The Group is the story of university friends who are starting to turn 40. Each chapter is dedicated to a member of the group and is narrated by Stella, one of the group. She narrates the chapters on the other friends as if she is with them but in fact she isn't and this is confusing as she relates a lot of what is happening to herself  and comes across as judgemental and a bit bitchy.
It is hard to warm to this group of friends as individuals and as a group, in fact the story doesn't really portray them as friends - more just people who have kept in contact because they feel they should.  
If you are expecting a funny story about female friendship then this may not be the novel for you, but maybe it is closer to real life friendships.

I was given a copy of The Group by Netgalley and the publishers in return for an unbiased review.

The Group is about the lives of five women who met at university, narrated by the main character Stella. She describes how their lives have panned out now they are all in their early forties living in London.  Some of the details are unbelievable as Stella continues to narrate the most intimate details of her friends - I felt that these observations were therefore her opinion and added to the gossipy, and at times snide, comments about them.
I was dissatisfied with the preoccupation of the trivial events that seemed to dominate the women's lives and I felt in the end it lacked substance but I also found it entertaining and fun at times.
Thanks to netgalley for the ARC

I am grateful to NetGalley and John Murray for an advance review copy, but I have to say that I found this to be a supremely irritating novel.

The narrator Stella is one of a group of nearly-40-year-old women who have been friends since university. The novel is structured in sections for each of them, all narrated by Stella, punctuated by sections in her own voice about her.

The style is flat, monotonous, a relentless stream of “she said x, then the other one said y, and I thought z”. There is more direct speech than I thought at first, but speech marks aren’t used much of the time, though they sometimes - why? - and the five women all sound the same as reported by Stella (who, ironically, is a successful writer), so that even halfway through the book I was still struggling to remember which was who amongst them. 

I couldn’t work out what the book was actually about - friendship? Femalehood? Marriage? Motherhood? The three with children seem so traumatised and exhausted by the experience that you have to wonder why on earth, approaching their forties, they keep defining themselves in terms of their relationships and maternity and encouraging the two childless ones to have a baby. Especially irritating is the repeated reference to having children as ‘procreation’, which comes across as coy and po-faced.

They are a collective cliche: talented writer squandering her gift because her less talented husband got there before her, dissatisfied with her marriage, her children, her unfulfilled life. Bisexual documentary maker planning a baby with her gay male friend. Divorcee who got pregnant with her ex husband’s baby by IVF. Successful consultant with a guilty secret, having an affair with a colleague 25 years older. A pattern of older husbands. Much focus on the sacredness of their friendship dating back to university, but also a fair bit of malice in Stella’s portrayal of her friends.

All in all, this novel bored me and left a nasty taste in my mouth - I just could not identify or sympathise with a bunch of unpleasant, emotionally dithering women without the backbone to acknowledge the things that aren’t working in their lives and get on with fixing them or walking away. I’m afraid I didn’t bother finishing it.

It is rare that I feel ambivalent about a novel.

I think that the observational style of of book stopped me from feeling a strong pull and connection to the characters and the situations they encounter. Whilst I finished the book I am not sure that the outcome was what I expected from the description of the novel and I was expecting a more nuanced look at female friendships.

Lara Feigel’s memoir Free Woman was one of my favourite books of 2018. In it she interrogates conventions of marriage and motherhood while rereading the works of Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook (1962), in particular, dramatizes women’s struggles to combine their disparate roles into a harmonious identity. Drawing inspiration from Lessing as well as from another early feminist novel, The Group by Mary McCarthy*, Feigel’s debut novel crafts a kaleidoscopic portrait of five women’s lives in 2018.

Stella, Kay, Helena, Polly and Priss met at a picnic while studying at Oxbridge and decided to rent a house together. Now 40-ish, they live in London and remain close, though their lives have branched in slightly different directions. Kay is an English teacher but has always wanted to be a novelist like her American husband, Harald. Priss is a stay-at-home mother excited to be opening a café. Polly, a gynaecological consultant at St Thomas’s Hospital, is having an affair with a married colleague. Helena, a single documentary presenter, decides she wants to have a baby and pursues insemination via a gay friend.

