Twenty-five questions, from Hogwarts to the Shopaholic series
1. The last book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell came out recently. What’s its title – and what were the other two called?
2. In the Harry Potter stories, what are the names of the four school “houses” at Hogwarts?
3. Queen of Crime Agatha Christie was a real-life expert on poisons. How did she acquire her knowledge?
4. What was the name of the lawyer in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird and what was the nickname of his daughter, who tells the story?
5. The 2019 Man Booker International Prize was won by Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi. What is the prize for?
6. The film of an Anne Tyler novel starred William Hurt, Kathleen Turner and Geena Davis. What was that book?
7. What was the name of the school in Enid Blyton’s six-book series about a girls’ boarding school in Cornwall, with a swimming pool filled by the tide?
8. The 2019 Costa Book of the Year award went to Jack Fairweather. What is the missing place-name in its title - The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Infiltrated ???
9. Ruth Rendell, a Suffolk Queen of Crime, died nearly five years ago. She was 85. What was the name of her long-running detective character, played by George Baker on TV?
10. Who wrote erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, and where was she born?
11. The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction was won in 2019 by Scot Robin Robertson’s The Long Take. In which country is his story set?
12. Another Suffolk Queen of Crime, PD James, died - in November, 2014 – aged 94. Her most famous character, poetry-writing detective Adam Dalgliesh, made his bow in a 1962 novel. What was it called?
13. Who wrote Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, and The Mayor of Casterbridge – among other works?
14. A 1999 psychological thriller by Suffolk-based husband-and-wife team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French (who write as Nicci French) was made into a film starring Heather Graham and Joseph Fiennes. What was it called?
15. Whose books included Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and A Room of One’s Own?
16. Who won last year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for novel An American Marriage?
17. What is the name of the kind, clever and wise female teddy bear who is one of Noddy’s best friends?
18. Which American writer, who has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and whose work includes The Color Purple, once said: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any”?
19. In which Arthur Ransome story do the Walker children find the boat they’re on leaving the Orwell/Stour estuary in thick fog, nearly getting run down and ending up in the Netherlands?
20. What is the name of the rebellious party worker in Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s 1949 warning about totalitarianism? (And, by the by, in which Suffolk town did Orwell’s parents once live? - a place he detested...)
21. What is the name of the main character in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice – a spirited young lady of 20 whose initial judgments about people often prove unreliable?
22. In Shopaholic and Sister, Becky Bloomwood returns to England after her honeymoon and finds she has a long-lost half-sister. But: disaster! Jess turns out to be ethical, puritanical and serious-minded. She doesn’t paint her nails or watch rom-coms.
Which writer created the Shopaholic series – and how many books has she sold altogether?
23. Her debut novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Desmond Elliott Prize for new fiction. Gifted is about Rumi, a 14-year-old Hindu girl and child prodigy from Cardiff who is bound for Oxford University. But life brings struggles.
What’s the author’s name – and what did she do with the £10,000 Desmond Elliott Prize?
24. Daisy Johnson, born in 1990, in 2018 became the youngest author ever shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (for debut novel Everything Under). Two years earlier, her first – and disturbing – collection of short stories was published. (One seemed to have a girl starving herself into the shape of an eel.) The tales were set in the East of England. What was that collection called?
25. Jacqueline Wilson wrote a successful series of books about a girl living in a children’s home. They spawned a BBC TV series. What’s the name of that girl?
Answers
1. The Mirror & the Light, Wolf Hall, and Bring Up the Bodies.
2. Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff.
3. She volunteered at the dispensary of her local hospital during the 1914-18 War.
4. Atticus Finch and Scout.
5. It rewards the best work of fiction written in a foreign language, translated into English and published in the UK.
6. The Accidental Tourist.
7. Malory Towers.
8. Auschwitz.
9. Inspector Reginald Wexford.
10. EL (Erika Leonard) James; born in Willesden, London, in 1963.
11. America. It’s about a D-Day survivor who, home, finds himself an outcast in a country looking ahead, not backwards, with fresh vigour.
12. Cover Her Face.
13. Thomas Hardy.
14. Killing Me Softly.
15. Virginia Woolf.
16. Tayari Jones.
17. Tessie Bear.
18. Alice Walker.
19. The seventh Swallows and Amazons book We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, published in 1937.
20. Winston Smith (and Southwold).
21. Elizabeth Bennet.
22. Sophie Kinsella – and more than 40million.
23. Nikita Lalwani, who donated it to human rights group Liberty.
24. Fen.
25. Tracy Beaker
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