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Home , George Saunders, Gillian Clarke, Lincoln in the Bardo, Yann Martel

GRIFFIN BOOKS LITERARY QUIZ

Round 1 – Classics

1. What is Shakespeare said to have left to his wife in his will? (his second best bed) 2. What are the names of Maxim de Winter’s first wife and the house they shared? (Rebecca, Manderley) 3. Of what club are Mr Nathaniel Winkle, Mr Augustus Snodgrass and Mr Tracy Tupman members (the Pickwick Club in Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers) 4. What is the name of the prequel to Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’, which was discovered and published 55 years after the original? (Go Set a Watchman) 5. What is the name of the quintessential Gothic novel which features in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, causing Catherine Morland’s imagination to run away with her? (The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe) 6. In Henry James’ ‘Portrait of a Lady’, what is the name of the lady? (Isabel Archer) 7. What are the title and author of the 19th century classic subtitled ‘A Study of Provincial Life’? (Middlemarch by George Eliot) 8. In Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, what is Raskolnikov’s crime and what is his eventual punishment? (murder of an old lady and her half-sister, 8 years of penal servitude in Siberia) 9. Jean Rhys’s novel ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ is a prequel to which 19th century classic? (Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte) 10. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ is often said to be the longest sentence ever written. To the nearest thousand, how many words does it contain? (3687, so 4)

GRIFFIN BOOKS LITERARY QUIZ

Round 2 – Crime Fiction

Who created each of the following fictional sleuths?

1. Adam Dalgliesh (P D James) 2. Tommy & Tuppence Beresford (Agatha Christie) 3. VI Warshawski (Sara Paretsky) 4. Salvo Montalbano (Andrea Camilleri) 5. Fiona Griffiths (Harry Bingham) 6. Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L Sayers) 7. Temperance Brennan (Kathy Reichs) 8. Guido Brunetti (Donna Leon) 9. Karen Pirie (Val McDermid) 10. Brother Cadfael (Ellis Peters)

GRIFFIN BOOKS LITERARY QUIZ

Round 3 - Booker Winners – name the winning title and author from the description and the year

1. 2017 – A US president mourns the death of his son, spending the night in the boy’s crypt ( – ) 2. 1981 – tells of India’s transition from colonialism through partition to independence from the point of view of a narrator born at the exact moment India became an independent nation (Midnight’s Children – ) 3. 2007 – An Irish family comes together for the wake of their son and brother, an alcoholic who has drowned himself in at Brighton (The Gathering – ) 4. 1992 – an unrecognisably burned man, his nurse, a Sikh British Army sapper and a thief are brought together at an Italian villa during WW2 ( – ) 5. 2012 – in this sequel to the 2009 winner, the king’s master secretary brings about the execution of the supposedly adulterous queen so that the king can marry his new love ( – ) 6. 1989 – a butler recalls his life in the form of a diary, including his personal relationship with a former colleague, the housekeeper ( – ) 7. 2015 – explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 and its aftermath in both Jamaica and New York City (A Brief History of Seven Killings – ) 8. 1978 – a self-satisfied playwright and director withdraws from the world to live in seclusion in a small house on the coast and write his memoirs (The Sea, the Sea – ) 9. 2004 - explores the tension between a young gay man’s intimate relationship with another family, in whose parties and holidays he participates, and the realities of his sexuality, which they accept only to the extent of never mentioning it ( – ) 10. 2014 – chronicles a century in Australian history with, at its heart, one horrific day on the Burma railway in 1943 (The Narrow Road to the Deep North – )

GRIFFIN BOOKS LITERARY QUIZ

Round 4 - Children’s Books

1. In the picture book classic ‘We’re Going on A Bear Hunt’, can you name 4 of the 5 hazards the family has to negotiate on their way to the bear’s cave? (grass, mud, river, forest, snowstorm) 2. What would you find at the top of Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree? (different magical lands) 3. Former Fast Show comedian Charlie Higson has written a popular series featuring which teenage spy? (James Bond) 4. In Louise M. Alcott’s ‘Little Women’, what are the names of the four March sisters? (Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy) 5. Who wrote the book on which the highly successful stage and screen productions of ‘War Horse’ are based? (Michael Morpurgo) 6. Which Roald Dahl character was originally written as black, but changed to white because Dahl’s agent thought a black character would not appeal to readers? (Charlie Bucket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) 7. Which bestselling picture book writer’s works include Stick Man, the Highway Rat and What the Ladybird Heard? (Julia Donaldson) 8. Four of David Walliams’ popular children’s books feature family members in their titles, for example a grandmother as in ‘Gangsta Granny’ – can you name any two of the other three? (Grandpa, Auntie, Dad) 9. In the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, what does the White Witch give Edmund to eat to persuade him to bring his siblings back to Narnia to meet her? (Turkish Delight) 10. Who is the current Children’s Laureate? (Lauren Child)

