Shelby Van Pelt belongs to the same writing tradition as our previous year’s One Read author, Daniel Mason, who wrote most of his books while working as a doctor and professor at Stanford University. Before publishing her first novel, Van Pelt spent years in an entirely different career, mostly as a financial consultant working on litigation cases. The book also makes me think of Richard Adams’ “Watership Down,” another work about a world seen through animal eyes, but which he said in an interview was mainly written to “entertain his daughters.”
It was an aquarium (or rather, a video of an octopus attempting a daring escape from one) that eventually pulled Van Pelt toward writing “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” her debut novel, which has also been turned into a movie (released on Netflix in 2026). Her story is one of the more unlikely publishing phenomena of the decade.
The novel centers on Tova Sullivan, a 70-year-old widow who takes a night job cleaning the Sowell Bay Aquarium on Puget Sound, partly to keep busy, but also partly to outrun a grief that has never fully resolved. Decades earlier, her teenage son Erik vanished without explanation, and Tova has spent the years since quietly waiting for an answer about his disappearance.
At the aquarium, Tova strikes up an improbable friendship with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus who is, in his own estimation, considerably smarter than the humans who observe him (it must be noted that these creatures are among the Earth’s most intelligent). Marcellus narrates several chapters himself. And he comes off as wry yet alien, cataloguing human folly with the patience of a creature who has watched every kind of curiosity and idiocy from inside a glass tank. Marcellus studies his captors and watchers closely: “Humans have few redeeming qualities, but their fingerprints are miniature works of art. I am well-read in fingerprints. I suppose you could say it is one fortunate side effect dealing with humans all day long, their trembling boogers and damp armpits, their sticky palms reeking of floral lotion and Popsicle residue.”
Among the many impressive feats of this first-time novel is how deftly it balances sorrow and humor on the same page. For it is, when all is said and done, a book 
about loss: a missing child, a marriage ended by death and the mental erosion that comes from living too many years alone. However, it never becomes maudlin, largely because Marcellus’s dry, sarcastic commentary keeps interrupting the reader’s descent into grief with something closer to delight.
Unlike last year’s One Read author, Daniel Mason, whose expansive body of work ranges from Burma, the setting of his remarkable first novel “The Piano Tuner,” to books about the Eastern Front during World War I and the woods of New England, Van Pelt has, remarkably, published only one book so far. “Remarkably Bright Creatures” remains, as of this writing, her sole published novel. Her other credited work is slim: a short story called “Carry On,” tucked into “Beneath Strange Stars,” an anthology of speculative fiction benefiting a UK science education nonprofit.
However, this is but a footnote to a novel that has achieved wild success; it has sold more than four million copies, spent long stretches on the New York Times bestseller list and won the 2023 McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns First Novel Prize. Van Pelt has spoken of a second novel in progress, reportedly with another unusual narrator.
Readers who fall for Marcellus tend to already know of, or soon discover, a small shelf of kindred books. Although it centers on a human rather than an octopus, Fredrik Backman’s “A Man Called Ove” is the comparison I reached for almost immediately. Both are studies of an isolated, routine-bound character slowly worn open by unexpected company. And there is also no shortage of literature about the lives of octopuses in general. See Sy Montgomery’s “The Soul of an Octopus” to read about these creature’s complicated, intelligent, and fascinating existence. “Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness” by Peter Godfrey-Smith is yet another recommendation.
Please stay tuned for a visit from the author September 22 and other great One Read programming in September surrounding “Remarkably Bright Creatures.”
