Twenty-nine year old Roberta has spent her whole life hungry – until the day she invents Supper Club. Supper Club is a secret society for hungry women. Women who are sick of bad men and bad sex, of hinted expectations to be thinner, smile more, talk less. So they gather at night to feast and drink and dance, seeking the answer to a simple question: if you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into? This is a story about the hunger that never goes away. It is a story about friendship, food and female rage. Above all, it is about the people who make us who we are – who lead us astray and ultimately save us.

Supper Club could quite easily have been like so many other books about women who’ve experienced a traumatic life changing event and created a club which inevitably brings them closer to their friends and leads them to find love.

But in an age of MeToo and more representation in literature for women, Lara Williams has created something far better. The characters are flawed and hurting. Their relationships are real and relatable. Their supper club is art and also activism. There’s no dashing hero though, word of warning. The men are skin-crawling awful. And yes, there is an air of Roberta finding herself and her squad, but it’s “not in a set by the sea and they eat cupcakes way”. 

Whilst Supper Club might not leave you with a spring in your step and heart warmed, it will leave you with the belief that things do get better if you want them to. That a story can be told and women are survivors. 

Supper Club by Lara Williams is out in paperback 16 July 2020

Thank you to Hamish Hamilton for my copy and opportunity to take part in this blog/bookstagram tour

(As a side note, my review copy was digital and a lot of words were missing the letter f and the prefixes and suffixes connected to it. So in the descriptions of recipes including fish, it was an amusing read, trying to decipher what it was saying.)