Guest Appearances
If you are interested in having Edward Docx as a guest of your reading group, then contact us here. He attends a few book clubs every year both in the UK and The US – depending on availability, time and costs.
Reader’s Guides
Self Help/Pravda
Here are some questions for discussion of Pravda taken from the website of Houghton Mifflin, the American publisher. They can be useful as a guide to stimulate discussion and provide a deeper understanding of the book.
The Calligrapher
1. ‘But that, I think, is what love is: an unknowable risk taken in the darkness during unsettled weather’. What do you think of Jasper’s characterization of love?
2. ‘For having purposed change, and falsehood, you/Can have no way but falsehood to be true.’ What does the novel say about truth and falsity between men and women? And for whom is this quotation more apt: Jasper or Madeleine?
3. In any first person narrative, we can only know and feel what the protagonist knows and feels. How does the author create a sense of the people in the book beyond that which Jasper’s skewed perspective gives us?
4. To what extent is John Donne a character in the novel?
5. ‘Take heed of loving me/ At least remember I forbade it thee…’ How did you feel about Jasper at the beginning of the novel? Did this change by the end?
6. Why do you think the author chose to end the novel as he did?