Current book list (NOT AN EVENT)

Tooting Book Club - current book list
Here is the list of books on the current list - if you would like to add a book to the list please bring your suggestion to the next meeting.

Remarkably Bright Creatures - Shelby Van Pelt (384 pages)
Kindle £4.53: Amazon Paperback £5

Remarkably Bright Creatures is about a widow and her unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus. After her husband’s death, Tova Sullivan took up night shifts mopping floors and tidying up at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Keeping busy has always been her way of coping, especially after her 18-year-old son Erik mysteriously disappeared on a boat in Puget Sound over 30 years ago. She becomes acquainted with Marcellus – a curmudgeonly giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. He knows more than anyone could imagine, but he wouldn’t lift any of his 8 arms for his human captors until he starts a friendship with Tova. Marcellus, ever the detective, deduces what happened the night of Erik’s vanishing, and he must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster in order to discover the truth before it’s too late.

It’s all in your head - Suzanne O’Sullivan (336 pages) - NON-FICTION
Kindle £3.99: Amazon Paperback £8.99
A non-fiction book by neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan, in which she shares her past experiences in diagnosing patients with psychosomatic illnesses. In this book, O’Sullivan recounts her most memorable interactions of patients with severe physical symptoms that she found to come from their mental state in a total of twelve chapters. The story is not sequential, instead each chapter depicts a different memory of her interactions with her patients. Each patient displays different symptoms varying in severity, but O’Sullivan comes to the same diagnosis and conclusion that these physical symptoms are actually psychosomatic disorders.

Martyr! - Kaveh Akbar (360 pages)
Kindle £5.99: Amazon Paperback £7.05
A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family.
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother's plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father's life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past--toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

James by Percival Everett (320 pages)
Kindle £5.99 Paperback £6.00

The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he flees to nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town.
So begins a dangerous and transcendent journey along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise. And together, the unlikely pair embark on the most life-changing odyssey of them all . . .

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods (444 pages)
Kindle £2.99 Paperback £7.99

On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found…
For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives.
But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. And by unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder… where nothing is as it seems.

Search History by Amy Taylor (278 pages)
Kindle: Not available Amazon Paperback: £8.72
After Ana flees to Melbourne in the wake of a breakup, all she has to show for herself is an unfulfilling job and one particularly questionable dating app experience. Then she meets Evan: the old-fashioned way, at a bar. Charming, kind, and responsible, Evan is a complete deviation from her usual type. Ana tries to let their relationship unfold IRL, but she can’t resist the urge to find him online. When she discovers that his previous girlfriend died in a hit-and-run, Ana begins to worry that she’s living in the shadow of his lost love. The more Ana learns about Evan’s past, the more questions she has: Was his last relationship as perfect as it looks online? And why won’t he talk about it?

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (240 pages)
Kindle: £5.99 Amazon Paperback: £9.01
Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep sea mission that ended in catastrophe. But it soon becomes clear that Leah may have come back wrong. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home.

Memories of what they had before – the jokes they shared, the films they watched, all the small things that made Leah hers – only remind Miri of what she stands to lose. Living in the same space but suddenly separate, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had might be gone.