The Titanic Survivors Book Club by Timothy Schaffert

The Titanic Survivors Book Club by Timothy Schaffert

320 pages

Published April 2024 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

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 Thoughts: 

I've been a fan of Schaffert's since 2010, when I first met him at Omaha Lit Fest, an event he organized and which I very much enjoyed attending for several years. The Titanic Survivors Book Club is the sixth of his books that I've read and very much enjoyed. I still count his The Coffins of Little Hope as one of my favorites, but his writing has expanded far beyond the Nebraska borders of that book. 

What I Liked About This Book:

• When you read the title of the book, you are definitely expecting a book about a group of people that managed to get into lifeboats as the Titanic sank into icy waters. These are not those survivors, which is makes them so interesting and so bound to one another. 
• The core of this book is the trio of Yorick, Zinnia and Haze and their trio of love stories. Such interesting and unusual characters. I loved how they both made each other better and broke each other apart. 
• Paris...the book store...the clothing and food and drinks. Schaffert is a master at creating atmosphere and painting a picture. I would love to see this book made into a movie so I could see all of this come to life...assuming Hollywood could do the writing, and the image I've created in my head, justice. 
• There is an epistolary section of the book which was an interesting interlude and allowed readers to see the story from many angles. 
• There is always a darkness to Schaffert's writing that draws me in; this one may be the darkest. But they also always contain an amount of humor (which, if you've ever seen Schaffert speak, will not surprise you). 
• I've remarked on this before and I will again with this book - there are no "happily ever afters" in Schaffert's books and that's just as it should be.

What Didn't Work As Well For Me: 

• I would have liked to see more the meetings of the book club. So many interesting characters to learn more about. 
• Of course, a book set just after the sinking of the Titanic was going to reach the point where the First World War began and these characters were pulled into it. That was logical, but I felt a little bit like it pulled me away from story that I'd been enjoying and the aftermath of what happened in the war was a slow collapse before things came back together. 

All in all, a very satisfying book that gave me exactly what I was expecting from Schaffert. I miss his books set in Nebraska but I'm also thrilled to watch him explore the wider world and its history.