Book Club by Jot Bookshop: Caleb Klaces – Mr Outside

Come and join Jot Book Club at Station South, Levenshulme.

Meet and talk with other readers in an informal, loosely structured setting about your impressions, feelings, interpretations, associations, pleasures and pains of reading our chosen book.

Everyone welcome!

In January, Jot Book Club will be reading Mr Outside (Prototype, 2025), by Caleb Klaces.

Purchase of the book via www.jotbookshop.com or the regular Jot pop-up shop outside Station South (Sunday 30th Nov, 14th Dec, 20th Dec, 11th Jan, 10-4pm) will secure you a place in the club on a first come first served basis.

Participants will be emailed with further information before each session.

The Book:

During a time of restricted movement, the narrator of Mr Outside visits his reclusive father Thomas who is packing up to move into a care home. As father and son grapple with the task, long-buried conflicts resurface. Thomas, a poet and former radical priest, slips between affection and fear, while the narrator struggles to find the words he’s been holding back. Yet amidst confusion and grief, moments of humour and connection emerge, as both men discover new ways to listen.

Told through a striking combination of text and image, Klaces’ distilled novel explores the stories we tell about our lives, intimacy in crisis, and the fragile line between reality and delusion. Based on the life of his own father, Mr Outside is poignant, profound, and unexpectedly funny; a tender meditation on endings, the limits of understanding, and the act of letting go.

‘I can’t remember the last time a book moved me to tears, but Mr Outside did so more than once. With each page awash in bittersweet detail, Klaces evokes the raw and distant intimacy between fathers and sons with tenderness and insight and captures the inevitable yet cataclysmic rupture of the loss of a parent as honestly and effectively as anything I’ve ever read. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful and comforting all at once. I could not recommend it more highly.’ – Kevin Powers

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Host or Publisher Station South