Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel The Color Purple.  Her other bestselling novels include Possessing the Secret of Joy and The Temple of My Familiar.  She is also the author of two collections of short stories, three collections of essays, five volumes of poetry, and several children's books.  Her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages.  Born in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker now lives in Northern California.


From the Hardcover edition. [Edit review] [Delete review]

By the Light of My Father's Smile is Alice Walker's first novel in six years--a stunning, original, and important book by "one of the best American writers of today" (The Washington Post).

A family from the United States goes to the remote Sierras in Mexico--the writer-to-be, Susannah; her sister, Magdalena; her father and mother.  And there, amid an endangered band of mixed-race Blacks and Indians called the Mundo, they begin an encounter that will change them more than they could ever dream.  Moving back and forth in time, and among unforgettable characters and their stories, Walker crosses conventional borders of all kinds as she explores in this magical novel the ways in which a woman's denied sexuality leads to the loss of the much prized and necessary original self; and how she regains that self, even as her family's past of lies and love is transformed.

By the Light of My Father's Smile presents, as Alice Walker puts... [More...] [Edit review] [Delete review]

1. Why do you think Alice Walker chose to write this novel in the voices of several different narrators? Which character's story do you think is the center of the novel? Do you think the use of different voices interrupts the story or enriches it? Does the author succeed in making each voice distinctive? Give examples.

2. The novel underscores the potency of lies and hypocrisy. The web of deceit practiced by the Robinsons, the African American anthropologist couple posing as missionaries and who are unable to find funding for their study of the Mundo tribe, is particularly telling on this point. How does the irony of their masquerade as "puritanical Christians" play into the tragedy at the novel's center?

3. Alice Walker says the book "examines the way imposed religion almost always acts to inhibit and harden the heart of those who would instinctively love." Is she referring to the rigid dogma of institutional religion and its condemnation of the... [More...] [Edit review] [Delete review]

Chapter 1

I am a man you can trust, is how my customers view me. Or at least, I'm guessing it is. Why else would they hand me their house keys before they leave for vacation? Why else would they depend on me to clear their attics for them, heave their air conditioners into their windows every spring, lug their excess furniture to their basements? "Mind your step, young fellow; that's Hepplewhite," Mrs. Rodney says, and then she goes into her kitchen to brew a pot of tea. I could get up to anything in that basement. I could unlock the outside door so as to slip back in overnight and rummage through all she owns--her Hepplewhite desk and her Japanese lacquer jewelry box and the six potbellied drawers of her dining-room buffet. Not that I would. But she doesn't know that. She just assumes it. She takes it for granted that I'm a good person.

Come to think of it, I am the one who doesn't take it for granted.


On the very last day of a bad old... [More...] [Edit review] [Delete review]