Remarkably Bright Creatures
Tova Sullivan, a seventy-year-old widow in the small Puget Sound town of Sowell Bay, cleans the local aquarium at night, a job she took to stay busy after her husband's death and her son Erik's unsolved disappearance thirty years earlier. Marcellus, the aquarium's giant Pacific octopus, has learned to escape his tank after hours, watches the humans with irritated precision, and narrates his own chapters in a voice of weary contempt and reluctant affection. When a drifting young man named Cameron arrives in town looking for a father he has never met, Marcellus begins to piece together what the humans around him cannot. Shelby Van Pelt's 2022 debut, equal parts small-town mystery and quiet novel of grief, treats an aging widow, a lost young man, and a short-lived cephalopod as three equally serious minds in the same book.
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Tova Sullivan is a widow in her seventies who cleans the Sowell Bay Aquarium after hours. Marcellus, the captive Pacific octopus, has figured out he is dying and decides to help her find what she lost.
Remarkably Bright Creatures is fictional, but Shelby Van Pelt drew on real research about giant Pacific octopuses, including their intelligence, problem-solving, and behavior in aquariums.
Yes. A film adaptation has been announced, with Sally Field attached to play Tova. The project is in development.
Remarkably Bright Creatures was written by Shelby Van Pelt, published in 2022 by Ecco.
Remarkably Bright Creatures is 368 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Remarkably Bright Creatures takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Remarkably Bright Creatures is a standalone novel by Shelby Van Pelt, not part of a series.
Remarkably Bright Creatures is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
