YOU Reading Group: The Balcony by Jane Delury

The Balcony is published by Hodder Paperbacks, price £8.99. To order a copy for the special price of £7.19 until 14 October, click here or call 0844 571 0640; free p&p on orders over £15.

THE STORY

A young American graduate is engaged as an au pair by a couple who live in an old village manor house outside Paris. They need her to look after their daughter while they make preparations to relocate to Boston, where the husband, Hugo, is about to take up a university teaching post. The girl’s fantasy that she will be living in some sort of French Impressionist painting for a couple of months, all sunflowers and periwinkle shutters, is quickly dispelled when she discovers that the house is rundown and the village is an industrial sprawl. But she finds herself being drawn to Hugo, a relationship that appears to be encouraged by his wife.

So begins a series of intertwined stories spanning over 100 years, from the late 19th century to the recent past, about characters with links to the once-grand house and its estate. The result is a moving tapestry of unwise love affairs, marriages under pressure, shocking family secrets, the fallout from two world wars, disappointed ambitions and the challenges that make up life.

THE TASTER

Sweeping, suspenseful, rich with surprises and eerie atmosphere 

‘It lasted a year. I’m aghast when I look back at myself: sitting at the breakfast table stirring the children’s hot chocolate, talking to my husband about taking the car in for a service, and then, a few hours later, lying on a hotel bed with my legs spread wide. What I did was wrong. Unforgivable. Sometimes, though, I think that I will never feel as alive as I did during those months of wickedness. Suddenly, I didn’t know who I was, and it was exhilarating.’

THE QUESTIONS

1. Do the stories hang together as a novel?

2. Which is your favourite story?

3. Is it easy to follow the connections between them?

4. Which characters do you find most sympathetic? Who would you like to have read more about?

5. How can a house affect the lives of the people who live in it?

6. What is the most significant event in the history of the manor house?

7. Do the changing fortunes of the house reflect events in society at large?

8. Is it a house you could imagine living in?

9. What is the book saying about the choices we face in life?

10. What is the significance of the book’s title?

THE AUTHOR

Author Jane Delury

Author Jane Delury

Jane Delury grew up in Sacramento, California, in a family that travelled often on history-themed trips to the South Pacific and Europe, in particular to France. She started French lessons at an early age and continued to study the language as a literature major at the University of California Santa Cruz, during which time she spent time studying abroad in Grenoble at the foot of the French Alps, where she met her first husband, a fellow student. His grandparents lived on the edge of a forest resembling the one in The Balcony.

After graduating from UC Santa Cruz, Jane returned to Grenoble to obtain a maîtrise degree and continued to live in the city for the next few years, teaching English at the public university and at a private business school where, she says, she took a very literary approach to analysing Harvard Business Review case studies.

Jane began to write short stories in Grenoble and to publish them in the US. When she was accepted at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, she and her then-husband moved to Baltimore. After completing her MA, Jane began to teach fiction at The University of Baltimore, where she is now an associate professor and directs the BA in English programme.

Jane’s stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Southern Review and The Yale Review and her awards include the F Scott Fitzgerald Story Award. She continues to live in Baltimore with her two daughters, Margot and Rose, and the writer Don Lee, whom she married barefoot on a cold and foggy San Francisco beach last summer. When she isn’t writing, teaching, or being a mother, she is deep in the wilds of her small garden in a sunhat, trying to distinguish wildflower from weed.

Jane Delury writes…

Years ago, when I lived in Grenoble, France, I saw a news item on TV about a house owned by a Jewish couple that had been destroyed during World War II. After the couple was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, their neighbours looted the house, looking for hidden money. I’m not even sure if this was the literal news item I saw, but it was the story that stayed in my mind.

I think of The Balcony as a novel-in-stories, so each chapter functions as a short story with its own set of characters and sense of completion. Taken together, these stories tell the greater story of an estate with a manor house and cottage before and after the manor house is plundered during the war. The stories range in tone, time period and style. In one chapter, the reader might encounter a 19th-century sawmill and in the next chapter an iPhone. By the end of the book, the reader has put together a puzzle about the history of the estate and the families who lived there. The reader knows more than any one character.

I started to write the short stories that formed The Balcony after I’d left Grenoble. I was living in Baltimore, after almost five years of life in France, pregnant with my first child, teaching and writing fiction. My imagination kept turning to the forest of Chateauroux, where my husband’s grandparents lived. That forest, where I went jogging on our weekend visits, had always been a magical place for me. I loved everything about it, from the pond at its centre to the fluorescent slugs that came out after rain. I loved the silence and the solitude. I missed the forest between trips to France, and I returned to it in my fiction. Over the following years, I wrote many stories that took place in or around a similar forest. And that news item from before returned in a story about an estate in the forest that was destroyed during the war.

When I decided to make the stories into a book, I laid them all out on a long table with the story about the estate at the corner of the table, the literal turn. The estate, you could say, became the protagonist of my novel-in-stories. As I wrote and revised, I delved into the lives of the people who lived on the estate’s grounds for over a century, exploring their secrets, hopes, frustrations, and dreams. What everyday choices did they make that ended up having deep moral consequences? What stories did they tell themselves to justify the wrongs they’d committed as spouses or mothers or the children of ageing parents? What wrongs did they even recognise as wrong? The characters in The Balcony are all flawed in different ways and in different proportion, as are all people. In moments of crisis, some of them rise to their best selves and others fail to do so. I was interested in the small ways that choice plays out in people’s lives and relationships, and in how people live with themselves after they’ve made the wrong choice.

 

  

 

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