Feel free to pick and choose — you don’t need to run every question in one sitting unless your book club fancies a full bench trial.

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CHARACTERS: WHO’S ON THE BENCH, AND WHO SHOULD BE IN THE DOCK?
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  1. Casting Court
    When Emma Thompson appeared as Fiona Maye, did your brain quietly gavel in approval, or did it shuffle its papers and mutter “that’s not who I had in mind”? Same question for Stanley Tucci as Jack and Fionn Whitehead as Adam. Who matched your mental casting from the novel, and who felt like they’d been summoned from a completely different McEwan adaptation?
  2. Fiona Maye 1.0 vs Fiona Maye 2.0 (Now With Visible Trembling)
    Book-Fiona is rendered almost entirely from the inside: we live in her legal reasoning, her guilt, her careful repression. Film-Fiona is all exteriority — Thompson’s face doing the heavy lifting that McEwan’s prose once carried. Which version of Fiona pulled you deeper in? Did you feel more protective of the internal Fiona on the page, or more moved by the outwardly composed but quietly cracking Fiona on screen?
  3. Adam: Radiant Symbol or Actual Teenager?
    Adam Henry is almost too luminous to be real — a violin-playing, poetry-quoting boy who burns through religious certainty and fixates on the woman who saved him. Critics of the novel noted he felt more like a theme than a character. Does the film’s casting of Fionn Whitehead make Adam more flesh-and-blood, or does he remain an idea that happens to have a face? Did you buy his intensity, or did it tip into the overwrought?
  4. Jack Maye: Villain, Symptom, or Just Extraordinarily Poor Timing?
    Jack announces his desire to have an affair with the measured reasonableness of a man who thinks he deserves a medal for not going behind his wife’s back. In the novel he’s a somewhat thin figure; in the film, Tucci makes him almost charming, which is arguably worse. Did you find him more sympathetic, more infuriating, or more irrelevant than the book suggested? And be honest: was his reappearance at the end satisfying or just convenient?
  5. The Supporting Roles: Nigel, the Parents, the Other Cases
    Fiona’s fastidious clerk Nigel, Adam’s Jehovah’s Witness parents, the barristers — these are the furniture of both versions. Which supporting character felt most alive on screen? Which felt most reduced by the compression? And did the conjoined twins case — glimpsed briefly at the start — do enough work to establish what kind of person and judge Fiona is before the main case begins?

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PLOT SURGERY: WHAT GOT REDRAFTED, WHAT GOT STRUCK OUT
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  1. The Interior Life, Now Exterior
    McEwan’s novel runs on interiority: Fiona’s legal deliberations, her wry self-assessments, her suppressed grief about childlessness. Film strips all that away and replaces it with Thompson’s face and body. What did you lose when the inner monologue went? Were there specific moments in the novel — a paragraph of legal reasoning, a quiet internal confession — that you missed having access to, and that no performance could quite replicate?
  2. The Climactic Race Across Town (Not in the Book)
    McEwan the screenwriter added a scene McEwan the novelist never wrote: a frantic rush across London that leans, critics noted, toward melodrama. Did it work for you as a cinematic escalation, or did it feel grafted on — a thriller beat dropped into what is fundamentally a quiet ethical drama? Does a story about the slow weight of moral consequence need a foot-race?
  3. The Letters: Read Aloud vs Read in Silence
    Adam’s letters to Fiona are one of the novel’s most quietly devastating elements — read by us in private, piling up unanswered on Fiona’s desk. The film makes one letter a spoken performance, read aloud by Fiona. Does hearing it change its emotional register? Does the shift from private reading to public performance alter what the letters mean?
  4. The Ending: A Cemetery vs a Flat in Gray’s Inn
    The novel ends where it began — Fiona and Jack in their London flat, marriage tentatively resuming, Fiona whispering her guilt and grief in the semi-darkness. The film takes a wider visual sweep, moving to the hillside cemetery where Adam is newly buried before pulling back to the city. Which ending carried more weight for you? Did the visual breadth of the film’s finale earn its emotion, or did the novel’s quiet, enclosed ending feel truer to what the story is actually about?
  5. What the Film Added, What It Quietly Dropped
    McEwan adapted his own novel, so the changes are his choices, not a stranger’s intrusions. Think about what the film adds (the race across town, the cemetery scene, the conjoined twins as a more prominent opening) and what it reduces (the texture of Fiona’s legal world, the depth of her childlessness as a theme, the accumulated weight of Adam’s letters). Which omission stung most? Which addition actually improved the story?

