Get our Best Book Club Books of 2025 eBook!

Book Club Discussion Questions for The Darling by Russell Banks

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reading Guide |  Reviews |  Beyond the Book |  Read-Alikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

The Darling by Russell Banks

The Darling

by Russell Banks
  • Critics' Consensus (8):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • First Published:
  • Oct 1, 2004, 384 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Oct 2005, 416 pages
  • Rate this book

About this Book

Book Club Discussion Questions

Print PDF

In a book club? Subscribe to our Book Club Newsletter!



For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, Liberia and our BookBrowse Review of The Darling.


Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

Introduction

Russell Banks has exhibited an astonishingly imaginative range throughout his distinguished career as a novelist, and his uniquely realistic American voice, on display in such modern classics as Rule of the Bone and Continental Drift, continues to shine in this latest effort. Fans and newcomers alike will be rewarded by his incisive eye for character and his ability to deliver a relentless and engaging narrative -- always in the service of his inimitable style.

The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison. Hannah's encounter with Taylor in America ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah's family in its grip and forces her to make a heartrending choice.

Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling is a political-historical thriller -- reminiscent of Greene and Conrad -- that explodes the genre, raising serious philosophical questions about terrorism, political violence, and the clash of races and cultures.



Discussion Questions
  1. What is the significance of the title, The Darling?

  2. Hannah Musgrave spends much of her life in the US and Liberia under an alias, Dawn Carrington. She recalls that for a time as a child, she insisted on being known as "Scout," and she feels that Woodrow has two separate lives: one in Freetown, and one in Fuama. How does identity play out in The Darling? What did the novel make you think about personality – could you only have lived the life you have, or do we each contain multitudes?

  3. "If humans, like the rest of the animals, could not speak, we would all live together in peace, devouring one another solely out of necessity and instinct, our positions in the food chain nicely balanced by need and numbers. If we were as speechless as my collies on the farm or the hens and sheep and the geese, if we barked or baa'd or clucked or if like the chimps we could only hoot and holler and otherwise had to depend on body language, we would not kill one another or any other animal solely for the pleasure on it. The power of speech is the speech of power. Vows of silence are pledges to peaceableness. Silence is indeed golden, and a golden age would be silent." Do you agree?

  4. Charles Taylor and Samuel Doe are real people as well as characters in The Darling – and at one point John Kerry gets a mention, having gone on a rafting trip with Hannah's parents. How does Russell Banks meld the historic and the fictional in this novel? Did you find its combination of the factual and imaginary persuasive or unsettling, or both?

  5. How are Hannah's "dreamers" important to her and to the novel as a whole?

Copyright Harper Collins.

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.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $0 for 0 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book:
  Liberia

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Lilac People
    by Milo Todd
    For fans of All the Light We Cannot See, a poignant tale of a trans man’s survival in Nazi Germany and postwar Berlin.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    The Original Daughter
    by Jemimah Wei

    A dazzling debut by Jemimah Wei about ambition, sisterhood, and family bonds in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.

  • Book Jacket

    Ginseng Roots
    by Craig Thompson

    A new graphic memoir from the author of Blankets and Habibi about class, childhood labor, and Wisconsin’s ginseng industry.

  • Book Jacket

    Awake in the Floating City
    by Susanna Kwan

    A debut novel about an artist and a 130-year-old woman bound by love and memory in a future, flooded San Francisco.

  • Book Jacket

    Serial Killer Games
    by Kate Posey

    A morbidly funny and emotionally resonant novel about the ways life—and love—can sneak up on us (no matter how much pepper spray we carry).

Who Said...

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

B W M in H M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.