Narrating her friends’ lives as well as her own is Stella, an editor at a Faber-like publishing house whose director (also Helena’s uncle) is under investigation for sexual misconduct. Stella, a stand-in for the author, has split from her husband and has a new baby via IVF as well as an older child; this hint of autofiction lends the book an intimacy it might have lacked with an omniscient perspective. Although you have to suspend disbelief in a few places – could Stella really know so many details of her friends’ lives? – it feels apt that she can only understand these other women in relation to herself. Her voice can be catty, but is always candid, and Feigel is astute on the performative aspects of femininity.

Fast-forward a Sally Rooney novel by about 20 years and you’ll have an idea of what to expect here. It is a sexually frank and socially engaged narrative that arose from the context of the #MeToo movement and fully acknowledges the privilege and limitations of its setting. The characters express guilt over lamenting middle-class problems while there is such suffering in the wider world – we glimpse this in Polly’s work with African girls who have undergone genital mutilation. The diversity is limited to Black boyfriends, Helena’s bisexuality, and the fact that one group member decides not to have children (that 1 in 5 is statistically accurate).

The advantage of the apparent heterogeneity in the friend group, though, is that it highlights depths of personality and subtleties of experience. Stella even sees herself as an amateur anthropologist:
So here we are then. Five exact contemporaries who once shared a cluttered, thin-walled student house off the Cowley Road, all privileged, white, middle-class, all vestigial hangers-on, left over from an era when we received free educations at our elite university and then emerged into a world where we could still just about find jobs and buy flats, provided with opportunities for selfishness and leisure by our cleaners and our childminders. Nothing very eventful happens to us, but that gives more room for the ethnographer in me to get to work.

Feigel previously wrote two group biographies of cultural figures of the Second World War era, and she applies that precise skill set – capturing the atmosphere of a time period; noting similarities but also clear distinctions between people – to great effect here. You’ll recognize aspects of yourself in all of the characters, and be reminded of how grateful you are for (or how much you wish you had) friends whom you know will always be there for you. It’s an absorbing and relevant novel that ranks among my few favourites of the year so far. (4.5 stars)

*Feigel borrows the names of four of her five group members, plus those of some secondary characters, from McCarthy, with Stella a new character perhaps inspired in part by McCarthy’s Libby, who wants to work with books but, after delivering an earnest report on a 500-page pot-boiler, hears that “we really have no work that you’re uniquely qualified to do. You’re one of thousands of English majors who come pouring out of the colleges every June, stage-struck to go into publishing.” (That sure sounds familiar!) Narrowing the circle and introducing a first-person narrator were wise choices that made Feigel’s version more accessible. Both, though, are characterized by forthright commentary and a shrewd understanding of human motivations.

I rarely DNF a book but I’m sorry to say that I admitted defeat with The Group. 
I read just over a quarter of the book and here are my main reasons for quitting!:
1. I was not a fan of the writing style. At times I was confused if another character was saying something or if it was the main character. There was a lack of clarity and quotation marks. 
2. The characters were not likeable. They were boring, miserable and selfish. 
3. Everybody had a lack of morals and were having (or had) an affair. 
4. It was dull. I stopped at a little over quarter the way through and nothing had happened. For me, it was slow and painful. 

For my age, I should be the target audience, however, I do not have children. This was not my insomnia curing cup of tea.   

I appreciate the advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publishers. These opinions are my own (clearly!).

The promise of the blurb didn't come across in the execution. I don't normally mind books written in this style (Reservoir 13 for one) but this was just weird. Stella discussing the sex lives of her friends was odd. The lack of passion, plot or person other than Stella also unfortunately worked against this book. A brave attempt at a different approach but it didn't quite work.

I honestly do not know what to think of this book.

The way The Group has been written is almost like a study of a friendship group, or a study of women over the age of 40. It's written almost like an observation (which, I suppose, it's just that - Stella's observation of her friends).

I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of the storyline of the book really is, other than an in-depth look at the relations between friends. There are hints of '#MeToo' style issues but the conversation around these is actually uncomfortable - to the point where I began to despise the main character.

