digital tool enabling authors to sign books for readers on the other side of the world.

      http://twitter.com/MargaretAtwood

      Work

      Over the years, Atwood has taken evident pleasure in experimenting with different genres and subject matter within her fiction. Within the sixteen full-length novels she has written, she has explored the boundaries of historical fiction, the detective novel, science fiction and Shakespeare. She is also admired as a feminist writer, creating strong, complex female characters and exploring gender ideology and sexual politics. Although her subject matter is often dark, her work is characterised by a playful sense of humour.

      Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman, told the story of a woman with an eating disorder and was published in 1969. This was followed in 1973 by Surfacing which explores a woman’s journey into madness as she investigates the disappearance of her father. A number of equally eclectic novels followed, culminating in the publication, in 1986, of the novel Atwood was to become most well-known for. The Handmaid’s Tale has become a widely studied modern classic and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. It tells the story of Offred, a woman living in a futuristic version of the USA where the freedom of women is completely restricted and ‘handmaids’ are assigned to bear children for elite couples.

      Following the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood continued to produce a stream of critically acclaimed novels, all very different in subject matter and style. Cat’s Eye (1989) tackled the psychological effects of childhood bullying and was again shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Robber Bride (1993) was a whodunit, centring upon the death of Zenia, a blackmailing husband stealer, who wreaks devastation on the lives of the women who are unfortunate enough to cross her path. Atwood’s ninth novel, Alias Grace (1996) marked the author’s first foray into historical fiction, reimagining the true story of the notorious nineteenth-century convict, Grace Marks. Alias Grace was shortlisted for the Booker and Orange Prize and won the Giller Prize.

      Atwood’s enthusiasm for mixing genres became even more evident with the publication of The Blind Assassin in 2000. Part-family saga, part-romance, part-detective story, this novel gradually reveals the history of its protagonist, Iris, through a number of sources and clues, including excerpts from a pulp sci-fi novel-within-a-novel. The result was playful and dazzlingly complex in structure and finally won Atwood the Booker Prize for Fiction.

      In 2003, Atwood published Oryx and Crake, the first book in what was to become her ‘MaddAddam trilogy’. This novel marked Atwood’s return to dystopian science fiction, or what she prefers to call speculative fiction. In this dark vision of the future, Atwood’s protagonist, Snowman, believes he is the only human being left alive after a lethal pandemic has devastated the planet. Through flashbacks to his earlier life, Snowman’s involvement in the events leading up to the pandemic is revealed: a fatal mixture of transgenic experimentation and bioterrorism. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction, Oryx and Crake was followed by The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013): novels which expand upon the dystopian world created in the first of the trilogy.

      Atwood’s fifteenth novel, The Heart Goes Last, originated as a four-episode series on the digital platform byliner.com and was expanded into a full-length novel in 2015. This novel explores the potential impact of technology upon human relations in an only too plausible near-future. Her most recent novel to date is Hag-Seed (2016), a modern reworking of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

      While Atwood is best-known for her novels, her literary output in other areas has been extraordinary. She has written short stories; screenplays; radio plays; critical articles; reviews; children’s books and a number of acclaimed collections of poetry.

      Over a career spanning almost fifty years, Atwood’s fiction has never fallen out of favour becoming, if anything, more relevant as time goes on. This has been recently proven in Hulu’s Emmy award-winning adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, starring Elisabeth Moss. The overwhelmingly ecstatic reception this series received from critics and viewers alike demonstrates the dynamism of Atwood’s literature. Hot on the heels of this success follows the Netflix adaptation of Alias Grace, starring Sarah Gadon in the

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