Hachette Livre

Hachette Livre Reading Group Guides

Welcome to our Reading Group guide for The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell. We invite you to consider and discuss the following questions when reading this book:

  1. ‘Bricks are undoubtedly an essential ingredient of civilisation; one gets nowhere at all without them.’ A satire on nineteenth-century imperialism – but do we still think this?
  2. ‘One cannot change something that is sacred.’ How does the Padre’s view fit with nineteenth-century Britain?
  3. The Collector’s view of the mass production of fine art: ‘Who could doubt the benefits which would result from placing such articles within the means of all classes of society . . . articles which could not fail to produce a love of the fine arts?’ How, and at what level, did this technology change society?
  4. ‘The humans he had got used to, in time . . . the dogs never.’ Is this just the Collector’s view of ‘want’? Or is it true of all of us?
  5. ‘We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us . . . but what if we’re only an after-glow of them?’ Is this true of our view of Victorian society? Is the author doing this himself?
  6. What does the author feel about bureaucracy? How does he demonstrate his feelings?
  7. ‘Possessions are surely a physical high-water mark of the moral tide which has been flooding steadily for the past twenty years or more.’ What does the author think of possessions?
  8. ‘Miriam was tired of womanhood.’ How does the female experience of the siege differ from the male? How well does this reflect the roles of men and women in Victorian life? What difference did class make?
  9. How well do you think the author handles the two doctors? What is their purpose in the novel, and do they succeed?
  10. ‘Beauty, of course, and Art, also needed warmth of feeling.’ Do they?
  11. ‘A people, a nation, does not create itself according to its own best ideas, but is shaped by other forces, of which it has little knowledge.’ This is how the author ends the novel – what do you understand by his conclusion? How does it apply to modern society?

Current Reading Group Titles

  1. Scapegallows by Carol Birch
  2. Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat
  3. Radiance by Shaena Lambert
  4. Rose of Sebastopol by Katharine McMahon
  5. The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell
  6. Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott
  7. The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle
  8. Golden Age by Tahmima Anam
  9. How To Talk to a Widower by Jonathan Tropper
  10. Still Waters by Camilla Noli
  11. Wives of the East Wind by Liu Hong
  12. Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
  13. The Keep by Jennifer Egan
  14. The Saffron Kitchen by Yasmin Crowther
  15. Pirate’s Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson
  16. The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani
  17. April in Paris by Michael Wallner
  18. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday
  19. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
  20. Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet
  21. Red River by Lalita Tademy
  22. The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox
  23. Rosetta by Barbara Ewing
  24. The Mathematics of Love by Emma Darwin
  25. The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld
  26. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell

Suggested Further Reading