Everyone Knows You Go Home

A new novel about immigration and the depths to which one Mexican American family will go for forgiveness and redemption. The first time Isabel meets her father-in-law, Omar, he’s already dead—an apparition appearing uninvited on her wedding day. Her husband, Martin, still unforgiving for having been abandoned by his father years ago, confesses that he never knew the old man had died. So Omar asks Isabel for the impossible: persuade Omar’s family—especially his wife, Elda—to let him redeem himself.

Book club questions for Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalia Sylvester

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

Omar, being a spirit, is caught in in-between spaces. What are other in-between spaces that characters like Elda, Isabel, Martin, and Eduardo navigate in their own lives? What about you?

Everyone Knows You Go Home has often been called timely because it deals with immigration, something that the author often pushes against by saying that immigrant narratives are timeless, not timely. Are there any chapters or scenes in the book that seem to exemplify this perspective?

Were there any humorous or everyday moments in the book that resonated with you? Why?

Natalia Sylvester dedicated this book to her mother and has often talked about the invisible emotional labor of immigrant mothers and mothers who make sacrifices that their children may never even know about. What are some of the sacrifices that characters make in the book that you most connected with and why?

A review in the Rumpus stated, "Sylvester refrains from lending a voyeuristic gaze on human suffering and instead writes of trauma as the threshold through which one must pass on the journey toward elsewhere." Were there any specific scenes that you felt were examples of this restraint? What effect did that have on you as a reader?

Many of the characters in Everyone Knows You Go Home carry secrets—some, even to their graves. Why do think the author chose to keep secrets in this way?

Let's talk about the title of the book. Why do you think the author chose this as the title? How is it central to where it literally appears in the text, and to the story as a whole?

Everyone Knows You Go Home Book Club Questions PDF

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