1. The title suggests that time itself has changed shape. How does the novel capture the distortion of ordinary life after betrayal and loss?
2. Doris is not a conventionally tidy or heroic protagonist. Did that make her feel more real to you?
3. How does the novel use humour? Did the comic elements soften the pain, sharpen it, or make it more uncomfortable?
4. Doris discovers John’s betrayal while carrying a pregnancy she has not yet announced. How does that private knowledge affect the emotional force of the opening?
5. The novel is about betrayal, but also about humiliation. How important is humiliation to Doris’s breakdown?
6. How did you respond to Lisa? Is she simply the betrayer, or does the novel complicate that role?
7. Female friendship is central to the damage in the novel. Is Lisa’s betrayal worse than John’s? Why, or why not?
8. How does miscarriage change the meaning of Doris’s grief? Is she grieving one loss, or several at once?
9. Doris often experiences domestic objects, rooms and routines as strange or hostile. How does the novel make ordinary life feel surreal?
10. Did you read Doris’s withdrawal from the world as collapse, resistance, self-protection, or transformation?
11. What role does loneliness play in the novel? Is Doris lonely because she has been abandoned, or because she has never fully belonged to her own life?
12. When Lisa returns with her own version of events, did it alter your judgement of her, John or Doris?
13. Is forgiveness presented as possible, necessary, impossible, or overrated?
14. What did you make of the novel’s dark comic tone? Could the same story have worked without humour?
15. By the end, has Doris recovered, changed, or simply learned to live differently inside the distortion?

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