The Titanic Survivors Book Club
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of The Perfume Thief, a remarkable tale about the life-changing power of books and second chances, following the Titanic librarian who opens a bookshop in Paris where he meets a secret society of survivors.
"Deeply moving and rich with vivid detail . . . Timothy Schaffert is an exquisite storyteller."—Lara Prescott, New York Times bestselling author of The Secrets We Kept
For weeks after the sinking of the Titanic, Yorick spots his own name among the list of those lost at sea. As an apprentice librarian for the White Star Line, his job was to curate the ship’s second-class library. But the day the Titanic set sail he was left stranded at the dock.
After the ship’s sinking, Yorick takes this twist of fate as a sign to follow his lifelong dream of owning a bookshop in Paris. Soon after, he receives an invitation to a secret society of survivors where he encounters other ticket holders who didn’t board the ship. Haunted by their good fortune, they decide to form a book society, where they can grapple with their own anxieties through heated discussions of The Awakening or The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Of this ragtag group, Yorick finds himself particularly drawn to the glamorous Zinnia and the mysterious Haze, and a tangled triangle of love and friendship forms among them. Yet with the Great War on the horizon and the unexpected death of one of their own, the surviving book club members are left wondering what fate might have in store.
Elegant and elegiac, The Titanic Survivors Book Club is a dazzling ode to love, chance, and the transformative power of books to bring people together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lush and intricately researched historical, Schaffert (The Perfume Thief) brings together a varied cast who, despite having tickets for an Atlantic crossing aboard the Titanic, are prevented by circumstance from taking its fateful maiden voyage. The tale is narrated by Yorick, who runs a bookshop in Paris, and whom the White Star Line replaced at the last minute as steward of the second-class library aboard the doomed steamship, having learned he was distributing banned books. At the story's center is a love triangle consisting of Yorick and two other would-be passengers who all meet when a Paris business owner calls them together as a publicity stunt: Zinnia, the striking mixed-race heir to her parents' confectionary company; and the handsome Haze, a photographer who specializes in capturing the decay of historic Parisian buildings, and to whom Yorick is immediately drawn, seeing in the Oscar Wilde–like artist a secretly gay man like himself. When Haze enlists Yorick's help in writing love letters to Zinnia, Yorick is devastated but complies, and they are all bonded by their shared brush with disaster. As Europe marches inexorably toward WWI, alliances shift among the three lovers and jealousies come to a head. The marvelous sensuous details—from the smells and feel of old books to the descriptions of Zinna's candies and the veritable river of cognac, absinthe, wine, and Dutch gin—make this star-crossed lovers' tale an absolute delight, and the underlying themes of book banning and suppressed sexuality resonate. Schaffert has outdone himself.
