The Holiday Cottage- Book Club Questions

Warning! These questions contain spoilers!

 

1. When you began reading the story, did you have any thoughts on who the victim would end up being?

2. What were your reasons for this? Were your predictions correct?

3. Similarly, what were your thoughts on who the killer might be?

4. Discuss the intentions behind the initial wish for the family to take this holiday.

5. Back when Kelli was eight, the services involved didn’t act on her hospital admission after her father attacked her. Discuss whether and how times have changed since then.

6. What were Erin’s reasons for living her lie? Did this revelation change your opinion of her or Rylan?

7. Gill also lived a lie for many years, on two counts. What were her reasons for this and where do your sympathies lie?

8. Should Karl have been also held responsible for covering up the circumstances around his mother’s death as he did, and then using them to blackmail his wife?

9. How might the police have acted if this truth had ever come to light?

10. What were your thoughts on Nathaniel? By the end of the story, did you feel any sympathy towards him?

11. And what about Alice? How should she now be helped and supported to get through the next phase of her life as unscathed as possible?

12. What might become of the other characters now the ‘holiday’ is over? How will they cope without Gill?

13. If a sequel were to be told of this story, in whose viewpoint should it be told from?