Why Fefè works for book clubs
The novel spans decades and multiple points of view, giving every reader a different entry point. Its themes — food, music, marriage, ambition, and the quiet erosion of identity — generate genuine disagreement and deeply personal responses.
The music dimension
Consider listening to the musical companion as a group before your meeting. The thirteen pieces James chose for the novel become additional characters — each one illuminating an emotional moment. A QR code in the printed book takes you directly to each piece.
Pair with
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles — another novel about a man of culture confined to a particular world, finding meaning and beauty within its limits. Both books share an elegance of voice, a love of ritual, and the sense that a life fully inhabited — however constrained — can be a kind of art.
The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi — an Italian novel about a man absorbing loss after loss across decades, remaining somehow still. Like Fefè, it is a book about endurance dressed as a love story, and about what it means to hold a life together when everything keeps changing.
Both are among James’s own touchstones — books he returned to while writing.
The People of the Novel
A one-page character guide — Alfredo, Lena, and the full cast — with context. Coming soon. Print it out for your group.
Ten questions to open the conversation
These questions are designed to generate conversation, not answers. The best discussions will probably start somewhere unexpected.
- Alfredo is known as "Fefè" in Sicily and "Alfredo" in his professional life. How does the novel use these two names? What does each one protect or reveal?
- Food appears throughout the novel as more than nourishment — it is memory, continuity, and loss. Which meal or food moment stayed with you, and why?
- Lena rises within the upper tiers of the arts world with increasing authority. How does the novel portray her ambition — with admiration, critique, or something more complicated?
- The younger Polish artist unsettles the life Alfredo has built without fully entering it. What does she represent for him — and what does it mean that the connection is never resolved?
- How does the novel portray the relationship between artistic identity and institutional power?
- The classical music woven through the novel is listenable via QR codes in the printed book. If you listened, how did the music change your experience of the scenes it accompanies?
- Sicily shifts throughout the novel — from stable origin to layered, contested memory. How does Alfredo's relationship to Sicily change, and what does that shift mean?
- The novel moves between New York, the Berkshires, Sicily, London, and Berlin. How does each place carry a different emotional register?
- Alfredo "has commanded the room his entire life." What does the novel suggest it has cost him — and is there a reckoning?
- The final image of the novel is of a man who "recedes." Is that a defeat, an acceptance, or something else? What did you feel at the end?
Invite James to your reading group
James is delighted to join book clubs — virtually or in person. He reads from the novel, answers questions, and occasionally cooks from it.