Published By: Faber
Pages: 288
Released On: 30/07/2026
In a self-running smart house, a young sentient hoover listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving human connection, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of self-discovery.
But when Edie passes away, Scout and her fellow appliances discover that the omnipresent Grid, which monitors every household in the City, wants to displace Harold from the home he’s lived in for fifty years. With the help of a neighbourhood boy, and Harold and Edie’s daughter, the humans and the appliances must come together to outwit the Grid before they lose everything they hold.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Faber for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
This is a novel narrated by household appliances. Now, I’ve read some weird books in my time, but never one narrated by a vacuum cleaner.
What a weird but beautiful book. I don’t know what I was expecting. Something weird and wonderful, and that’s what I got. It’s such an uplifting, comforting novel.
This could be our future, appliances that communicate with us, that can make decisions for us. And that’s scary. I’m not a fan of overly smart gadgets even though we have some. But it”s made me really aware of the feelings of my appliances. I mean, I already say please and thank you to our Alexa so that when the robot uprising occurs, they’ll remember I was polite and spare me.
I rarely want a book to be longer but at just over 200 pages, I felt it could have been longer. It’s such a joyful book that I wanted to read more of it.
The chapters are a little too long for my liking but because it’s a short book, it doesn’t really matter much. It’s so easy and quick to read that I finished it within a matter of hours.
It’s not a horror, obviously, by any stretch of the imagination so I won’t pretend it is. But it is quite scary at times, this idea of AI and smart tech and robots controlling every aspect of life, and people just going along with it because what’s the alternative?
I loved the love letter he gives to books in this story. If you’re a passionate reader, you’ll know how important books are, and Glenn has got that just right.
Never did I think I’d feel so emotionally attached to a vacuum cleaner. It’s so moving. Such a wonderful story I highly recommend to everyone.
Books By Your Bedside 