Hachette Livre

Hachette Reading Group Guides

Welcome to our Reading Group guide for The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite by Beatrice Colin. We invite you to consider and discuss the following questions when reading this book:

  1. How would you categorise this novel? Would you call it, say, a love story? A historical melodrama? A satire? Was it what you expected, given the design of the book’s cover, the blurb on the back, and whatever you may have heard about it before started reading it?
  2. In what sense may Lilly’s life be described as ‘luminous’?
  3. ‘What’s your name?’ they would always ask. ‘Lara,’ she would sometimes reply. Or Hanne, or Clara. If they asked what she did, she told them she was an heiress, a ballet dancer, or a singer. And some of them believed her.
    Discuss the significance of naming, identity and reinvention in this novel.
  4. Would you say that the novel produces a particularly pessimistic or optimistic view of the possibility of establishing relationships – between family members, friends, lovers – in Berlin during that particular time? What effect do relationships and their ending have on the characters in the book?
  5. Would it have been possible for Colin to tell the same story, if she had based it in a different setting – for example, in Australia today?
  6. ‘My life … in the later years of the war? I was not there, I was an Ersatzmensch, a fake person.’
    Discuss the novel’s proposal of what it meant to be a human being in Berlin during the First World War. Do you think the case was the same for people in other cities and countries at the time?
  7. He was twenty-three and was filled with the heady sense of his own potential. She was thirty-eight and racked with the sense of her own decline.’
    Could it be said that one of the novel’s themes is the conflict between potential and decline?
  8. To what extent are films, and the film industry, significant to the story, the characters, and to Colin’s description of Berlin in the early twentieth century?
  9. ‘She was the face, if you can imagine it, of Berlin at that particular moment in history.’
    Do you agree that Lilly is a personification of Berlin, the way in which it is presented by the writer? Do you think that there is a difference between the way in which Lilly is perceived by other characters in the novel, and the way in which we, as readers, perceive her?
  10. Is Lilly a feminist novel?
  11. Discuss the importance of ‘orphanage’ and ‘abortion’ – in their metaphorical, as well as literal, sense – to an interpretation of the novel.
  12. Does this novel celebrate the underdog?
  13. Is Lilly a victim, or a survivor? What about the other characters in the novel, such as Sister August, Hanne, Stefan, Eva, Ilya?
  14. Does the narrator of the novel judge the characters’ actions, thoughts and feelings – or does the narrator merely report them? If the former, what judgements are made, and how?
  15. The novel’s working title was The Negative Cutter. Do you think that this would have been a more appropriate title than the one with which it ended up? What other titles might it have been given?

Current Reading Group Titles

  1. The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce by Paul Torday
  2. The Disappeared by Kim Echlin
  3. The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite by Beatrice Colin
  4. Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker
  5. The Other Hand by Chris Cleave
  6. Testimony by Anita Shreve
  7. Home by Marilynne Robinson
  8. The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
  9. City of Thieves by David Benioff
  10. Remembering The Bones by Frances Itani
  11. The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton
  12. Lies by Enrique de Heriz
  13. Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaardner
  14. Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt
  15. Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
  16. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
  17. The Sisterhood by Emily Barr
  18. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
  19. The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie
  20. The Return by Victoria Hislop
  21. A Small Part of History by Peggy Elliott
  22. A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley
  23. Scapegallows by Carol Birch
  24. Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
  25. Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat
  26. Radiance by Shaena Lambert
  27. Rose of Sebastopol by Katharine McMahon
  28. The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell
  29. Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott
  30. The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle
  31. Golden Age by Tahmima Anam
  32. Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
  33. The Keep by Jennifer Egan
  34. The Saffron Kitchen by Yasmin Crowther
  35. Pirate’s Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson
  36. The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani
  37. April in Paris by Michael Wallner
  38. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday
  39. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
  40. Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet
  41. Red River by Lalita Tademy
  42. The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox
  43. Rosetta by Barbara Ewing
  44. The Mathematics of Love by Emma Darwin
  45. The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld
  46. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell