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.
My reading experience:
I bought this book based on the very first sentence of chapter one, of which I won’t mention so you can go find it for yourself. Suffice to say that I think this could be the ultimate book of love. Love of surviving, love of Paris, love of gin, love of fellow man and woman, heterosexual love, gay love, love of life, self love, but mostly and most importantly, love of and for, books.
Meet Yorick and his fellow survivors. Owning a bookshop in Paris, and formidably encouraged by Zinnia, Yorick starts a book club. It is meant as a bridge, a way for the group to communicate without having to say anything about themselves. Those personal details required for friendship would be revealed by their allegiances or otherwise to fictional characters and circumstances. What Yorick was not expecting to find was himself in some surreptitious love triangle. Love having had been the very thing he had avoided his entire life.
I absolutely adored the elements of book history that Schaffert brings to the foreground, of course these little intricacies that a bookish man such as Yorick would be in the detail of. With beautifully formed descriptions of the books’ elements, its spine, and ‘innards’, and of course the subject of the narrative, this is truly an ode to the book.
Themes include, Titanic, supernatural, surviving, homelessness, the Great War, letter writing and censorship, humankind.
Elegiac and ethereal. Wistful and woeful. This is a beautiful lamentation of love and loss.
I highly recommend The Titanic Survivors Book Club by Timothy Schaffert. See my review of The Swan Gondola here.
Appletree Books 