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TONE & VIBE: HOW QUIET IS THIS COURTROOM, REALLY?
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  1. Chamber Drama or Ethical Thriller?
    On the page, this reads like a very McEwan novel: cool-surfaced, morally intricate, slightly clinical in its intelligence. On screen, Richard Eyre steers it toward something warmer and more overtly moving. Did the film’s emotional temperature feel like the right adaptation of the book’s register, or did it make something austere into something slightly weepy? Which version’s tone suited the material better?
  2. Piano Music as Emotional Telegraph
    Fiona’s piano-playing — Bach in the flat, the impromptu duet with Adam in the hospital — does a lot of work in both versions. But the film can actually play it for you. Did hearing the music change how you understood Fiona’s emotional interior, or did it feel like the film was underlining things that the novel trusted you to feel on your own? Name one moment where the music did something the prose couldn’t, and one where it overdid it.
  3. The Law as Atmosphere
    Both versions are steeped in the specific texture of the English High Court: the robes, the titles (“My Lady”), the language of precedent and welfare. Did the film convey the weight and strangeness of that world, or did it feel like legal procedure as backdrop rather than as a genuine influence on character? Does Fiona feel as entirely formed by her vocation on screen as she does on the page?

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THE FIONA-ADAM RELATIONSHIP: BOUNDARY, OBSESSION, OR SOMETHING WITHOUT A LEGAL CATEGORY?
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  1. What, Exactly, Is This?
    The relationship between Fiona and Adam resists a clean label — maternal instinct, artistic kinship, transferred grief for the children she never had, something uncomfortably like mutual infatuation. The novel keeps it genuinely ambiguous; the film has to project it onto faces and gestures. Which medium handled the ambiguity better? Did the film clarify things it should have left murky, or did Thompson and Whitehead find the right unsettled register?
  2. The Hospital Visit: A Pivotal Scene in Two Registers
    Fiona’s decision to visit Adam in hospital — unusual, possibly irregular, and transformative for both of them — is the hinge on which everything else turns. Compare how the book and film stage this scene. Did the film give it the right weight and strangeness? Was the moment they play music together more or less charged in each version? And crucially: did it feel like an act of judicial courage, a professional misstep, or something else entirely?
  3. Adam’s Kiss: A Transgression the Film Has to Show
    Adam kisses Fiona — briefly, witnessed, mortifying. In the novel it’s a moment of startling specificity that Fiona carries as a kind of shame. The film has to put it on screen with two actors and an audience watching. Did it land with the right mixture of sweetness and wrongness? Or did making it visible change its meaning in ways that didn’t serve the story?
  4. Fiona’s Guilt: Who Killed Adam?
    Adam’s death — he refuses further treatment and dies, having been cast out of the only community he knew — arrives as a consequence of Fiona’s ruling. She saved him and arguably unmade him. Does the film make this moral equation as precise and painful as the novel does? Did you blame Fiona? The law? Adam himself? The Jehovah’s Witnesses? Does your allocation of blame differ between the two versions?

