26a Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, and our BookBrowse Review of 26a.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

In this haunting tale of innocence lost, Diana Evans evokes, with unforgettable vividness, the wonders and terrors of childhood and growing up. Identical twins Bessi and Georgia Hunter create a private universe in the attic room at 26a Waifer Avenue in a drab, lower-middle-class section of London. Here they sit back to back when making important decisions and hatching dreams (will their parents get divorced? how will they create their flapjack empire?) and share an intimacy, a mystical sense of connection, that they feel will bind them forever. But theirs is not an innocence immune to the tensions arising from their Nigerian mother's distracted nostalgia for the home she left behind and their British father's drunken rages. When the Hunter family returns to Sekon, Nigeria, Georgia has a terrifying encounter with a night watchman that plunges her into a world of inner separation, self-consciousness, and painful secrecy and that pushes the novel to its harrowing conclusion. At once playful and serious, magical and real, 26a explores the ties that bind family members and extend from this world to the beyond.

Questions for Discussion

1. In a dream William Gladstone tells Georgia that "one day you will see that there are no answers, only the places we make" [p. 30]. What does he mean, exactly? In what ways are place—and displacement—important in the novel?
    
2. Why doesn't Georgia tell Bessi about being sexually assaulted by Sedrick? Might her life have turned out differently if she hadn't kept this awful secret to herself?
    
3. Is Georgia's suicide attributable chiefly to her sexual assault? What other causes might have contributed to it? How does the attack change her?
    

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Harper Perennial. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.