Becoming Strangers 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 Becoming Strangers.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

Becoming Strangers is a notably assured, engaging, and perceptive debut novel about two married European couples on holiday in the Caribbean. In telling their separate and combined stories, in revealing their backgrounds and orchestrating their interactions, Louise Dean has crafted a “delicately powerful [and] impressive” account (Sunday Times, UK).

After more than half a century of marriage, Dorothy and George are embarking on their first journey abroad together. Three decades younger, Jan and Annemieke are meanwhile taking their last, as illness and incompatibility bring their unhappy union to an end. Initially, the luxury of an island resort is no match for the well-worn patterns of domestic life. Then the couples’ paths cross, and a series of surprises takes place—a disappearance and an assault, most dramatically, but also a teapot tempest of passions, slights, misunderstandings, frustrations, and small awakenings that punctuate a week in which each pair struggles to confront what’s been keeping them apart.

A hit with readers and critics alike in England, Becoming Strangers is a different kind of love story, and maybe a different kind of story altogether. For in Dean’s sharp and authentic account there is seldom a happy ending, but there is—more honestly, more accurately—sometimes a chance to redeem a life half-lived.


DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Compare George and Dorothy’s relationship with their kids to that which Jan and Annemieke have with theirs. Also, compare their respective marriages, their distinct but similarly flawed unions. Given all the spite and friction they exhibit, why have these two couples stayed together so long? (Recall, for instance, George’s observation: “You couldn't tell him that there was any marriage that wasn't equal measures love and hate.”)
   
   
2. What causes Dorothy to wander away from the resort, to walk all the way to a village in a different part of the island? And what did you make of the depiction of Dorothy’s “illness” in these pages? Was it realistic or contrived, accurate or simplistic, moving or hollow? Defend your views by citing the text.
   
   
3. Early on, while enjoying pizza and beer at the bar, Adam remarks in passing that “Americans don’t like second-hand smoke.” To which George replies, with a sigh: “Everything’s got to be new with them.” How are Americans portrayed in this novel? On the whole, do you agree with this portrayal? Why or why not?
   
   

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