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Book club questions for Still Life by Sarah Winman take a closer look at the scale of a man, heart of the human experience and the love we all carry with us in every moment – that ultimately binds us together.
Still Life is an immensely rich book, with lovable characters and sweeping storytelling. It’s definitely one of the best books I’ve read in 2022, and I highly recommend it. This is a story so generous, rich, and deepy moving, it is sure to stick with you for a long time. There are so many layers and much to discuss.
I hope you will enjoy my book club questions for Still Life. You will find them below, along with the official synopsis of the book, and my additional recommendations. I hope you like them!
The Synopsis
A captivating, bighearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster, by the celebrated author of Tin Man.
Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and recall long-forgotten memories of her own youth. In each other, Ulysses and Evelyn find a kindred spirit amidst the rubble of war-torn Italy, and set off on a course of events that will shape Ulysses’s life for the next four decades.
As Ulysses returns home to London, reimmersing himself in his crew at The Stoat and Parot—a motley mix of pub crawlers and eccentrics—he carries his time in Italy with him. And when an unexpected inheritance brings him back to where it all began, Ulysses knows better than to tempt fate, and returns to the Tuscan hills.
With beautiful prose, extraordinary tenderness, and bursts of humor and light, Still Life is a sweeping portrait of unforgettable individuals who come together to make a family, and a deeply drawn celebration of beauty and love in all its forms.
Book Club Questions for Still Life
1. Still Life opens with a fateful meeting between Ulysses and Evelyn. How does this encounter shape the rest of their lives? What did they each take away from that evening?
2. The Stoat and Parot is a major gathering place for many of the characters in this novel. What does the pub mean to each of them? How would you say Ulysses’s found family changes (or not) as they leave the security of the pub?
3. Ulysses is truly surprised by his inheritance of the pensione in Florence, and this fresh start at life includes leaving the only home he’s known. Why do you think he made the decision that he did? What would you have done in Ulysses’s situation?
4. How is mothering and motherhood represented throughout the book, particularly with Alys? What does she learn from her relationship with Peg? How is she cared for by Ulysses and Cress, and how does her upbringing in Florence impact her?
5. In what ways does nature impact the characters and the story? Discuss some examples, such as Cress’s connection with the trees and the devastation of the flood, and how they shape the larger narrative of Still Life.
6. Art, specifically Renaissance art, is a major part of this novel. In what ways are these characters’ lives, particularly Evelyn’s and Ulysses’s, inspired by and shaped by art? Do you have a favorite work of art that has impacted you?
7. Discuss the ways in which E. M. Forster’s presence is felt in Still Life. Have you read A Room with a View? What did you think of Evelyn’s connection to the writer?
8. Do you think Evelyn and Ulysses’s meeting, and then their near misses for decades, are due to sheer coincidence? Or do they feel more like matters of fate? Discuss the differences, if any, between the two.
9. Love, in all its forms, is a major theme in Still Life. Discuss the types of love explored in the novel. How do we see examples of familial, romantic, platonic, unconditional love?
10. What do you think is next for these characters? For Ulysses and Peg? Alys? Col and Peggy and Pete?
Additional Recommendations
Hope you enjoyed book club question for Still Life! Here are some more recommendations along with their synopses.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left the family when he was nine years old without a trace. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, his family’s life has been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic.
Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.
Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s a story about the power—and limitations—of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
From the acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, a brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero’s unforgettable journey to maturity
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.
Thank you for reading my book club questions for Still Life. Happy reading! ❤️