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WORK TITLE: The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus
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CITY: Toronto
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COUNTRY: Canada
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PERSONAL
Married Anthony Green (company CEO); children: two daughters.
EDUCATION:Has both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and entrepreneur. Greenhouse Juice Co., co-founder.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including New York Times, The Walrus, and Globe and Mail.
SIDELIGHTS
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Emma Knight is a writer based in Toronto. With her husband, she cofounded a cold-pressed juice company called Greenhouse Juice in 2014, and then she cowrote two different cookbooks: The Greenhouse Cookbook: Plant-Based Eating and DIY Juicing in 2017 and How to Eat with One Hand: Recipes and Other Nourishment for New and Expectant Mothers in 2021. She has also written for a number of different publications, including the New York Times, the Globe & Mail, and The Walrus.
Her first novel, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, was published in 2025. It is about an eighteen-year-old named Pen (short for Penelope) who starts at the University of Edinburgh. She has come to Scotland from Canada in part because she believes her parents have been hiding something from her. In Scotland, she invites herself to stay at the estate of a man who used to be friends with her father, and there she falls in love with Sasha, the family’s oldest son. The novel is a coming-of-age story that also wrestles with the place of women, especially for those who have become a mother.
In the Globe & Mail, Sarah Laing called the novel a “pleasure” and praised the “nuanced portraits” of its various characters, particularly the women who “glow from the page as distinct beings, fully realized in the complexity of their experiences and rendered with tenderness.” Laing encouraged readers not to think too much about the novel’s title or do any research about it, for it becomes part of the novel’s climactic twist. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly also thoroughly enjoyed Knight’s fiction debut, describing it as “satisfying” and “touching.” They wrote, “Pen’s intelligence and charm carry the reader along.”
Eleanor Dunn, writing in the New York Times Book Review, agreed, calling the book a “winsome tale” of “Pen’s jolt into adulthood.” Dunn stated that “Knight writes with humor and generosity” about “what it truly means to come into one’s own.” A contributor in Kirkus Reviews used similar language in describing why they liked the novel, calling it a “lovely and poignant coming-of-age story.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Globe & Mail [Toronto Canada], March 1, 2025, Sarah Laing, “Emma Knight Tackles Life’s Important Themes in First Novel,” review of The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, p. R7.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2025, review of The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus.
New York Times Book Review, January 19, 2025, Eleanor Dunn, “Tempests and Teapots,” review of The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, p. 14.
Publishers Weekly, November 25, 2024, review of The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, pp. 33+.
ONLINE
All Things Considered, https://www.npr.org/ (January 7, 2025), Justine Kenin, Mary Louise Kelly, and Lauren Hodges, author interview.
CBC Radio, https://www.cbc.ca/ (February 5, 2025), author interview.
CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/ (February 27, 2025), Gili Malinsky, author interview.
The octopus metaphor at the heart of Emma Knight's novel about motherhood
The Canadian writer discussed novel The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus on Bookends with Mattea Roach
CBC Radio · Posted: Feb 05, 2025 12:45 PM EST | Last Updated: February 5
A white woman with red hair looks at the camera against a red background.
Emma Knight is the author of The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus. (Caitlin Cronenberg)
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When Canadian writer Emma Knight was a teen, she decided to move across the pond to attend the University of Edinburgh.
"For me, it was the idea of adventure that attracted me," said Knight on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "And the moodiness of the city of Edinburgh, its beauty, its architectural gloriousness."
Her debut novel The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus takes her back to Scotland, where, like Knight, the protagonist Pen also finds herself in Edinburgh for school.
There, Pen is set for an eventful first-year university experience, all while she looks for answers about her parents' messy divorce by writing a letter to her dad's estranged best friend, thriller writer Lord Lennox. When he invites her to spend a weekend at his family estate, she can't help but become enthralled with his entire family — and slowly begins to unravel the family secrets that left her parents so pained.
