When We Flew Away
Whalesong: The True Story of the Musician Who Talked to Orcas
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Remarkably Bright Creatures

Dazzling and unexpected, Shelby Van Pelt’s debut novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures is set over the course of a summer in a fictional town on Puget Sound. This is a witty and warm tale of a widow’s friendship with a giant Pacific octopus reluctantly residing at the local aquarium—and the truths she finally uncovers about her son’s disappearance thirty years ago.

Tova Sullivan began mopping floors and tidying up on the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium after her husband died. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago. Finding the sea creatures around her easier to talk to than the humans in her life, Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors—until he forms an unlikely friendship with Tova. Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared. As his affection for Tova grows, Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late.

More Adult Books

  • Walt Longmire is back after the escapades of First Frost and encounters one of his most baffling cases in Wyoming’s brutal and unforgiving Red Desert. When Blair McGowan, the mail person with the longest postal route in the country of over three hundred mile a day, goes missing the question becomes—where do you look for her? The Postal Inspector for the State of Wyoming elicits Sheriff Longmire to mount an investigation into her disappearance and Walt does everything but mail it in; posing as a letter-carrier himself, the good sheriff follows her trail and finds himself enveloped in the intrigue of [...]

  • Mirroring the music of New Orleans, Kane's poems combine traditional form with improvisational flourishes. Rhythm & Booze charts her progress as she undertakes a number of journeys, from youth to experience, from blues bars to college classrooms, from city to country, from chaos to something approaching peace.

  • Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war.