GRIFFIN BOOKS LITERARY QUIZ

Round 5 – Numbers, numbers

1. What do you get if you subtract the traditional number of lines in a sonnet from the traditional number of syllables in a haiku? (17-14 = 3) 2. What book’s title refers to the temperature at which paper spontaneously combusts (Fahrenheit 451) 3. Alexander McCall Smith is best known for his Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, but writes another series featuring a group of characters living in Scotland Street in Edinburgh. What number house in Scotland Street? (44) 4. What Emily St John Mandel novel, which won the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2015, is set in the Great Lakes region after most of the world has been wiped out by the so- called Georgia Flu? (Station Eleven) 5. How many books are there in Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events series? (13) 6. In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, what is the answer to ‘the Ultimate Question of Life the Universe and Everything’? (42) BONUS QUESTION: what character does that number represent in the ASCII character set used by computers? (Asterisk) 7. What is the name of the first of the five novels which feature anti-hero Richard Hannay, in which he foils a plot against the UK at the outbreak of the First World War? (The 39 Steps) 8. How many ingredients feature in each recipe in Jamie Oliver’s latest bestselling cook book? (5) 9. What number is the nickname of the Tamil boy who is shipwrecked in ’s novel, adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2012? (Pi) 10. How many splendid suns are there in the city of Kabul, according to the title of Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini’s 2007 novel? (1000)

GRIFFIN BOOKS LITERARY QUIZ

Round 6 – Welsh Literature

1. In what kind of structure and in what town did Dylan Thomas do much of his writing? (boathouse, Laugharne) 2. Which honorary fellow of University wrote the words which appear on the Wales Millennium Centre? (Gwyneth Lewis) 3. What is the traditional collection of Welsh legends, comprising a collection of 11 prose stories, known as? (The Mabinogion) 4. Last year the Hay Festival celebrated a significant anniversary – how many years had it been running? (30) 5. What was the profession of Welsh poet R S Thomas? (Anglican priest) 6. Poet and novelist Owen Sheers was brought up in Abergavenny, but on what island was he born? (Fiji) 7. Which Welsh novelist won the 2017 BBC National Award for his story ‘The Edge of Shoal’? (Cynan Jones) 8. Which celebrated Welsh travel writer wrote an autobiography entitled Conundrum about her personal journey from male to female? (Jan Morris) 9. Who is the current National Poet of Wales? (Gillian Clarke) 10. Two of the three poets shortlisted for the Wales Poetry Book of the Year prize in 2016 live in Penarth – can you name them? (Philip Gross, Stephen Payne)

GRIFFIN BOOKS LITERARY QUIZ

Round 7 - Fantasy & Future

1. Which leading sci-fi and fantasy writer, best known for a series of five novels featuring an apprentice wizard, died this week? (Ursula LeGuin) 2. In what year did George Orwell write his dystopian novel ‘1984’? (1948) 3. What is the name of Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel in which women rule the world as a result of teenage girls developing the ability to electrocute others at will? (The Power) 4. has recently published the first in a new trilogy called The Book of Dust, but what is the name of the first book? (La Belle Sauvage) 5. What film was based on Philip K. Dick’s short story ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’? (Blade Runner) 6. What is the name of the secret society reactivated by Dumbledore to foil Voldemort and his minions, which gives its title to one of the seven Harry Potter books? (The Order of the Phoenix) 7. In John Wyndham’s ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’, how are the alien ‘Children’ which have been born to all the women in the village eventually destroyed? (blown up by their teacher while watching a film) 8. ‘New Moon’, ‘Eclipse’ and ‘Breaking Dawn’ are the sequels to what popular YA fantasy novel? (Twilight) 9. Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was the daughter of which prominent philosopher and feminist? (Mary Wollstonecraft) 10. In ’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, what is the name of the fictional republic which has overthrown the former United States? (Gilead)

GRIFFIN BOOKS LITERARY QUIZ

Round 8 - 2017

1. Which non-fiction book sub-titled ‘A Brief History of Humankind’ was amongst the top ten bestsellers of the year? (Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari) 2. In The Lost Words, a collaboration between nature writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris highlighting various common British flora and fauna, what do all the featured words have in common? (excluded from the Oxford Junior Dictionary) 3. 2017 marked the bicentenary of which author’s death? (Jane Austen) 4. Who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature? (Kazuo Ishiguro) 5. The bestselling title at Griffin Books during December was a collection of short biographies of 100 inspirational women – what is it called? (Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls) 6. The creator of a beloved children’s character, now the subject of two animated films, died aged 91 this year – who were the author and his character? (Paddington Bear – Michael Bond) 7. Which highly regarded novelist, who died in June, posthumously won the poetry category of the Costa Book Awards for a collection entitled ‘Inside the Wave’ (Helen Dunmore) 8. ‘Oi Frog’ and ‘Oi Dog’ are very popular children’s picture books – what animal features in the title of the latest in the series, published earlier this year? (Cat) 9. June 26th was the 20th anniversary of the publication of which global bestselling children’s book? (Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone) 10. What is the name of the book revealing the inside story of Trump’s White House, written in 2017 and published earlier this month? (Fire & Fury)