By turns funny, entertaining, touching, and profound, The Soul of an Octopus reveals what octopuses can teach us about the meeting of two very different minds. With her “joyful passion for these intelligent and fascinating creatures” ( Library Journal Editors’ Spring Pick), Montgomery chronicles the growing appreciation of this mollusk as she tells a unique love story. Scientists have only recently accepted the intelligence of dogs, birds, and chimpanzees but now are watching octopuses solve problems and are trying to decipher the meaning of the animal’s color-changing techniques. Each creature shows her cleverness in myriad ways: escaping enclosures like an orangutan jetting water to bounce balls and endlessly tricking companions with multiple “sleights of hand” to get food. From New England aquarium tanks to the reefs of French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico, she has befriended octopuses with strikingly different personalities-gentle Athena, assertive Octavia, curious Kali, and joyful Karma.

In pursuit of the wild, solitary, predatory octopus, popular naturalist Sy Montgomery has practiced true immersion journalism. As the person who designs the complex puzzles for the octopuses to solve tells her: “Octopuses have their own intelligence that we can’t match.Another New York Times bestseller from the author of The Good Good Pig, this “fascinating…touching…informative…entertaining” ( Daily Beast) book explores the emotional and physical world of the octopus-a surprisingly complex, intelligent, and spirited creature-and the remarkable connections it makes with humans. But she’s firmly in the camp that believes animal science should allow for thoughts, feelings and personality. All of which are recognisably human characteristics, of course, and Montgomery is well aware of the dangers of anthropomorphising. She discovers they’re highly intelligent, capable of tenderness, playfulness, happiness and friendship. Where Montgomery really convinces the squeamish is not in show-and-tell encounters with various octopuses but in her quest to try and know this misunderstood “alien”. And it’s testament to some fine writing that by the end, stroking an octopus’s head or getting a “love bite” from one of its 1,600 suckers seems downright desirable. In The Soul of an Octopus, the American author and naturalist Sy Montgomery seeks to de-monsterise the intriguing creatures. S hooting Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1916 – the first motion picture filmed underwater, no less – J Ernest Williamson trembled: “No words can adequately describe the sickening horror one feels when from some dark mysterious lair, the great lidless eyes of the octopus stare at one… One’s very soul seems to shrink.” And the image of giant octopuses enveloping ships, pulling sailors to watery graves and generally being the writhing, eight-armed stuff of shivery nightmares has pervaded our culture.

The soul of an octopus