Show Notes
Derek Owusu joins Tom’s Book Club to discuss his powerful new novel, The Recovery House — a moving and darkly funny story about mental health, creativity, faith, friendship and finding a way back to yourself.
Jamal is a gifted young writer who wakes in a recovery house after a devastating mental breakdown. Surrounded by other patients dealing with their own struggles, he begins to find unexpected friendship, humour and connection. As music, literature and spirituality become ways of making sense of his experiences, the boundaries between illness, inspiration, God and madness begin to blur.
Derek discusses how much, or how little, of his own experiences made it into the book, as well as the role of humour, the importance of music - including The Cranberries’ Zombie - his relationship with faith, discovering reading in his twenties, and how he unexpectedly became a writer. 📚 Buy books discussed on the podcast through the Tom’s Book Club Bookshop.org page: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/TomsBookClub
Tom’s Book Club may earn a small commission from purchases made through our Bookshop.org link, at no extra cost to you. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Tom's Book Club
Luke Kennard joins Tom’s Book Club to discuss Black Bag, his offbeat novel shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. A penniless actor takes a job wearing an oversized black bag as part of a university experiment, with unexpected consequences for love, friendship and the possibility of turning the whole thing into a business.
Roddy Doyle joins Tom’s Book Club to talk about A Ghostly Little Book, a new collection of contemporary ghost stories from five acclaimed writers.
Hernan Diaz joins Tom’s Book Club to talk about Ply, his new novel set centuries in the future. Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Trust, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
John Boyne joins Tom’s Book Club to talk about his new novel, The Weight of Angels, an imaginative reworking of the life of Oscar Wilde that asks what might have happened if Wilde had made a different decision at a crucial moment in his life.
Louise Kennedy joins Tom’s Book Club to talk about her new novel, Stations, a powerful story of friendship, love, family and the long shadows cast by the choices we make when we are young.