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    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Heart Goes Last: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #21
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Heart Goes Last: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #21
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Heart Goes Last: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #21
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Heart Goes Last: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #21

    By Kathryn Cope

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    About this ebook

    Whether you are a member of a reading group, or simply reading The Heart Goes Last 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 The Heart Goes Last, this discussion aid includes a wealth of information and resources: useful literary context; an author biography; a plot synopsis; analyses of themes & imagery; character analysis; twenty-eight 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 26, 2018
    ISBN9781386980452
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Heart Goes Last: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #21
    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

      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 book clubs. 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 and literary context 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 & Imagery’ 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, 2016

      The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

      Originally written as an online serial, The Heart Goes Last evolved into Margaret Atwood’s fifteenth published novel. Fans of the grande dame of Canadian literature were pleased to find many of Atwood’s trademarks in her first stand-alone novel since The Blind Assassin, published in 2000. A piece of speculative fiction, The Heart Goes Last examines the familiar Atwood territory of a dystopian future in which mankind’s quest for technological advancement and better ways of living has gone badly awry. As in her MaddAddam trilogy, Atwood lets her imagination run wild in a cautionary tale speculating on what the future might hold for us. Unusually for Atwood, however, her dystopia is set in a near-present which could quite feasibly be just around the corner.

      The novel is set in the USA, where a country-wide economic crash has hit north-eastern regions particularly hard. At the beginning of the novel, Stan and Charmaine, an average married couple, have been reduced to living in their car, having lost their jobs and their home. Constantly in fear of being attacked by roaming gangs, it is no surprise when the couple are seduced by an advert for the Positron project: a scheme which offers a comfortable home and job security in the town of Consilience. In exchange, the participants have to live within the privately-funded Positron prison every alternate month. Stan and Charmaine sign up for the project and, although the scheme delivers all the comforts that were promised, things soon start to go wrong. Charmaine and Stan become sexually obsessed with the ‘Alternates’ who live in their home while they are in prison and it becomes increasingly clear that the project involves the violation of human rights and the erasure of freewill.

      At the heart of Atwood’s novel is her interest in what happens when technology and the flaws of human nature come together. In exploring this idea, she raises many other fascinating questions about modern society and the ways we live. Would most of us sacrifice freewill in exchange for safety and security? Will technology de-personalise human relationships altogether? Could our desire for social order ultimately lead to social cleansing? And where will our desire for eternal youth lead? At the same time, Atwood also explores rich, universal themes such as the true nature of love, the perversity of sexual desire and the boundaries of identity. Once again, Atwood’s literary skills and lively imagination have combined to produce a novel perfect for book club discussion.

      Margaret Atwood

      Life

      Margaret Atwood, Canada’s most celebrated novelist, is now in her seventies. She was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1939 and, as the daughter of a forest entomologist, 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 also been notable for enthusiastically embracing new technologies in writing 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. For her, literary fiction and genre fiction are not mutually exclusive and, within the fifteen full-length novels she has written, she has explored the boundaries of historical fiction, the detective novel and science fiction. 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 was The Edible Woman, published in 1969: a story about a woman with an eating disorder who feels that she is being eaten. 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

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