Novel Endings - Random Trivia Answers

• A1) L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Although Dorothy rejoices after the ruby slippers magically return her to Kansas, she would return with Toto to Oz permanently in the numerous sequels.
• A2) Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose. The ending Latin phrase translates as "The ancient rose continues to exist through its name, yet its name is all that remains to us."
• A3) Yann Martel, Life of Pi. The title character is not an irrational number but a shipwrecked Indian boy, Piscine Molitor Patel.
• A4) Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind. Scarlett O'Hara hasn't given up hope for getting Rhett Butler back.
• A5) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Although the story focuses on the Ramsay family's trips to the Isle of Skye in Scotland, philosophical contemplations overshadow the minimal plot.
• A6) George Orwell, Animal Farm. In the 1945 parody of the early Soviet Union, the animals who have taken over behave no better than the owners they detested.
• A7) W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe. The baseball story, whose working title was Dream Field, became famous as the basis for the 1989 movie Field of Dreams seven years later.
• A8) Jack London, The Call of the Wild. John Thornton's pet dog Buck avenges his master's death and becomes the leader of a wolfpack.
• A9) F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway reflects on the title character's penchant for clinging to the past.
• A10) John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick. The 1984 novel led to the 1987 movie starring Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer as the title characters and Jack Nicholson as their mysterious and powerful seducer.
• A11) E.M. Forster, A Passage to India. Sixty years after the novel was published in 1924, the movie adaptation would earn Peggy Ashcroft a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and Maurice Jarre a Best Original Music Score Oscar.
• A12) Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum. The novel is the first book of the Danzig Trilogy, named for his hometown (now called Gdansk) in Poland. Cat and Mouse and Dog Years were each published after a gap of two years, in 1961 and 1963.

The last letters of the twelve authors' last names spell Daniel DeFoe's Moll Flanders, which concludes, "My husband remained there some time after me to settle our affairs, and at first I had intended to go back to him, but at his desire I altered that resolution, and he is come over to England also, where we resolve to spend the remainder of our years in sincere penitence for the wicked lives we have lived."