Reading Group Discussion Questions for Hurry Home

Discussion Guide

CLOSE TO MY HEART YOU'LL BE...

SISTERS FOREVER YOU AND ME. Alexandra Van Ness has the perfect life. She lives in an idyllic resort town tucked away in the Rocky Mountains, shares a designer loft with her handsome boyfriend, Chase, and has her dream job working in child protection. Every day, Alex goes above and beyond to save children at risk.

But when her long-lost sister, Ruth, unexpectedly shows up at her door, Alex's perfect life is upended. Growing up, Ruth was always the troublemaker, pulling Alex into her messes, and this time will be no different. Still, Alex will help Ruth under one condition: we will never, ever, talk about the past. But when trouble befalls a local child, both women are forced to confront the secrets they've promised to keep buried.

Utterly engrossing and claustrophobic, Hurry Home is a tantalizing reflection of the chain-and-shackles relationship between sisters that asks: what lines wouldn't you cross for your own?

Roz Nay's debut novel, Our Little Secret, was a national bestseller in Canada, won the Douglas Kennedy Prize for best foreign thriller in France, and was nominated for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Mystery and the Arthur Ellis Best First Novel Award.

Roz has lived and worked in Africa, Australia, the US, and the UK. She now lives in British Columbia, Canada, with her husband and two children.

Discussion Questions:

1

2

Is this a story about

What might the writer be

the enduring bond of

exploring about the relationship

sisterhood or the

between a person’s past and their

constrictive shackles

present? How do memory and

of it?

guilt play a part in this?

3 Who were you cheering for at the start

5

of the book, the middle, and the end?

4

Alex took Ruth into her home in her time of need, granted, she had ulterior motives.

What would you do

If you were in Alex or Ruth's shoes, how

if your troublemaker

do you think you'd react to the death of a

sibling dropped in

sibling? How would it impact your

one day with stolen

relationships with the sister you have left?

drugs and money?

2

6 How does Hurry Home deal with established beliefs about family, love, parenthood and the protection of children?

7

8

Alex, Ruth, and Minerva all have a different

Is Hurry Home a

approach to parenting/child protection and set

tragedy? If not,

the bar at varying heights. Is there a correct

what other kind

height, do you think? Whose approach did you

of story is it?

most align with?

9

10

What motivates the

With the exception of her

villain(s) in Hurry

brother, whose life do you

Home? Is she a

think Alex ruins the most?

psychopath, narcissist, sociopath, or something

a) father

else? How does this

b) mother

make her similar or

c) Ruth

different to villains we

d) Chase

usually see in

e) Sully

psychological thrillers?

f) all of the above, she’s a wrecking ball