About the Author
From Elizabeth McGregor comes an unforgettably moving, richly layered novel with a timeless love story at its core. Beautiful, suspenseful, hauntingly erotic,
A Road Through the Mountains tells of one womans extraordinary journey to a new life with the help of the man she thought shed lost long ago—a journey that will take hold of your heart.
Anna Russell is a talented painter and single mother. Her daughter, Rachel, is a ten-year-old whose undoubtedly gifted mind is trapped by a form of autism known as Asperger Syndrome. When a car accident leaves Anna in a coma, both their lives—and the lives of all those around them—are changed forever.
Across the Atlantic, David Mortimer receives an unexpected phone call from Annas mother. The scientist is stunned to learn that hes a father. His long-ago affair with Anna was short and intense; when she suddenly returned home to the States, David slipped into a reclusive life of research, haunted by memories of the girl whod left him without explanation. Now he knows he must break his self-imposed isolation, go to Boston and the woman hes always loved, meet the child he never knew he had—and perhaps coax them both out of their silence.
But as David attempts to put together the puzzle of Annas life as an artist, mother, and daughter, he finds himself involved in a relationship with Anna far more intimate than he expected. Why did she leave him so many years before? Where, as she lies in a coma, is she now? And how is it that he loves this woman even after all these years? When he stumbles across Annas mysterious fascination with the rare flowers that were once their shared passion, he and Rachel, their beautiful, sensitive child, may just have discovered how to help Anna find a way back—a road through the mountains.
Lyric, tender, as fragile and enduring as love itself, A Road Through the Mountains draws upon its authors personal experiences and establishes Elizabeth McGregor as a major storyteller.
Reading Group Guide
The timeless story of a love tested in every way, and a life held up to the fragile prism of time,
A Road Through the Mountains takes readers on a journey that will linger in their hearts.
Anna Russell is a talented painter whose career is vaulted into prominence by a Boston art dealer. She has never told him the true inspiration for her work: David Mortimer, a young Englishman she fell in love with a lifetime ago at Oxford. And though David doesnt know it, he is also the father of Annas child, a vibrant ten-year-old trapped within the labyrinth of Aspergers syndrome. But when a tragic accident takes Anna to the brink of death, her secrets are no longer so easily kept. Summoned by Annas mother, David pieces together the truth about Annas love for him, and in the process tries to find a healing path for her—a road through the mountains of her physical and emotional injuries.
Rich with enchanting landscapes and poignant turns of fate, A Road Through the Mountains is a novel that itself offers many roads of discovery for every reader. The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your reading of Elizabeth McGregors A Road Through the Mountains. We hope they will enrich your experience of this haunting and beautiful novel.
1. Both Grace and Anna raised their daughters essentially alone. What are the similarities and distinctions between the ways they experienced motherhood, and love?
2. In what way do Annas artistic sensibilities complement David Mortimers scientific ones? What was the basis for their initial attraction?
3. Discuss the ways in which botany makes for a rich backdrop in the novel, and in Annas paintings. Why was this an appropriate choice on the part of Elizabeth McGregor when she was crafting Davids character?
4. The concept of art as commodity drives much of the novels tension. Does James Garrett also see love as a commodity? What is his motivation in seeking power over Anna?
5. What parallels did you find between the story of Ernest Wilsons experiences in China and Davids journey to America? What other forms of destinations and journeying are portrayed in the novel?
6. Discuss the landscape of Annas comatose world. Is its scenery completely foreign to her? What elements of familiarity and imagination does it contain?
7. What does the absence of Grace at the novels conclusion indicate about the role of fate versus willpower in the lives of these characters?
8. How does the authors rendering of Oxford compare to that of Cape Cod and Boston? How does each locale suit the events taking place there? What cultural comparisons can be made between the novels American and English elements?
9. Why was Anna unable to stay in England? Do you attribute her departure to her pregnancy, or the fear that David would become like his father, or were there other unspoken factors in her decision? What drove David to leave his family?
10. Who appears to have had more power in the relationship between Anna and David? How did they change during the decade of their estrangement?
