Table of Contents
About The Book
France, 1921—Tom, a young American orphaned in World War I, is helping comfort the grieving families who travel through Verdun, seeking answers about their loved ones. But nothing in his past—not his rough Chicago childhood nor his experiences driving ambulances across French battlefields—can prepare Tom for the arrival of Sarah Hagen.
From the moment he meets her, a disarmingly magnetic woman looking for news of her missing husband, he knows he will help her in any way he can—even if that means crossing an unforgivable line. As their affair takes them across a fractured Europe careening toward World War 2, Tom and Sarah learn how love can be both a cure for—and a distraction from—the realities of a world turned upside down. But they can only hide from the truth for so long.
When news of an amnesiac soldier in Bologna reaches Tom in Paris, he sets off as a journalist to uncover the story, only to find Sarah at the soldier’s bedside, hopeful as ever. Both are surprised to encounter an Austrian journalist named Paul with his own interest in the amnesiac. As they confront the past, Tom’s actions come back to haunt him, and each is forced to make a choice that will change their lives forever.
A deeply transporting novel about love and identity, truth and consequences, The Verdun Affair is a page-turning and vividly imagined “literary romance… [that] unravels a love triangle and its players’ secrets” (Los Angeles Times).
Reading Group Guide
Introduction
France, 1921—Tom, a young American orphaned in World War I, is helping comfort the grieving families who travel through Verdun, seeking answers about their loved ones. But nothing in his past—not his rough Chicago childhood nor his experiences driving ambulances across French battlefields—can prepare Tom for the arrival of Sarah Hagen.
From the moment he meets her, a disarmingly magnetic woman looking for news of her missing husband, he knows he will help her in any way he can—even if that means crossing an unforgivable line. As their affair takes them across a fractured Europe careening toward World War 2, Tom and Sarah learn how love can be both a cure for—and a distraction from—the realities of a world turned upside down. But they can only hide from the truth for so long.
When news of an amnesiac soldier in Bologna reaches Tom in Paris, he sets off as a journalist to uncover the story, only to find Sarah at the soldier’s bedside, hopeful as ever. Both are surprised to encounter an Austrian journalist named Paul with his own interest in the amnesiac. As they confront the past, Tom’s actions come back to haunt him, and each is forced to make a choice that will change their lives forever.
A deeply transporting novel about love and identity, truth and consequences, The Verdun Affair is a page-turning and vividly imagined literary romance.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. At the beginning of the novel, Tom is working in an ossuary in Verdun, sorting bones. How does this impact his understanding of the war? How does it affect his feelings toward the women he meets, searching for their husbands and sons?
2. When Tom first meets Sarah, she’s just caught a koi fish from the church’s pond in her purse. How does this set the tone for their relationship?
3. Why do you think Tom tells Sarah that he met Lee Hagen?
4. One day, collecting bones, Tom imagines the war experience of a man named Martin, whose mother once came to the ossuary to ask Father Perrin if her son, then dead, had ever received her letter. Tom imagines Martin’s childhood, swimming in the village lake; his adulthood as a stone mason; and then his time as a soldier, finally deciding that it “couldn’t be” (p. 36) that this man he imagined had died—that he must have been taken prisoner instead. What might be the purpose of Tom’s thought experiment?
5. Tom, reflecting on his experiences in World War I, quotes a famous line from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers. Finally, only the names of places had dignity.” Why would these words (p. 41) resonate with Tom?
6. When Tom and Sarah visit a medium together, the woman conjures up a spirit—but not the one that they’re looking for. How do the themes of miraculous connection and false hope play out further in the narrative?
7. Before Tom, Sarah, and Paul meet Douglas Fairbanks, Tom hears of another famous soldier-turned-amnesiac, a man called Anthelme Mangin. The publisher of the newspaper where Tom works writes that this man rejects his identity because “in the age of industrial war, an identity can be stolen on the whims of strangers and at a moment’s notice” (p. 120). Do you agree or disagree, and why?
8. Why do so many mothers wait to see Douglas Fairbanks, knowing that he is almost certainly not their son?
9. Sarah believes men prefer a frightened woman. Paul believes men prefer a happy woman. Dr. Bianchi believes that women don’t have the freedom to express illness. How have women’s roles shifted since the 1921 portrayed in The Verdun Affair, and how have they stayed the same?
10. When Tom and Sarah travel together, they call themselves Mr. and Mrs. Tom Morrow. Do you see irony in this choice, or is it an expression of optimism?
11. In Los Angeles in the 1950s, why doesn’t Tom want “his” song to be written into a movie?
12. In a world where everyone is grieving, why do Paul and Sarah hold on to the specific hope of finding a single man—respectively, the man that wronged Paul and the man that Sarah married? What’s the relationship between forgiveness and vengeance in this novel?
13. After the riot in Bologna, Tom and Sarah find a group of boys whipping a cadaver with their belts (p. 257). What symbolic value does this action have?
14. The song Tom hears a soldier sing in Aix-les-Bains—the song he tells Sarah that Lee Hagen sang—ends with, “the perfect end to a perfect year.” How do the lyrics reflect the situation in Europe in 1921, as well as the three main characters’ experiences?
15. What do you make of Dr. Bianchi’s final treatment with Douglas Fairbanks? Why are Paul, Sarah, and Tom willing to see Douglas Fairbanks suffer?