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THEMES: LAW, FAITH, CHILDLESSNESS, AND THE COST OF COMPETENCE
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  1. The Children Act as a Title: How Many Things Is It Doing?
    The 1989 Children Act — the real piece of legislation that puts children’s welfare above parental wishes — gives the story its legal engine. But it’s also, quietly, about the children Fiona doesn’t have and whether her vocation substituted for them. Did the film carry this double meaning, or did it foreground the legal title and let the personal echo fade? Which version made you feel the weight of the title more?
  2. Religious Faith vs the State: Who Gets to Decide?
    The central case turns on a question that isn’t really about blood: it’s about who has authority over a person’s body and soul when that person is seventeen years, nine months old. How did each version present Adam’s faith — as conviction, as conditioning, as something more complicated? Did you find yourself agreeing with Fiona’s ruling? Did either version make you question it more than the other?
  3. Overwork as a Form of Hiding
    Fiona’s professional excellence and her emotional unavailability are the same thing. Jack says as much; the novel shows it in her deliberations; the film shows it in Thompson’s bone-deep exhaustion and clipped warmth. Which medium made you feel the tragedy of that equation more clearly: a woman so good at her job that she has quietly mortgaged everything else? Did you read her workload as avoidance, ambition, or something for which the language of psychology is too small?
  4. The Marriage: Does It Resolve, or Just Resume?
    Jack and Fiona end up back together, or something like it. In the novel, this feels like a quiet diminishment — life reasserting its damp ordinariness after a crisis. In the film it’s more visually ambiguous. Did you feel the reconciliation as relief, resignation, or just the path of least resistance? And does your reading change depending on whether you think Fiona’s attachment to Adam was, even partially, romantic?

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EYES VS. IMAGINATION: WHO TOLD THE STORY BETTER?
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  1. Scenes That Looked Better Than You Imagined
    Name one scene that the film staged more powerfully than the novel described it. The hospital room. The courtroom. The rain-soaked cemetery. The flat where Jack delivers his extraordinary announcement. Which moment did Richard Eyre’s camera give you something your reading imagination hadn’t quite managed?
  2. What the Book Did That the Camera Couldn’t
    McEwan’s prose has a quality critics call “quiet mastery” — cool, precise, doing a great deal with very little. Were there passages, arguments, or interior moments that simply cannot be filmed? A legal ruling read silently on the page, a half-page of Fiona’s self-assessment, the texture of a London evening described from the inside? Name one thing the novel gave you that the film was structurally unable to.
  3. The Author Adapting His Own Work: Advantage or Trap?
    McEwan wrote both the novel and the screenplay, which is unusual. Does the film feel like it’s in conversation with the book, or like it’s trying to replace it? Did the self-adaptation produce a screenplay that’s too faithful (keeping things that only work on the page) or too willing to diverge (adding the race across town)? Is there such a thing as being too close to your own source material?

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OVERALL ADAPTATION VERDICT: HOW SOUND IS THIS RULING?
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  1. “True to the Spirit” — Or Just True to the Plot?
    The film is widely described as faithful, and it is — in incident. But McEwan’s novel is primarily a novel of interiority, and the film is necessarily a film of surfaces. Can an adaptation be faithful to a story while losing the very thing that made the story what it is? If you had to argue the case for the film’s fidelity — or against it — what would your ruling be?
  2. What Each Version Does Best
    If you had to award one gold star to the novel and one to the film, what would each be for? (Suggested categories: Best Legal Atmosphere; Best Marriage Implosion in Under Five Minutes; Best Use of a Piano as a Character; Best Face Doing What Prose Usually Does; Best Ending That Knows When to Stop.)
  3. Recommend: Read, Watch, or Both?
    If a friend said “I have time for one version” — which would you send them to, and why? Would your answer change if the friend was more interested in the ethical dilemma, or more interested in the relationship between Fiona and Adam, or more interested in watching Emma Thompson work? Is there a version of this story that’s better at one of those things than the others?
  4. Order of Operations
    Book then film, or film then book? How does the order change what you experience? Does reading the novel first give you a Fiona that Thompson then either confirms or complicates? Does watching first let you encounter the legal and ethical material without McEwan’s interiority pre-loading your response? And is there a case for just one and done — and if so, which one?
  5. Final Club Gut Check
    On the spectrum from “perfect page-to-screen translation” to “loosely based on a feeling,” where do you place The Children Act adaptation? And here’s the harder question: does Emma Thompson’s performance make you want to give it more credit than it has strictly earned? Is there a point at which acting so good it carries a film’s weaknesses also becomes, paradoxically, a mild problem for evaluating the adaptation?

Use, tweak, or mash these questions as needed — your club, your verdict.