The Titanic Survivors Book Club
Among those who survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 are those who never got aboard: ticket holders who changed their minds at the last moment. And Yorick, librarian of the ship’s second-class library, abruptly fired and left behind. Now the proprietor of a Paris bookshop, he is drawn together with a group of other intended passengers, all struggling with a strange survivor guilt affecting those who simply missed a deadly boat. They form a book club, based on the banned and censored books that Yorick smuggled into the library that sailed without him, and gradually they tell their own stories.
The novel revolves around Yorick and two others: beautiful Zinnia, heiress to a candy company, and the mysterious Haze, who has no legal identity. The three fall complicatedly in love and navigate the alternating and conflicting relations between them while the situation in Europe builds toward the First World War. Their story is told by Yorick, supplemented with letters between the three. Yorick, named by a father obsessed with Shakespeare, also shares the book club with a writer of “penny dreadfuls,” cheap romantic mysteries; a disillusioned evangelist; a famous aging actress; and a toy maker stuck with an unsalable inventory of commemorative Titanic-related playthings.
\Full of details of pre-war Paris as intricate as the ethereal candies that Zinnia’s family produces, this is both a novel of the human heart and a novel rooted in the power of books and language and reading. The bookstore becomes a character in itself, and each book a specific message of hope and second chances.
