Literary Fiction · Free kit
The Things We Never Say
Artie Dam is fifty-seven, a well-liked high school history teacher in a coastal Massachusetts town in 2024, the man who sails on weekends and still cannot quite believe he lives in his wife's inherited house by the water. Inside, he feels cut off from Evie, now a family therapist, and from their son Rob, withdrawn since a crash ten years earlier. Elizabeth Strout's Booker Prize 2026 shortlisted novel is spare, political, and quietly devastating: a portrait of loneliness, the things a family will not name, and what happens when a long-buried secret finally reaches the person it was kept from.
“I wonder why people never say anything real.”
Complete free book club kit
BookClubee may earn a commission from Bookshop.org purchases, which supports independent bookshops.
Plan your meeting
The Things We Never Say Icebreakers
Answer in under 30 seconds. These connect to the book’s themes without spoiling the story.
Personality Reveal
1. Are you easier to talk to at work than at the kitchen table — and which version of you would your closest people say is the real one?
Personality Reveal
2. When a room goes quiet after someone almost says the hard thing, do you fill the silence or let it sit?
Personality Reveal
3. Are you the friend people call when they need cheerfulness, or the friend they call when they need the truth?
Funny & Light
4. What ordinary household object would you accidentally turn into a metaphor if you stared at it too long?
Funny & Light
5. What's the most "I am a functioning adult" hobby you have that still looks a little goofy from the sidewalk?
Funny & Light
6. Have you ever been nicknamed something affectionate and slightly humiliating — and did you secretly love it?
Would You Rather
7. Would you rather be deeply known by two people or warmly liked by a whole town that has you slightly wrong?
Would You Rather
8. Would you rather hear an uncomfortable truth at dinner tonight, or keep a peaceful table and find out in a letter years from now?
Would You Rather
9. Would you rather be the person who always says the real thing, or the person everyone describes as kind?
Hot Take
10. Be honest: most marriages survive on things left unsaid. Is that wisdom or a slow leak?
Hot Take
11. Hot take: being "easy to like" is sometimes a way of hiding. Defend or destroy.
Hot Take
12. A parent should not have to be anyone's explorer. Agree, or is that exactly the job?
Personal Connection
13. What's one thing you are good at explaining to strangers that you still cannot say cleanly to your own family?
Personal Connection
14. Who in your life would notice first if the cheerful version of you went missing?
Personal Connection
15. What's a small coastal, classroom, or kitchen detail from your own life that still has more feeling in it than it should?