A book cover of a painting of a vase with a colourful bouquet in it.
Knight is an author, journalist and entrepreneur based in Toronto. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, Vogue, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus and The New York Times. She co-hosted and created the podcast Fanfare and co-founded the organic beverage company Greenhouse.
She is the author of cookbooks How to Eat with One Hand and The Greenhouse Cookbook.
The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize is now open
Knight joined Roach to discuss The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus and why it works as a metaphor for the multitudes of motherhood.
Mattea Roach: What is it that makes Pen feel that there's some sort of secret about her parents relationship that she might want to uncover?
Emma Knight: I'd say it's less of a presence and more of an absence. She grows up with this gap in her knowledge — that when she does try to press on that area, she can see the pained look on her parents' faces and she can understand by the quality of their silence that this is not a place that they would like to have her probe.
I was very interested, while writing this novel, about the Jungian concept of individuation. The idea that you're not born a full human being, you spend your whole life becoming one. And that figuring out who you are specifically as an individual does require some understanding of where you come from.
In the case of Pen, she really wants to understand what it was about love that resulted in so much pain for her parents. She is an optimistic young person and somebody who loves reading, especially 19th century novels.
She wants to understand that gap and know, in her own journey, whether to be optimistic, what to look for, if love should be a part of that.
- Emma Knight
Romance is appealing to her. She doesn't believe in it, her practical experience is that marriage does not lead to forever companionship and a balm for the soul.
She wants to understand that gap and know, in her own journey, whether to be optimistic, what to look for, if love should be a part of that and so on.
MR: Even though the book is not about the octopus, there's this line later on in your novel where a character uses the octopus as a metaphor for this theme of motherhood throughout the book. What sparked the idea to bring this marine creature into your novel as this metaphor?
EK: It wasn't premeditated. When the character said that, the phrase kind of got stuck in my head.
There's a Loch Ness Monster that we can torture ourselves with and that I was torturing myself with pretty actively at the time of writing this novel, which I'd say is this image of the perfect mother, the one who sacrifices everything, including who she wants to be or thought she was going to be, all independent ambition and drive and selfhood for her children.
It's not a spoiler to say that in the life cycle of the common octopus. Not just the common octopus, many different species of octopus: you have the female entering senescence after caring for her eggs, and that means that she begins to waste away, she stops feeding herself, she becomes purely alive in order to sustain that next generation's birth, and then she is instantly obsolete.
It's also true of the male. It actually happens sooner for the male.
That image of this female character sacrificing everything for her young was something that I couldn't really get out of my head.
- Emma Knight
But that image of this female character sacrificing everything for her young was something that I couldn't really get out of my head as I was writing this.
MR: You examine motherhood in this novel through a number of different mother-daughter relationships that play out in very different ways — but the novel didn't feel judgmental about the different ways that people choose to be mothers. What were you trying to get at by displaying motherhood in all of these different iterations?
EK: I think you've really put your finger on it. It's about that suspension of judgment and understanding that all the different ways there are to be human, there are the same number of ways to be a mother and that if you're being an authentic version of yourself, that's better, I think, for your children than if you're suppressing a part of yourself.
To go back to that Jungian philosophy, there's individuation and then there's also this idea that the unlived lives of parents is a burden that children carry forward. And by unlived lives, Jung talked about thwarted hopes and missed opportunities.
It's important as we move into the future, to pause and recognize that there is no such thing as a perfect mother and that humanity is what matters here.
- Emma Knight
I'm very conscious of the past generations, specifically of women that have allowed me to have the freedom that I have because it is by no means a given for a young woman to be able to go to university at all.
It's only fairly recent that that's allowed. When I think about the sacrifices that my grandmothers made of their own sense of self in order to pour all of that love and dedication into the five children that one of them had and six that the other had it's just such a different equation from the one that I have had the privilege of of growing up with.
It's important as we move into the future, to pause and recognize that there is no such thing as a perfect mother and that humanity is what matters here.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Talia Kliot, with thanks to Ailey Yamamoto.
