London, 1885: three women are summoned to Lady Duxbury’s drawing room, where afternoon tea conceals a clandestine book club. There, Eleanor Clarke, Rose Wharton, and Lavinia Cavendish — three women who couldn’t be more different — find a pocket of sisterhood that helps them to survive in a society designed to keep women silent. I love novels set in late Victorian London, especially those with strong feminist leads. This book delivers on atmosphere and on the women’s inner lives. It captures the suffocating social rules of the time, the double standards and the chilling reality of domestic violence. Rose’s outsider perspective as an American married into the English aristocracy was particularly compelling. Still, the balance felt slightly off: I missed moments of ease between the heavy trauma and the men drawn as evil caricatures. The “secret book society” angle is thinner than the title implies and I found the multiple POVs difficult to track on audio with a single narrator. I briefly considered DNF-ing (rare for me), but I’m glad I finished for the dark but powerful ending. Recommended for historical fiction fans prepared for a tough, sometimes infuriating ride. (Do check content warnings!)

Wow. Dieses Buch hat mich positiv überrascht, das Cover ist eher simpel und lässt nicht erahnen, wie tiefgründig es tatsächlich ist. Ich habe es damals gekauft, weil ich den Klappentext interessant fand und ich Bücher, die im späten 19. Jahrhundert spielen gerne mag. Doch dieses Buch war so viel mehr, als eine Geschichte über einen Buchclub im 19. Jahrhundert. Es war so gut, dass ich am Ende sogar die „Author note“ gelesen habe, was ich sonst bei Büchern fast nie mache.