16. At the very end of The Verdun Affair, with the glimmer of a new life before him, Tom remembers what it was like to drive an ambulance in combat during World War I (p. 291). Can you imagine why that image might come to him at that time?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Further research World War I by reading one of the books the author mentions inhis acknowledgments, such as A World Undone by G. J. Meyer or The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne.
2. Check out Nick Dybek’s first novel, When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man.
About The Author
Nick Dybek is a recipient of a Granta New Voices selection, a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and a Maytag Fellowship. He received a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches at Oregon State University. He is the author of When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man and The Verdun Affair.
Product Details
- Publisher: Scribner (June 12, 2018)
- Length: 304 pages
- ISBN13: 9781501191787
Raves and Reviews
“Grief looms, shadowlike, over this beautifully calibrated novel, which recalls the work of Anthony Doerr and Michael Ondaatje.”
—O Magazine
“Striking… a story of operatic complexity, narrated in many voices, rich in imagery... Dybek finds the perfect conclusion for a novel so much about the mutability of time.”
—New York Times Book Review
“As evocative as it is unflinching in its verisimilitude, Dybek’s novel begins shortly after the First World War in an ossuary, a makeshift memorial of sorts where unidentified remains of soldiers are gathered. Into this metaphor-rich setting a young American wife arrives seeking answers, and a precarious romance ensues…capturing the fragmented textures of war’s afterlife, and the private desires that seem to glow with even greater intensity in memory, is Dybek’s true ambition.”
–Vogue
“For a literary romance, try The Verdun Affair by Nick Dybek, a historical fiction that begins in 1950 in Los Angeles, where a Hollywood screenwriter runs into someone from his past. Their story stretches back to Europe in the years following the First World War, and the novel unravels a love triangle and its players’ secrets.”
–LA Times
"Dybek has a knack for creating a cinematic, wistfully noirish atmosphere of romance, in a world where love now seems beside the point."
—Seattle Times
"Nick Dybek’s pensive new novel centers on a man, a woman and a lie in World War I Europe and 1950s California. Dybek’s protagonist is an orphan without ties, free to project his life in any direction he chooses – but he can’t choose where the lie takes him."
–Portland Oregonian
"The perfect escape."
–First For Women
“While there are obvious comparisons to The English Patient, this book seems to be an extended metaphor showing how relationships, loves even, can be shattered beyond all recognition, just as a human body can be obliterated. The author effectively communicates the spirit of place and time. He also has a knack for sharing the feelings and intentions behind quite ordinary conversations.”
–Historical Novels Review
"Dybek is a master at creating an atmosphere of war, of decadence amid the rubble, and at dipping in and out of history, teasing the reader with beguiling clues concerning the secrets each character harbors ... Dybek's novel is a complex tale of memory, choice, and the sacrifices one sometimes makes by doing the right thing."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Dybek has created a carefully constructed, deeply inquisitive, and broodingly romantic tale of mourning resonant with judicious echoes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and spiked with piquant insights into the loss, longing, and delusion rampant in the haunting aftermath of war."
—Booklist, starred review
“An absorbing tale ... in delicate, evocative prose, Dybek captures the grim devastation of scarred battlefields, bombed villages, and fetid soil and conveys with sensitivity his characters' unabated desire to see in the shellshocked soldier an answer to their deepest desire.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The Verdun Affair is ravishingly beautiful, and as much about love as about war. Nick Dybek is a storyteller of great power. I found myself drawn in immediately, believing the place, the characters, everything in his magnificently woven story. If there’s any justice, this novel will be widely read and recognized. I absolutely adored it.”
—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun
“Sometimes the true battle begins only after the fighting is over. In this case, it’s the struggle to regain feeling, memory, and love in a landscape where verdancy can flourish again over graves and trenches and bones, but not over the craters of a wounded spirit. In the end, only a story can do that, but it must be as rich and poignant and compelling as Nick Dybek’s immersive and atmospheric The Verdun Affair. The meaning in life often goes AWOL, and we look to our great writers—writers like Nick Dybek—to bring it back.”
—Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master’s Son and Fortune Smiles
“The Verdun Affair is an intensely gripping story set in the immediate aftermath of war. From a still-smoldering battlefield, Nick Dybek conjures a sweeping saga of secrets, lies, mistaken identity, love and betrayal. This is the kind of book you can’t put down.”
—Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn
“The Verdun Affair is a masterful, sweeping novel of love and war and the way we reconstruct ourselves and our stories after everything has come apart. Nick Dybek is a vivid storyteller, and this is a beautiful and exciting book.”
—Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and No One is Here Except all of Us
“I am still haunted by the images of war so deftly conjured in the midst of an elegiac love story. Dybek writes with a commanding sense of story and language. This novel will not let you go.”
—Helen Simonson, author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand and The Summer Before The War
"Love, war, the mysteries of who we are — it's all in The Verdun Affair. A masterful novel that will fizz your brain and enchant your heart."
—David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife
“A haunting, beautiful, and wholly absorbing book, that is at once a gripping story of war, a poignant coming of age, and a bittersweet romance. Dybek conjures the time period with elegance and visceral detail. I didn’t want it to end!”
—Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles and Circe
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