Come and join us for 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 and pleasures of reading our chosen book.

Everyone welcome!

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

Purchase of the book here 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.

PLEASE NOTE:

You can choose to have your book home delivered at the usual rate of postage or to be picked up for free at our Station South pop-up shop on the following days ONLY:

• Sunday 30th November 10-4pm
• Sunday 14th December 10-4pm
• Sunday 11th January 10-4pm

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

Prototype, 2025.