Wild and Distant Seas Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, A Moby-Dick Reading List and our BookBrowse Review of Wild and Distant Seas.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. Tara Karr Roberts's Wild and Distant Seas is a novel that expands the world of a canonical work—much like Circe by Madeline Miller or James by Percival Everett. What minor or peripheral character in a favorite novel would you want to read about in a work like this?
2. How familiar with Moby-Dick are you? Do you feel like having read that book was necessary to your experience of reading Wild and Distant Seas?
3. What does Evangeline Hussey mean when she says "I wanted to believe I had changed the story, that the painting of my life on Nantucket now hung on my wall in unchangeable form: I at the inn, Hosea forever on the edge of returning. Yet I came to see I had wrought something far more fragile, an illusion etched on a pane of glass"? (p. 6) Did this impulse feel familiar to you?

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