36-year-old quit the company she co-founded—now her novel is a NYT bestseller and ‘TODAY’ Read with Jenna pick
Published Thu, Feb 27 202510:46 AM ESTUpdated Thu, Feb 27 20253:44 PM EST
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Emma Knight
Emma Knight.Courtesy Emma Knight
Emma Knight always wanted to write for a living, “but I didn’t think that was a viable option,” she says.
The 36-year-old Toronto native spent her 20s getting a bachelor’s in languages in Scotland and a master’s in international affairs and journalism in France. Throughout both she contributed to publications like the International Herald Tribune and co-wrote screenplays with her then-boyfriend, now husband, Anthony Green.
In 2014, Knight and her husband co-founded a cold-pressed juice company, Greenhouse, with a number of their friends in Toronto. The company’s products were immediately a hit and Greenhouse has continued to grow over the years, with Knight’s husband ultimately taking on the CEO role and Knight filling various roles, including director of brand and marketing.
Even while at Greenhouse, Knight found pathways to her passion, like co-writing and publishing two cookbooks, one in 2017 and one in 2021. She quit the company when she got a book deal for her first novel, “The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus,” in 2023, she says. The book was released in January 2025 and has since become a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club pick on NBC’s “TODAY.” It’s also in development to become a TV series, according to a recent report by Variety.
Here’s how Knight built her writerly career.
CNBC Make It: How did your first cookbook, “The Greenhouse Cookbook,” come into play? It became a national bestseller in Canada.
Knight: We had zero money and zero marketing team to speak of, but we did have really interesting people in our stores who were selling the juice alongside me, some of them nutritionists. And so we created a blog, which, at the time, was called Terrarium, and we filled it with plant-based recipes. And someone from Penguin Canada, Andrea Magyar, noticed the blog. She was a customer and she said, “Hey, have you ever thought about a book?” And I said, “Well, now I am.”
How did your second cookbook happen, “How to Eat With One Hand”?
After our first daughter was born, [co-author Christine Flynn and] I came up with another cookbook idea for how you eat with one hand. [She is] a chef who was at the time a single mother of twins. We would just be texting back and forth late at night about how hungry we were with these little people and how hard it was to feed ourselves properly during this very peculiar time.
And so “How to Eat with One Hand” was a collection of essays that were meant to be a very raw and candid and not yummy-mummy Instagram version of what motherhood really was, so that someone might read them and feel less alone, while also giving useful, easy recipes for the different stages of early parenthood.
When did you start working on “The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus”?
I’ve always written just for me and on the side, just at night and whenever I have time.
In the summer of 2019, I started hearing these characters talk, and I would write down this dialogue. And then I started writing letters to and from this mysterious person called Lord Elliot Lennox, [a character in the book]. That was just his name and I didn’t know that much about him. I was curious about what was going on in my own brain, so I just kind of wrote it.
It was during the writing of that book that you realized you needed to step back from your duties at Greenhouse and pursue writing full-time. How did that come about?
[When our second daughter, Frida,] was born in September 2020 there was a spike of Covid happening. I had some postpartum complications that landed me in an isolation room in the hospital for a number of days without her. And it was scary. I started writing this long journalistic piece about maternal health.
I think that experience jolted me and made me realize that writing was what I needed to do and is who I am, and that in order to properly show these two little people that they can do whatever they want eventually, that I would need to be a little bit braver in terms of embracing what it was that I wanted to do.
I was able to have conversations with Anthony and to kind of scale back my time. First it was one day a week of not doing Greenhouse and writing [beginning in 2021]. And then it moved to 50/50, and then I moved to just one day a week of Greenhouse. When I had publishers and I was in the editing process, then I fully stepped back from Greenhouse in June 2023.
Was it difficult to let go of that financial safety net?
Cutting myself off from gainful employment with two small children was terrifying.
