Thunderstruck 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 Thunderstruck.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

Erik Larson, bestselling author of The Devil in the White City and Isaac’s Storm, returns with another gripping examination of a watershed period in history. In Thunderstruck, he intertwines the fascinating, sometimes shocking stories of two Edwardian-era men: Guglielmo Marconi, the appallingly driven inventor of the wireless telegraph, and Hawley Harvey Crippen, a mild-mannered doctor who killed his wife in the notorious “North London Cellar Murder.” One’s creation helped to capture the other, while the capture itself catapulted the creation from the merely intriguing to the downright necessary, opening the door for the instantaneous communication we take for granted today.

Told with Larson’s renowned fusing of meticulous detail and propulsive storytelling, Thunderstruck is his best, most absorbing book yet.

Reader's Guide

1. In his note to the reader, Larson quotes P. D. James: “Murder, the unique crime, is a paradigm of its age.” How is the murder in Thunderstruck a paradigm of its time? Can you think of a notorious murder in our own era that is an equivalent?
   


2. The murderer Hawley Harvey Crippen and the inventor Guglielmo Marconi came from similarly prosperous backgrounds, and yet their lives took quite opposite turns. Compare the two men as characters–in what ways are they similar, and in what ways are they different? Who would you most like to have met, and why?
   


3. Now compare the two men to their respective spouses–is Marconi at all like Beatrice? What about Crippen and Belle?
   

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