Books like Remarkably Bright Creatures, for the octopus and for Tova rather than for the warmth
The lists for this book match on warmth and quirk and hand you more Backman. The octopus and Tova are what make it unusual, and they have their own traditions: The Travelling Cat Chronicles (the animal narrator, warmly done), Timbuktu (a dog carrying the grief) and The Stone Angel (the old woman who will not be pitied). Nine picks below, gentlest first in each section, with content notes where they matter. Last verified 13 September 2026.
Say what you loved about the octopus
The ones you will be handed everywhere else
A Man Called Ove, Lessons in Chemistry, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and The House in the Cerulean Sea are on nearly every page answering this question, most of Fredrik Backman’s books with them. They are good, and they match the warmth. They do not match the octopus, and they do not have a Tova. We work through that warm, quirky shelf properly on the Lessons in Chemistry page; nothing below repeats it.
What Highstreett returned for “books like Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt”
- The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett, Annie Lyons (2020)
- The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness, Sy Montgomery (2015)
- The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein (2008)
- The Highest Tide: A Novel, Jim Lynch (2005)
- The Light Between Oceans, M. L. Stedman (2012)
- Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
See this result · run 13 September 2026
Editor’s verdict: One run. It took the animal mind seriously twice — a dog narrator in The Art of Racing in the Rain, and Sy Montgomery's non-fiction The Soul of an Octopus — and it found the Puget Sound shoreline in The Highest Tide. It reached Paul Auster's Timbuktu on its own and then held it back from the final six, which is the one pick we took from the list it discarded. It missed the older-woman tradition almost entirely.
If you loved that the octopus was the one telling it
Marcellus is not a pet watched by people. He is a mind narrating, cleverer than the humans around him and short of time. That is an old tradition, and not one of the seven recommendation pages checked for this book goes near it. Ordered gentlest first.
1. The Travelling Cat Chronicles, Hiro Arikawa (2012, English 2017)
Cat narrator · road trip · gentle, then devastating
Nana the cat narrates a road trip across Japan while his owner tries to find him a new home, and the reason he needs one emerges slowly. It keeps the animal narrator and delivers the warmth most readers of this anchor actually came for, which makes it the safest first step on the page. Differs: the sadness is the whole architecture of the book and it lands harder than anything in Sowell Bay. It is also the least undiscovered pick here, because Japanese healing fiction is now a visible shelf in UK bookshops and this is one of its anchors.
2. The Bees, Laline Paull (2014)
Bee narrator · thriller-paced · built, not cute
Flora 717 is a sanitation worker, the lowest caste in the hive, and she narrates. The insect interiority is constructed rather than anthropomorphised, and the book moves like a thriller. The parallel nobody draws is exact: Tova cleans an aquarium at night, and Flora is a cleaner whose intelligence exceeds the role the hive assigned her. Differs: the hive is a violent, rigidly hierarchical place, and there is no human warmth in it at all.
3. Timbuktu, Paul Auster (1999)
Dog narrator · short · grief
Mr Bones, a dog, tells the last days of his homeless poet owner and what happens to him afterwards. It is Auster's least-read novel and the closest thing in his work to this anchor: a non-human narrator carrying a grief the humans around him cannot put into words. On none of the seven pages checked — though our own search engine reached it independently for this query, then dropped it while composing its final six. Faber keep it in print. Differs: it is spare and melancholy rather than warm, and there is no community to catch anyone.
4. Fifteen Dogs, André Alexis (2015)
Dogs given human minds · Giller Prize · content note
Apollo and Hermes bet on whether animals given human intelligence would be more unhappy than humans, and hand consciousness to fifteen dogs in a Toronto veterinary clinic overnight. It won the Giller Prize, and it is the most direct execution anywhere of what Marcellus actually is — a creature with a mind it did not ask for and a lifespan too short for it. Differs, and this is the content note: several of the dogs die, some of them badly. This is the harder version of the idea, not the gentler one.
If you loved Tova
An old woman at the emotional centre, competent, unsentimental and still working, with a grief thirty years old rather than fresh. The recommendation lists for this book rarely hand a reader one of these; they hand them Ove.
5. The Summer Book, Tove Jansson (1972, English 1974)
Grandmother and child · island · short
A grandmother and her six-year-old granddaughter spend a summer on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland, in the year after the child's mother died. The grief is never stated once, and the small closed world is the nearest thing on this page to Sowell Bay. It is the soft landing in this section. Differs: almost nothing happens, by design — there is no mystery, no plot to pull you, only the island and the two of them. Thomas Teal's translation is the one in print.
6. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor (1971)
Widow · residential hotel · no consolation
An elderly widow takes a room in a shabby residential hotel on the Cromwell Road, where the other long-stay guests are quietly waiting out their lives, and to save face she passes off a young writer she barely knows as her grandson. This is exactly Tova's register — dignity, self-sufficiency, the refusal to be pitied — written with more control and much less mercy. Taylor is one of the most under-read major English novelists of the last century, and sharing a name with the actress has not helped. Differs: there is no warm landing at the end. Readers who wanted Remarkably Bright Creatures' ending will not get one here.
7. The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence (1964)
Ninety-year-old narrator · Canadian classic · sharp
Hagar Shipley is ninety, proud to the point of cruelty, and about to be moved into a nursing home by her son, so she runs away instead. It is the definitive first-person old-woman novel in English — a school set text across Canada, and almost never handed to a British or American book-club reader. Absent from all seven pages checked. It is in print in the UK. Differs: Hagar is not likeable the way Tova is, and much of the book is her own unrepentant memory of how she got here.
If what held you was the old mystery underneath
Remarkably Bright Creatures uses Erik's disappearance as scaffolding rather than as the point. These two do the same thing with a cast in their seventies and beyond — and the second one then leaves realism behind entirely.
8. Memento Mori, Muriel Spark (1959)
Elderly Londoners · unsolved calls · comic, then not
A circle of elderly Londoners each receive an anonymous phone call saying only: remember you must die. The police cannot trace the calls. The mystery's solution is not really the point, and the whole thing is carried by characters in their seventies and eighties — the same structural move this anchor makes with Erik. Differs: Spark is sharp and cold where Van Pelt is warm, and she is canonical, so this is not a discovery so much as an unexpected match.
9. The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington (1974, English 1976)
Ninety-two-year-old narrator · surrealist · the swing
A ninety-two-year-old woman is given an ear trumpet, overhears her family planning to put her in a home, is put in the home, and the novel then goes somewhere no summary survives. It is the wildest book on this page by an enormous margin, and it is here last on purpose. Differs, and it is load-bearing: it stops being a realist novel about a third of the way through. Some readers of this anchor will love it more than anything else here, and many will put it down. Carrington, better known as a Surrealist painter, wrote it in the 1950s; it was first published in French and then in her own English two years later.
What we checked
Every pick was resolved against Open Library and Google Books for a verified edition. Four of the first-publication years the catalogues returned were wrong or incomplete and are corrected above: Memento Mori is January 1959, not 1958; The Hearing Trumpet first appeared in French in 1974 and in English in 1976; The Summer Book is 1972 in Swedish, translated in 1974; and The Travelling Cat Chronicles was published in Japan in 2012 and in English by Doubleday in November 2017. The two titles most likely to be hard to buy new in the UK were checked directly and both are in print: The Stone Angel in a 2016 UK paperback, and Timbuktu from Faber.
The honest bit
Sort by how much sadness you want before you buy, because this page runs darker than its anchor’s jacket. Warmest, closest to the feeling Remarkably Bright Creatures leaves: The Travelling Cat Chronicles and The Summer Book. Clever and cool: The Bees and Memento Mori. Sad without a warm landing: Timbuktu, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont and The Stone Angel. Hardest going: Fifteen Dogs, for the animal deaths. And then The Hearing Trumpet, which is not sad at all but is the likeliest book here to be abandoned. The single most likely way to be mis-sold on this page is to pick Mrs Palfrey for its premise, expecting the anchor’s kindness, and get Elizabeth Taylor’s precision instead. Five of the nine were written before 1975, which is the point, and also the risk.
One limit worth stating. The saturation check behind this page covered seven editorial and aggregator pages; TikTok, Reddit and StoryGraph were not checked, and The Travelling Cat Chronicles and The Summer Book are the two picks most likely to be better known on those than this page assumes.
This is an editor’s sort of a shelf the standard lists skip. Highstreett’s book search starts from the sentence you write instead, and tells you which shop your money reaches.
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Related
Books like Lessons in Chemistry covers the warm, deadpan, found-family shelf that most lists for this book lean on, matched axis by axis, including A Man Called Ove. Short books is the place to go if The Summer Book, Timbuktu, Fifteen Dogs or The Hearing Trumpet appealed for their length as well as their subject — all four run under two hundred pages in the editions checked.