I was very scared to jump into the abyss and I have been lucky so far that it has not been ruinous. And that doesn’t mean that it won’t be in the future. But I think, one, it’s worth it. I love it enough. And two, I’m just really lucky that we can pull it off.
The Canadian maternity and parental leave system is generous in terms of the amount of time you can spend on leave, but you do take a pay cut.
It had already happened a couple of times, and I had already been through the kind of stop-going-to-coffee-shops-and-don’t-go-out-for-lunch and recognizing the ways in which you can’t waste your resources when you’re not earning. I understand those are very tiny sacrifices overall, we are in a very privileged position.
Do you feel like you’ve made it?
Oh my goodness, no!
[During the first lockdown, my daughter] asked me what kind of job she should have when she grows up. It took me a while to figure out how to answer her. The answer I finally gave was that she should do something that makes her feel like herself and that she will always want to get better at. This is what writing is for me. It was not long after telling her that that I committed (in my own mind) to finishing a novel.
I will always know that there is room to get better, and so I do not imagine that I will ever think I’ve made it. I’m happy about this. I think it means I’ve found the right work.
Do you have advice for people who want to find success as writers?
Just keeping at it, sitting in the chair and doing it every day, even if some days you know that it’s bad. Because it’s an endurance game.
Taking time in life that otherwise goes to things like drinking wine with dinner so that you can’t work after dinner or watching lots of Netflix [is also important] … I basically didn’t have a social life, I’d say for, like, five years. I sort of gave up on all the bits of life that are extra and spent that time writing.
And if you’re really serious and you really want it, then if you can find those margins of your life — and I know it feels like they don’t exist, especially with small children … finding those pockets of time that you didn’t know you had and identifying them and committing to using them for this is one method.
Emma Knight's debut novel takes on motherhood, female friendship and first love
January 7, 20255:38 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
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Justine Kenin
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Mary Louise Kelly
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Lauren Hodges
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Emma Knight about debut novel, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, which takes on the subjects of motherhood, female friendship and first love.
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MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
In the opening pages of Emma Knight's debut novel, she describes a typical student breakfast at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Scrambled eggs, too puffy to be true, she writes, also, baked beans with a faint aftertaste of ash, pliable triangles of potato bread, and something darkly sausage-like. Well, I had to smile reading this, having been a student at a British university myself back in the '90s. Along with breakfast, Knight's novel takes on subjects of motherhood and female friendship and first love. The novel is "The Life Cycle Of The Common Octopus." Emma Knight, welcome.
EMMA KNIGHT: Thank you for having me. It's a joy to be here.
KELLY: And I have to congratulate you on the alarmingly accurate description of the darkly sausage-like food (laughter) as you're describing the cafeteria offerings for students in Britain. Is this a delight you experienced firsthand?
KNIGHT: It absolutely is, although, my favorite was the porridge.
KELLY: Oh, which they do quite well.
KNIGHT: Extremely well.
KELLY: All right. So tell us about your protagonist. Her name is Pen, and she has just arrived as a student in Edinburgh.
KNIGHT: Yes. So Pen is an overachieving, 18-year-old late-bloomer from Toronto. Her real name is Penelope, but she goes by the on-the-nose, on purpose nickname, Pen. She aspires to be a magazine writer. And she doesn't really believe in marriage, so she's cut off the elope.
KELLY: (Laughter) Oh, I didn't even catch that as I was reading, but that's great. Yeah. Go on.
KNIGHT: So she, throughout her childhood, could sense that her parents were hiding something from her. And at age 18, she decides that she's going to find out what.
KELLY: Yeah.
KNIGHT: She goes to the University of Edinburgh, in part, to get far away from where she grew up and have adventures, but also because she wants to find an estranged friend of her father's.
KELLY: This is a man named Lord Lennox.
KNIGHT: Yeah.
KELLY: And he is also an elusive Scottish writer of mysteries. Tell us more about him and his family, who we get to know quite well.
