How to Be Lost
by Amanda Eyre Ward

List Price: $13.95
Pages: 320
Format: Trade Paperback
ISBN: 0345483170
Publisher: Ballantine Books

When five-year-old Ellie disappears, the Winters family is devastated. Fifteen years later, Ellie's sister Caroline, now a cocktail waitress in New Orleans, sees a magazine picture of a woman who looks like Ellie all grown-up, and resolves to find her and fix their broken family. Her journey leads her to Montana, where her search, and her family history become more complex and confusing by the moment.

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1. What is the significance of the title? Who in the book is lost?

2. What is the distinction between being lost and being missing?

3. What is Caroline searching for?

4. How does Ellie's disappearance affect the relationship between Madeline and Caroline?

5. How is setting important in How to Be Lost? Where does Caroline feel most comfortable, and why?

6. What role does alcohol play in the novel? How does it initiate, complicate, or smooth out circumstances?

7. In what way do Winnie and Peggy function as surrogate sisters for Caroline?

8. There are a number of mothers in How to Be Lost: Isabelle, Sarah, Winnie, Madeline, and Mrs. Lake. Discuss these different images of motherhood. Are any of these mothers revered? Criticized? What role do these women play in protecting their children and offering them a sense of the world?

9. Bernard tells Agnes that "There's always another chance to take what you deserve." Do you think that Bernard's belief is always possible? Do any other characters in the novel seem to hold a similar view?

10. Roxie utters only a few words in the novel, but she leaves a strong impression on Caroline. What role does Roxie play in Caroline's journey? What sort of revelations do Roxie and Olivia provide for Caroline?

11. Compare and contrast Charlene with Agnes. Both are lost to their families but there is a distinct difference - the element of choice. Discuss these two women and how the element of choice affects their separate lives.

12. Compare and contrast Charlene with Agnes. Both are lost to their families but there is a distinct difference - the element of choice. Discuss these two women and how the element of choice affects their separate lives.

13. At the beginning of the novel, Caroline attempts to avoid going home to her mother's condo in New York for the holiday, but by the book's end, she feels at home there. What brings about this change? How is home defined for her in the end?

14. Ward uses multiple perspectives - Caroline's first-person account, Agnes's letters, and a third-person, omniscient narrator - to tell this story. How did this structure affect the story and your understanding of it? What is the role of the reader in unraveling of the mystery of the Winters family?

15. If you have read Ward's previous novel, Sleep Toward Heaven, do you see any common themes or elements in How to Be Lost?

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"Ward (Sleep Toward Heaven) tracks a young woman's search for her missing sister-and herself-with economy and compassion in this believable and moving tale of hope's ability to best the most unforgiving of sorrows."

—Publishers Weekly

"Amanda Eyre Ward is an author who knows how to be bold, how to be funny, how to be smart and compassionate and true. It is a pleasure to be lost inside this searching and sure-footed novel."

—Gayle Brandeis, author of The Book of Dead Birds

"You've got a great book in your hands - Ward shines here with the same humor and brilliance she showed in her first novel, Sleep Toward Heaven, setting vivid descriptions of women's interior lives within a haunting mystery, all told in the clear, no-nonsense prose that has won her such acclaim."

—Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli

"Another knockout of a novel from the prodigiously talented Amanda Eyre Ward. Here, she writes about longing, loss, love and all the mysteries in our lives--the happy endings we yearn for, the ragged holes in our hearts we ache to fill, and all the stories we create to try to heal ourselves and those we love. Told with radiant heart and humor, and written in prose so arresting I was stopping to underline whole passages, How To Be Lost is a gem."

—Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls In Trouble