Kingfisher Book Club Questions & Discussion Guide

About this book

A thirty-five-year-old creative-writing academic, comfortable in an open relationship with his partner Michael, becomes fixated on a colleague he knows only as "the poet," an older, famous woman who seems to hold everything he lacks. As his devotion deepens into obsession and illness enters the picture, he is forced to reckon with how much of another person one is allowed to take, and who gets to control the story afterward. Lyrical and unsettling, this queer debut is a novel about desire, grief, power, and the uses and abuses of love.

Discussion questions

1. The narrator, comfortable with his partner Michael, decides he wants the poet, a woman he barely knows. What was your first impression of him, and of the desire that takes hold so suddenly?
2. This is a short, intense, and inward book. If its close focus on one man's fixation ever tested you, what kept you reading, the prose, the relationships, or the growing unease?
3. The narrator is by turns tender and selfish, attentive and self-absorbed. Did you find him sympathetic, and how did his cruel, homophobic mother help explain the man he has become?
4. The book asks, plainly, what one person is allowed to take from another. Where did his devotion tip into possession for you, and did you trust his version of the poet?
5. Beneath the love story sits a question about who controls the record once a private life becomes material to write about. What did the book ultimately say about art, ownership, and the people we turn into stories?
6. Kelly writes in a lush, sensory, image-soaked style, with birds recurring throughout. How did that poetic texture shape your experience, and did the beauty ever sit uneasily against the story it was telling?
7. The novel moves between the narrator's steady life with Michael and the poet's white house in the woods. How did those two worlds, and the gulf between them, drive his longing?
8. Did this remind you of another story of obsessive desire, or of an artist drawing on a real person, in a book, a film, or life?
9. The book is honest about wanting what we cannot, or should not, have. Without oversharing, did its portrait of longing and its costs resonate for anyone at the table?
10. Who would you hand this to next, the reader who loves lyrical, uncomfortable literary fiction or someone drawn to stories of desire and power, and who might find it too claustrophobic?

Themes to listen for

• Desire that curdles into possession
• Who controls the story when a life becomes material
• Grief, illness, and care
• Family cruelty and its long shadow
• Queer identity, love, and its limits

If your club liked this, try…

• Real Life by Brandon Taylor
• What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
• Hot Milk by Deborah Levy
• The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

Where to get it

• Check availability at your local library
• Find it on Bookshop.org
• Listen on Libro.fm

Practical notes

Best for literary clubs open to an uncomfortable, inward, and beautifully written novel. A short, intense read.

Content notes: Terminal illness and death, homophobia, and references to parental abuse.