KNIGHT: Yes, so Elliot Lennox has been dubbed the peerless peer by the press. And he is a well-known author of detective fiction whose series of novels have been gripping the world for over a decade by the time Pen tracks him down. And he is one of those fortunate people who found the right job for his talents. He grew up in a beautiful, crumbling castle on the east coast of Scotland. And he is extremely welcoming toward Pen, to a degree that surprises her. He invites her to spend the weekend. She writes him a letter through his literary agent, not even really expecting a response. And he writes back, inviting her to come on the train and spend the weekend.
So she does, and she meets his seemingly perfect family - his captivating wife, Christina, and his son, Sasha (ph). She keeps tugging at the thread of this family secret that she knows exists, but she doesn't know too much about it. And he does just about anything to make her feel welcome, except for answering her direct questions.
KELLY: She does do a lot of growing up in that one year. You write one beautiful scene between her and her father, who has shown up out of nowhere. He decides he's going to appear and take her out to dinner. And you describe him, among other things, as knowing how to wield silence. And you write that Pen, in contrast, was too young still to know how not to fill the silence. Tell me what you're playing with there.
KNIGHT: This is definitely something I'm still learning.
KELLY: Yeah.
KNIGHT: Part of it is about this sort of - the dramatic irony that exists when one gets a bit older and is able to look back on one's younger self and see all of the knowledge gaps that are glaring. Pen, the child, is with her father. And Pen, the adult, is observing the questions that young Pen has for her father that he can't quite answer. The older narrator views with a lot more empathy and understanding of the position that he's in.
KELLY: You also bring so much laughter and joy, just pure joy to the scenes of what it's like to be 18 years old, 19 years old, out in the world for the first time. There's so much banter and silliness and flirting. That must have been just a total delight to write.
KNIGHT: I had way too much fun writing the reeling ball.
KELLY: Give us a taste of that one.
KNIGHT: Well, there's a character called Fergus Scarlett Moore. He was actually the first character who came to me. He sort of strode into my brain, wearing trousers the color of smoked trout and a melancholy frown and started heckling Pen. There's a lot happening at the reeling ball, but one of the things that's happening is a kind of mating dance between Fergus and Pen - the characters not knowing exactly what it is they want.
KELLY: There's something Jane Austen about what you're describing there.
KNIGHT: Oh, that's very kind of you. I love Jane Austen.
KELLY: (Laughter).
KNIGHT: I love Jane Austen. I mean, Evelyn Waugh writes funny college scenes very well, and young people thinking that they're sophisticated.
KELLY: Yeah.
KNIGHT: I mean, Jilly Cooper - Jilly Cooper does such a great job of writing about the mating dance with a sense of humor.
KELLY: Yeah. Well, and there's something so perfect and obvious about writing about an actual dance as the mating dance is taking place in between the steps. It all comes together. Alert listeners may be wondering what on Earth an octopus has to do with any of this. So explain your title, "The Life Cycle Of The Common Octopus."
KNIGHT: So I don't want to give too much away, but I can say that the octopus in this novel is a metaphor for a kind of Loch Ness Monster that I tortured myself with in early motherhood. And I don't think I'm the only one. This concept of the perfectly self-sacrificing mother for whom independent life and ambition cease to exist. Now, the octopus in real life is famous for spending a large portion of her life brooding over her eggs. So this creature works very hard to make it to adulthood in a difficult world and then, after mating, stops eating and begins to waste away while taking care of her eggs. And this beautiful brooding process is quite tragic. It is something that we as humans should not aspire to. Our children need us to be our authentic selves. They need us to continue living and to show them what it is to be a truthful person in this world.
KELLY: I think you just ventured toward answering what was going to be my last question, which is the question that Pen poses to herself. Does a mother have to choose between being selfish and being eaten alive?
KNIGHT: (Laughter) Oh, goodness. It's a daily question, isn't it?
KELLY: Yeah.
