November’s Title Pick for Adults: All My Sons by Arthur Miller

We always include a play on The Reader Bookshelf as tackling a play in a Shared Reading group is an experience which can not only capture and hold attention in a quite specific way, but also open up lots of new and different paths to group members. Our 2026 Bookshelf choice of Arthur Miller’s play All My Sons, written in 1946, offered intense reading experiences and opened up rich discussions about morality, family and grief.

As they emerge from World War Two, each member of the Keller family has very different opinions about how to make sense of the past, live in the present, and move into the future. Their beloved family home has become a very strange and painful place to be. One of the Keller’s two sons, pilot Larry, was reported missing in action over three years ago. Mum Kate believes he is still alive, the other son Chris wants Kate to accept that Larry is dead, and dad Joe doesn’t know which side to take. Joe hopes Chris will follow him into the family business making aircraft engines, but this area of life is tainted too: during the war, Joe’s factory sent out faulty engine parts which resulted in the death of 21 pilots. This catastrophe casts a long shadow: Joe’s business partner Steve is currently serving time in prison for the crime. His daughter Annie, once Larry’s sweetheart, now Chris’s, refuses to speak to her father. Over the course of the play ugly secrets are reveals which will tear the family apart.

We shared extracts of the play with Shared Reading groups around the country via The Home We Carry anthology, and our Monthly Poems and Stories packs. Reader Leader Jacquie was pleased that her group in a criminal justice got stuck into one such extract, a conversation between Joe and Chris, recording that:

‘People took turns with the two roles and during the pauses made really thoughtful comments about the father and son. They had strong feelings about whether it was right for this man to be wanting to marry his brother's girlfriend while he was missing in action and also about how the father handled the difficult situation.’

Another group member told Jacquie ‘they could never have believed they would have so much to say about something we were reading.’

A Liverpool-based group for people in recovery also read an extract from the play together. The Reader Leader reflected that ‘group members enjoyed taking a part each when reading the play, and it helped keep focus on the text for individuals who sometimes find this challenging.’

Clare’s Shared Reading group, also based in Liverpool, read the whole of All My Sons together over several months, with different group members taking it in turns to read different parts and stage directions each week. Clare’s reading records reveal the complex and rich discussions that the play inspired.

Week 1: Really excited to start a play with this group and it was great to see the content of the play begin to take hold of the group, as we meet the Keller family and learn about their shared grief over their missing son Larry. Reading a play does present some new challenges for the group - working out how to read lines, having only voices and stage directions without the guidance of a unifying narrator. But it feels good to have set out on this challenge together.

Week 2: Lots going on in the play to discuss, especially around different experiences and perspectives on grief. One of the good things about doing a play like this is that the different perspectives expressed by the different roles in the play are supported by the many voices you have in the room, as the group feel able to identify with different characters. Some group members identified with the mum, Kate: as one member said, 'as a mother I would always be hoping for my son to come back'. Meanwhile, another group member said, 'I feel so sad that Chris is getting ignored - it is like the mum spends all her time thinking about her missing son that she cannot see the son in front of her'. There was lots of discussion this week about whether anyone has a right to tell another person it is time to move on from grieving, or equally a right to ask people to hold back. We spent time re-reading and wondering about many individual lines, particularly Chris's line: 'We're like at a railroad station waiting for a train that never comes in.'

Week 5: Today's session brought about a very interesting conversation about justice, guilt and innocence, as we learn from Joe Keller about being convicted, along with his employee Steve, for selling faulty plane parts during the wars. Joe's request for his family (and us) to 'see it human' was initially read with scepticism - 'He's just making excuses', observed one member. There was a feeling that what Joe and Steve had done was inexcusable. I then re-read some sections from the play: 'But I know he meant no harm. He believed they'd hold up a hundred percent. That's a mistake, but it ain't murder.' While the group were still not prepared to quite go along with Joe's reasoning, when I asked again whether what he said made a difference to whether we classed the situation as ‘murder’ or not, I noticed the group seemed a bit more hesitant to pass judgement so quickly, and seemed to reflect on the question in silence. The play is good at showing the complexity of morality and challenging us to test out our ideas and instincts through a live family dynamic, rather than in abstract.

Week 6: The play continues to stretch and challenge the group, and builds with each week - as one member said, 'there's lots of layers in this one'. Today we spoke a lot about whether we can ever be 'brand new' to others in terms of relationships (a hope that is expressed by Chris, in relation to Annie) and the difficulty of perhaps always 'carrying feelings of unfaithfulness in some way', as one group member put it. As well as the play taking us deeper into emotions - Chris opens up in this section about why he feels 'ashamed somehow' - the plot continues to thicken as Annie takes a call from her brother George. The poem was very well received - a few people folded it up to take away, always a good sign when someone asks 'can I keep this one?' There were spontaneous connections back to the play – one group member was eager to say how the poem related to Chris, as well as much sharing of how life might be revealed to us as a gift. While there was pain in this poem and acknowledgement of difficulty, there was a feeling of hope and consolation as well, which felt true for the group rather than overstated.

Week 9: It was great to see the animation of some people when reading - as if they really become another person for a moment, and I got the sense that the people who did this quite enjoyed that space - conveyed by the sheer passion with which they read. Indeed there was quite a bit of lifted energy and laughter in this session - the release perhaps of becoming someone else and also sharing in the playfulness of that. We also had a great conversation about how emotional manipulation might happen in a family and how this is not necessarily straightforward to judge. One member said 'This is a moral play, but a very personal moral play, literally happening in someone's back yard.' I think that is what gives the power to this play - big questions, but played out in the microcosm of a family, and therefore making it accessible/relatable for others to think through.

Week 11: We finished the play! Always feels like an achievement to complete a longer read together. I had been nervous about reaching this point – as the play ends with Joe dying by suicide - and the group certainly felt the tragedy of this, something which left a bitter taste in our mouths and which couldn't quite be resolved with Kate's last words, telling Chris to ‘live’. The group were left still worrying about this family - about Chris, about Kate, about Annie. One member said 'I don't like loose ends.' But the feeling of having got through the play together, even if the ending was tragic, was valuable, as was a shared appreciation of the depths that the play had taken us to in its exploration of family, love and betrayal.

By Frances Macmillan, Literature Engagement Lead