11. What does the novel convey about the physical world versus the one inhabited by the mind and soul? In what way does the portrayal of Rachel as a child living with Aspergers syndrome reinforce these observations? Does Rachels struggle mirror her mothers in any way?
12. Sara is an integral part of the novels concluding scenes. What was her role in guiding David?
13. Early in the novel, James Garretts early years are depicted. Was his upbringing very different from Annas? In what ways was he transformed by meeting Catherine Graham? Does knowing about his life before Anna affect your opinion of him?
14. What are James reasons for wanting to gain custody of Rachel? Does he have any capacity for loving her, or Anna?
15. What comparisons can be made between Annas art and the abstract work that launched James career (in particular the Mark Rothko painting he acquired from Catherine)?
16. To what or whom do you attribute Annas recovery?
17. Describe the metaphoric mountains you have faced. How did you find your way through them? Who was your primary guide?
Author Q&A
A Note About The Seed of the Idea Behind
A Road Through the MountainsBy Elizabeth McGregor
Like The Ice Child, this book is about a journey. Although I never consciously plan the books around my personal life, nevertheless these last two have turned out to be quite revealing. The Ice Child was written at a time when my twenty-two year marriage had come to an end and my mother had died, and I look back on it now and see that I was in the same sort of ends-of-the-earth landscape. Similarly, A Road Through the Mountains coincided with a period when I was looking back over my relationship with my father, who died ten years ago.
Dad was hard to know, never revealing any feelings. It wasn’t until I read an article by Oliver Sacks in which the writer drew a pen portrait of an Asperger sufferer that I realized I was reading an exact description of my father. Intelligent, off-the-wall, intensely focused, curiously critical: all of these described the person whom I had longed to be close to all my life. One memory in particular sticks to my mind: of the day of my wedding, when I clasped my dad’s hand as we entered the church and he immediately withdrew it. Asperger’s hate to be touched. Finding a way through to him was a near impossibility, like finding an unmarked road through the mountains.
I began to think about trying to get close to the ones we love. About what a parallel might be. And I came up with the idea of a couple who have been parted by a misunderstanding but who, ten years later, still love each other.
Sometime at this point of what I call “simmering”—which is when a book seems to cook itself slowly in my mind without my paying any direct attention to it—my love of gardening and trees suddenly chimed into the story.
I had read about Ernest Wilson, the plant collector who traveled 11,000 miles to find a single specimen of a new tree. All at once the stories wove into each other—passionate people trying to find the things they love, trying to bring something beautiful out of what seems like an impossible, unreachable landscape.
If anything, A Road Through the Mountains is about faith in the future. It doesn’t matter if the journey so far has been difficult; we can last that much longer, and find places that otherwise we might have missed. A Road Through the Mountains gave me an understanding of my father, and a relationship with him, that I had never had before.
Some of the settings in A Road Through the Mountains have a real resonance for me. Lewesdon Hill, described early in the novel, is about ten miles from my home, and is a real “heart-stopping cathedral of trees.” The stream in which David’s sister watcher her son playing exists, too, with its slow-moving chalk stream and abundance of stickleback fishes! The village that they live in is typical of Dorset: farming communities in idyllic landscapes that have changed very little since Thomas Hardy’s time. Dorchester is Hardy’s hometown, and every day, taking my dogs for their walk, I pass the field that Hardy used in Tess of the D’urbervilles—the summer field where Angel Clare finally falls in love with Tess.
The childhood home that Grace remembers is a real place, too: I owe a debt to my friend Liv Blumer for introducing me to it, a piece of paradise on the edge of the Appalachians.
Perhaps the chapter in the book that means the most to me is the one in which Sara remembers her father’s final days in the hospital: how a series of minor strokes release his inhibitions and show the real, loving man underneath. These scenes are taken directly from my own experience with my mother, who, just before she died, said some wonderful things to me—things she’d hidden or kept back for years. This chapter has the knack of always reducing me to tears, no matter how often I reread it!
I do enjoy the journeys that my novels offer to me. I hope the reader does, too. I really believe that, providing we have the will, no route in life is closed to us.