KNIGHT: No. No.
KELLY: (Laughter).
KNIGHT: A mother just has to carry on being herself.
KELLY: That is Emma Knight, very much herself, talking about her debut novel, "The Life Cycle Of The Common Octopus." This was a delight. Thank you.
KNIGHT: Thank you so much, Mary Louise.
(SOUNDBITE OF FLORANTE AGUILAR'S "BAYAN KO")
Byline: SARAH LAING; Special to The Globe and Mail
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus BY EMMA KNIGHT (PENGUIN CANADA, 384 PAGES) A word of advice as you embark on reading Emma Knight's exquisite debut novel: Forget that it is called The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus.
Or, at the very least, resign yourself to the fact that you will not understand why it is called that until the last 10 of its pages.
Don't be distracted by wondering whether you have some kind of misprint where the cover of one book has been attached to the contents of another, or whether you accidentally skipped over some setup that made it clear that characters you assumed were two-legged humans are actually eight-limbed sea creatures.
And definitely do not Google the actual scientific phenomenon.
That is cheating, and will deprive you of an immensely satisfying emotional gut punch.
Instead, think of the title as you would the identity of the killer in a murder mystery - the puzzle piece that makes sense of the whole. One spoiler: There are no cephalopods in the story except for briefly, but crucially, in an exhibit at a London museum.
This book is also not, despite the unlikelihood of two novels featuring octopi hitting shelves within three years, anything like Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures, save for the fact that they're both charming and profound in equal measure.
So, what is The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus about? At first, you will think it is about Pen, a young Canadian woman who's gone to study at her father's Scottish alma mater, and the revelations and tribulations of her first year of university in 2006. The scene is set well, down to the squishy residence-hall carpets and someone having 50 Cent's In da Club as their ringtone, but the narrative centre shifts quickly.
Pen, you see, had an ulterior motive for going to the University of Edinburgh. Her middle name is "Elliott," which is also the first name of her father's best friend from university. No one has ever given her a good explanation as to why she was named after this man. It's even weirder when you learn that the men are essentially estranged and have not spoken in decades.
With all the wisdom and hubris of an 18 year old, Pen writes to this other Elliott, who, it turns out, is a Scottish aristocrat - the Duke of Lennox, who's gained fame writing detective fiction.
She all but invites herself to the family castle. There, two key events take place: Pen meets Sasha, the eldest son of the house and instant object of an overwhelming crush, and the family welcomes her in with much more warmth than you'd ordinarily accord the daughter of a university friend you haven't seen in years.
Before you worry that things are headed in a Saltburn-y direction, know that there will be no naked dancing under the moonlight or murders in mazes. There is a twist at the end - a solution to a complicated family mystery where the story behind Pen's middle name is just the first secret among many - but it's arrived at gently and empathetically.
After Pen's arrival at the castle, we quickly find ourselves moving around a constellation of characters. Among the Scottish family members are Christina, Lennox's duchess who gave up a career in espionage to devote herself to the flourishing of her family, the castle and its community; and George, a cousin in the trenches of early motherhood. We also meet Alice, Pen's best friend from home who is also attending the University of Edinburgh and sleeps with her married tutor (which she acknowledges is a cliché long before she reckons with the damage it has done to her).
There is also Anna, Pen's mother at home in Canada, living in the long shadow of her own motherless childhood; and Margot, a brilliant fashion designer who chose to raise a baby on her own.
If Knight - the co-founder of organic juice purveyor Greenhouse - has one particular gift, it is the nuanced portraits she paints of these women. They glow from the page as distinct beings, fully realized in the complexity of their experiences and rendered with tenderness. You will cry with them, perhaps because you see pieces of yourself, or people you love, in their stories.
