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‘A very funny and brilliant book. Feigel does a thorough and virtuosic job of describing the dilemmas of contemporary middle-class women’ Rachel Cusk
Lara Feigel’s first novel, The Group, is a fiercely intelligent, revealing novel about a group of female friends turning forty. Who has children and who doesn’t? Whose marriages are working, whose aren’t, and who has embarked on completely different models of sexuality and relationships? Who has managed to fulfil their promise, whose life has foundered and what do they think about it, either way?
The Group takes its cue from Mary McCarthy’s frank, absorbing novel about a group of female graduates. The relations between men and women may be different now but, in the age of Me Too, they’re equally fraught. This is an engrossing portrait of contemporary female life and friendship, and a thrillingly intimate and acute take on female character in an age that may or may not have been changed by feminism in its different strands.
(P) 2020 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Lara Feigel’s first novel, The Group, is a fiercely intelligent, revealing novel about a group of female friends turning forty. Who has children and who doesn’t? Whose marriages are working, whose aren’t, and who has embarked on completely different models of sexuality and relationships? Who has managed to fulfil their promise, whose life has foundered and what do they think about it, either way?
The Group takes its cue from Mary McCarthy’s frank, absorbing novel about a group of female graduates. The relations between men and women may be different now but, in the age of Me Too, they’re equally fraught. This is an engrossing portrait of contemporary female life and friendship, and a thrillingly intimate and acute take on female character in an age that may or may not have been changed by feminism in its different strands.
(P) 2020 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
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Reviews
A very funny and brilliant book. Feigel does a thorough and virtuosic job of describing the dilemmas of contemporary middle-class women
An elegant, vivid, fascinating novel, with a profound vision of these lives and this moment in our culture. Pure pleasure
The mix of caustic insights and sudden tenderness make the group dynamics arrestingly real. I can't remember the last time I consumed a novel so hungrily
The Group works because there is nothing self-satisfied in its tone . . . The mix of caustic insights and sudden tenderness make the group dynamics arrestingly real
Feigel shows all this to attentive readers in a novel playing with its own fictitiousness a clear statement of the novel's timely and clever investigation of otherness and sameness
Thought-provoking . . . with flashes of brilliant perception
A clever, modern book
The humour is sharply observed, drily delivered and laced with ruefulness. While Feigel articulates her characters' fears with sensitivity, she also illustrates their lack of self-awareness and limits of experience with angry frustration that makes for a claustrophobic, often deeply uncomfortable and sometimes agonising picture
Crisp and clever