The Rest of Our Lives

Tom and his wife Amy don’t communicate well, often hiding their true feelings and avoiding difficult conversations. Tom tells himself: ‘If you call Amy now the person you talk to will not be the person in your head, for whom you have these warm and simple feelings. It will be another person, who doesn’t like you much these days, with whom you get into stupid arguments.’ Did you feel that Tom and Amy love each other, despite their problems?

The Booker judges were impressed with the way Markovits, ‘without emulating sentence structure’, evokes several ‘Big Names’ in American literature, including Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Philip Roth and John Updike. Did you notice any similarities between the book and those – or other – writers?

Tom is put on leave from work after he gives legal counsel to the owner of a basketball team accused of racism and sexism, and refuses to include pronouns in his email signature. He tells his daughter this but doesn’t tell Amy: why do you think this is?

The Booker Prize judges commented that, ‘The star of this novel is Tom’s voice: the lodestar and the ‘why now’. He is a democratic guide, he’s delightfully embarrassed, and he is as observant as he is negligent. But what’s most impressive is Markovits’ dedication to Tom as an averagely flawed human.’ What did you think of the book’s conversational narrative style? Did you find it engaging, and do you, like the judges, find Tom to be a ‘ridiculously relatable narrator’?

After dropping Miriam off at college, Tom visits an ex-girlfriend, Jill, to whom he hasn’t spoken for around 10 years. Jill says to him, ‘I forgot what you’re like’ and ‘You don’t really care about anything’. Do you think her statement is a fair assessment and in what ways does Tom give her this impression?

Ben Markovits told the Booker Prizes website that the book contains autobiographical elements: ‘My kids were getting older and I wanted to write about a certain period of family life coming to an end.’ While writing the novel, Markovits, like Tom, had undiagnosed symptoms that turned out to be a serious illness. Does knowing this affect your reading of the book and Tom’s portrayal?

Michael’s friend Betty is interested in healing and asks: ‘Is the idea of healing to get you back to the way you used to be or to turn you into something new?’ What do you think of this quote in relation to Michael, or other characters in the book?

There is a scene in the book where Tom comes across a teenage girl on the side of the road. She says she needs help as she’s fallen off her skateboard and asks Tom if he can drive her home. Tom hesitates, unsure if it’s a scam, and decides not to help. What did you make of this interaction and what does it reveal about Tom’s character?

Over the course of the novel, Tom experiences a range of symptoms that clearly indicate a health problem. Why do you think he chose to ignore his symptoms even when his family and friends were so insistent that he seek medical advice? Do you think he knew more than he let on? And what does his response to his symptoms tell us about Tom as a person?

At the very end of the book, the last thing Tom says to Amy is ‘Let’s go home.’ Did you imagine that the couple will be able to mend their relationship and have a future together?