In some moments, particularly in Pen's story, the novel tends toward slight pretension. You can forgive it for sounding like a firstyear arts student buzzed on Baudelaire and Barthes because it's charmingly done. And just because my own experience as an undergrad in 2006 didn't include boys who said thing like, "I'm more Banquo than Banksy," who's to say they didn't exist on other campuses? It does slightly irritate, however, that all of Pen's friends seem to be pulled from the upper classes, creating a slight air of a Brideshead Revisted pastiche.
These are quibbles, however.
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus is a pleasure, and one that wears its Big Important Themes - friendship, motherhood, parentchild dynamics - lightly enough that you don't feel as if you're mired in the emotional muck of a dreary Scottish day. And when the octopus finally makes an appearance, you have the delight of seeing - to borrow from Kierkegaard, and risk sounding like a pretentious first-year myself - how life, and sometimes novels, can only really be understood backward.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Globe and Mail Inc.
http://www.globeandmail.com
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Laing, Sarah. "Emma Knight tackles life's important themes in first novel; The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus traces friendship, motherhood and family dynamics to its satisfying, emotional gut punch of an ending." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 1 Mar. 2025, p. R7. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829228962/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f6a3a0d9. Accessed 23 Aug. 2025.
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus
Emma Knight. Viking/Dorman, $29 (304p) ISBN 978-0-593-83045-1
Cookbook author Knight (How to Eat with One Hand) makes her fiction debut with a touching tale of a student's romantic entanglements and family secrets. Penelope "Pen" Elliot Winters arrives at the University of Edinburgh from Toronto. While in Scotland, she looks up aristocrat Elliot Lennox, from whom she believes her parents derived her middle name. Her father, Ted, was friends with Elliot and Elliot's sister, Margot, at university, and Elliot now lives with his wife, Christina, at their crumbling family castle, while Margot is a fashion designer in London. Elliot and Christina invite Pen to their estate, where she meets their oldest son, Sasha, who is frequently in the tabloids as he finishes his final year at St. Andrews, and with whom Pen feels an instant attraction. As Pen frets over her virginity and worries what others think of her, she grows closer to the entire Lennox clan, including Margot's daughter and grandson. But after a second trip to the castle ends with the cold shoulder from Sasha and revelations about their families' connections, Pen confronts her naivety and tries to "make peace with herself." Though the cast is a bit too crowded, making the story hard to follow, Pen's intelligence and charm carry the reader along. The result is a satisfying coming-of-age story. Agent: Samantha Haywood, Transatlantic Agency. (Jan.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 45, 25 Nov. 2024, pp. 33+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A818519050/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3770cad7. Accessed 23 Aug. 2025.
In ''The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus,'' a college student balances her new independence while investigating the demise of her parents' marriage.
THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE COMMON OCTOPUS, by Emma Knight
As a British reader, I am admittedly fussy when it comes to mysteries that take place on labyrinthine country estates. ''The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus,'' Emma Knight's debut novel set in Scotland, initially had my trope and tartan radar blinking. Fearing another entry into the buzzy ''cozy fiction'' genre, I instead found a winsome tale of one young woman's coming-of-age.
Penelope ''Pen'' Winters -- a bookish stick-in-the-mud with the ''skittish flinch of a black house cat'' -- is a Canadian first-year student at the University of Edinburgh, where she has matriculated with her childhood friend, Alice. She's scarred by her parents' divorce and desperate to learn more about the youth her father spent in Britain, so, finally independent at college, she contacts an old friend of his, the famous novelist Lord Elliot Lennox, who also happens to live in Scotland. ''I have pieced together some clues over the years, and they all lead to you,'' she writes, believing Lennox has some connection to her parents' split. Lennox, suspiciously eager to help, invites Pen to his Saltburn-esque castle.
It is an undeniably delicious premise: A foreign student nervously pads up the parquet stairs of a Scottish country pile, looking for a family secret. A gorgeous son, Sasha Lennox, appears, and their hands brush as he helps Pen carry her bags. A zany cast of Lennoxes pops out of wood-paneled rooms. Pen soon realizes she is ''a bit in love with all of them.''
