Winter Garden

Encourage readers to connect the book’s themes and characters with their personal experiences.

1. What is the main issue that causes conflict between Anya and her daughters? Whose side did you find yourself on? Did your opinion change as events unfolded? 

2. How do Anya, Meredith, and Nina cope with their grief? Have you known people who cope in similar ways? 

3. In what ways are Anya’s daughters more like her than they recognize? Do you think, in general, most people are more like their parents than they realize? Do you see this changing with age?

4. Nina and Meredith are polar opposites when it comes to their willingness to put others’ needs ahead of their own. Do you think one of their approaches is healthier than the other, or do both seem problematic in some way? 

5. What metrics of success and happiness does the book seem to apply to its characters? Do you think this is because the main characters are women, or do you think the two things are unrelated? In your experience, are men and women both held to the same metrics of success and happiness?

Examine the book’s relevance to societal issues, historical events, or cultural themes.

1. What do you know about the Siege of Leningrad? Could Anya’s story have been set during any war, or is there something about the Siege of Leningrad that makes it uniquely suited to expressing this story’s themes?

2. How does gender intersect with time period and setting in this text? Could a similar story have been told about a father and sons?

3. What is generational trauma? How does it manifest in this story? Do you think the story’s depiction of generational trauma is realistic?

Dive into the book’s structure, characters, themes, and symbolism.

1. What does the Sitka, Alaska, setting represent? Are there other places that might have been used in the same way, or is this setting uniquely appropriate? 

2. How does the novel use things like Anya’s name change and her framing of her story as a fairy tale to suggest the trauma she has suffered?

3. What does winter traditionally symbolize or connote in Western literature? How does your answer illuminate the meaning of Anya’s and Stacey’s winter gardens? What is the relationship between the idea of the winter garden and the use of “Belye Nochi” as a name for the Whitson house?

4. How are Anya’s, Meredith’s, and Nina’s struggles with identity bound up in their relationships to family? How does each gradually develop a more well-rounded identity? What message does this send about the relationship of the individual to the family?

5. How would you describe the voice and tone of the novel’s third-person narrator? If Hannah had chosen instead to have one—or all three—of the Whitson women narrate in the first person, how might the work’s voice and tone have changed? How would this impact the novel’s ability to convey its themes?