Hachette Livre

Hachette Livre Reading Group Guides

Welcome to our Reading Group guide for Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott. We invite you to consider and discuss the following questions when reading this book:

  1. ‘Time always seemed to stop around Elizabeth.’ The linear nature of time is questioned right from the start in Ghostwalk. How does time behave?
  2. ‘I’ve been thinking about labyrinths this summer.’ Do all the threads tie up?
  3. ‘Writers, apparently, often have a diminished sense of direction.’ Do you agree? If you do, why is it so?
  4. Smell and colour are very important in Ghostwalk. Why so?
  5. How is Cambridge, or anywhere, a palimpsest?
  6. ‘The uncountable daily acts of forgetting.’ Elizabeth was a historian, but is it only objects or buildings that really preserve history?
  7. ‘Elizabeth hadn’t finished. But would she ever have done? Does anyone ever finish?’ Do they?
  8. ‘Life was disappointing, I thought, when you looked close; full of mediocrity and domesticity.’ What does this tell us about Lydia?
  9. ‘The smell of oysters is an objective correlative for sexual repression.’ What other objective correlatives (‘An object that stands for something complicated – an emotion, a knowledge, an instinct.’) are there in Ghostwalk?
  10. ‘Entanglement’ is explained in terms of quantum mechanics. How does it apply to Cambridge?
  11. cience as religion – what parallels does the author draw? How does stained glass come into it?

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