There's a disastrous hunting trip, oil portraits of ancestors, a ''persona non grata'' hidden relative (thankfully, the ''Bertha in the attic'' allusion ends there). Just as I was about to roll my eyes at what could have been a predictable story within a tired pastiche of upper-crust life, I softened. The concept of a stranger lurking among a complicated aristocratic clan, ''with all their tempests and teapots,'' is far from new, but it's such fun here. And the book is filled with literary references. There are nods to ''Brideshead Revisited,'' ''Never Let Me Go,'' ''Macbeth'' and more. Jilly Cooper gets a mention, naturally.
Though the story is animated by a mystery, the true heart of the novel is Pen's jolt into adulthood. Back in Edinburgh, Pen's parents' past temporarily takes a back seat. She struggles to keep the fickle, brooding Sasha off her mind while a series of irresistible campus dramas -- including a friend's affair with a married tutor -- take over her life and push her closest relationships to their limits. Later in the book, Pen takes an uncharacteristically gutsy risk, and her ''restrictive code of conduct'' begins to yield. She eventually vows ''to free herself from the useless burden of other people's expectations.''
Knight writes with humor and generosity as we follow Pen's frequently painful metamorphosis into womanhood. Her kind, comic eye sneaks into the novel in subtle, endearing ways, like when Pen is harassed on a train by a man whose ''biceps resembled baking potatoes.'' Her densely packed prose, however, tends to describe to the point of claustrophobia. I didn't always need to know that a lever was ''bronze-handled,'' a neck ''sweat-darkened'' or fingers ''rubber-gloved''; such superfluous details occasionally felt like road blocks in the addicting plot.
What Pen discovers about her family's tie to the Lennoxes is no stunning twist, and it manifests without much melodrama. Instead of staggering from the reveal, we are left pondering what a changed Pen might do with her own legacy. ''The only way is to make peace with yourself,'' she realizes at last.
Amid the tweed, college escapades and British literary winks, Knight has crafted a tantalizing yet quietly touching debut about inheritance, emerging sexuality and what it truly means to come into one's own.
THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE COMMON OCTOPUS | By Emma Knight | Pamela Dorman Books | 371 pp. | $29
Eleanor Dunn is an international staff editor at The Times.
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Dunn, Eleanor. "Tempests and Teapots." The New York Times Book Review, 19 Jan. 2025, p. 14. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A824056987/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=69bd238b. Accessed 23 Aug. 2025.
Knight, Emma THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE COMMON OCTOPUS Pamela Dorman/Viking (Fiction None) $29.00 1, 7 ISBN: 9780593830451
While attending the University of Edinburgh in 2006, a young woman is taken in by an enigmatic family as she discovers secrets about her own.
Penelope Winters is far away from her Toronto home as a freshman at the University of Edinburgh. But it isn't only education that drew Pen abroad--she knows that her divorced parents have been keeping secrets from her, and she thinks that her father's estranged best friend, a mystery writer named Elliot Lennox who lives in Scotland, may be able to shine some light on the mysteries of her past. After spending a weekend with the Lennox family, Pen falls in love with them--including their handsome son Sasha. But as Pen balances getting to know the Lennoxes with trying to uncover her own family's hidden mysteries, she's also dealing with the many firsts that come along with living on her own at university. She and her best friend, Alice, a fellow Canadian, navigate exams, sex, and independence as their friendship grows and changes. In her fiction debut, Knight delicately explores the painful and exhilarating experience of growing up, which for Pen includes falling in love for the first time and realizing that her parents are flawed human beings. This is largely Pen's story, and while the occasional point-of-view shifts do add depth, they are sometimes a bit disorienting. However, the charming characters, Pen's personal growth, and a nostalgic portrait of campus life make this an altogether enjoyable read.
A lovely and poignant coming-of-age story.
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"Knight, Emma: THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE COMMON OCTOPUS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785261/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2e0981f4. Accessed 23 Aug. 2025.