I don't think I'd recommend this book as I'm unsure who, outside of the context of Netgalley, would enjoy it.

I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, John Murray Press, and Laura Feigel. 
Unfortunately the above is the only reason I carried on reading this book, when I would definitely have given up and abandoned it long before. 
A novel covering a group of 40-something women, all fundamentally unlikeable characters preoccupied with the ennuie of their own lives and an overwhelming sense of self-importance. 
It is not, as the description says, a engrossing portrait of contemporary female life and friendship. It is dry, hard work, and unfortunately not worth the time. 
A generous 2 stars.

I really wanted to like this book as the synopsis seemed right up my street.  However I was very disappointed as there seemed to be no plot, no likeable characters and in fact some of them merged into one.  I felt the book dragged and I didn’t look forward to picking it up again.  I’m sorry but this wasn’t one for me.

Lara Feigel is a writer, critic and cultural historian teaching in the English department at King's College London and is the author non-fiction books including The Love-Charm of Bombs, The Bitter Taste of Victory and Free Woman. The Group is her first attempt at writing fiction. Given Feigel's background it makes perfect sense that she used a ground-breaking and controversial novel as inspiration. Mary McCarthy's The Group was published in 1963 and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for two years and described the lives of four colleague graduates in 1933. 

Full review on my blog at https://wanderingwestswords.wordpress.com/2020/07/04/the-group-lara-feigel/

The Group, the debut novel by Lara Feigel is set in modern day London, features a group of female friends who met at University twenty years earlier and is an examination of friendship, motherhood, marriage, sex, sexuality, relationships, Me Too, mental health, feminism and everything in between. The women, Priss, Kay, Helena, Polly and our narrator Stella are all in their late thirties/early forties, middle-class and are all at a tipping point in their lives.

It’s brilliantly written and uses a very unusual style. Our narrator is Stella and she tells us about her friends, dropping in small morsels of their history, of how they interlink, their closeness and their secrets. It’s really well done, so much so that until there was a reference to herself, I forgot Stella was even narrating. It really works as it allows us to both get closer to the group and understand them fully whilst keeping us just far enough removed that there is mystery and a desire to know more.

This book really resonated with me. I too am in my late thirties, and although I don’t live in London, am possibly not quite as middle class as these women and sadly don’t work in publishing like some of the characters in the book I found that there were enormous swathes of the book which I could identify with.

It is an intelligent examination of women and their different facets. In the group of five three are mothers, one is trying to be a mother and the fifth is undecided about having children. It seems reductive to say “three are mothers”, as in their own ways all five women are mothers; to each other, to partners, to siblings and to parents. Quite often I read books where women are almost put in two camps, those with children and those who are child free and the grey area in between isn’t examined, or if it is it is clumsy and oftentimes insulting. In this book, the three women with children are experiencing different versions of motherhood. Lara Feigel lays bare the difficulties, the highs and the lows and isn’t afraid to write about how much of a woman’s identity is tied up in and lost by motherhood.

She also explores what it is like to be a woman in her late thirties and not have children when your peers do. My ecopy of The Group is littered with highlighted sections which perfectly encapsulate what it feels like, especially when it comes to your time being seen as being less valuable, one line in particular stood out to me,

Polly is the only one who’s not busy with procreation or children, so she is apparently the one who has time to care.

There is also a wonderful examination of the isolation, loneliness and the feeling of being “left behind in ordinariness by a woman who has been chosen by the gods to enter a magical realm” which I thought was perfectly pitched.

I think I am really drawn to books like this. It made me think and made me reflect, especially when it comes to the nature of female friendships. The Group is a snapshot of life for these five women in a time when their lives are in a state of flux. The friendship between women is a complex and intricate thing, and when women have been friends for this long it is susceptible to ebbs and flows. This isn’t a saccharine sweet portrayal of female friendships, in fact it as times brutal and difficult to read and feels incredibly honest and real.

I have barely scratched the surface of the themes explored in The Group. It is one of those books which provokes thought and may mean different things to different readers depending upon their life experiences. It is based on a book of the same name written by Mary McCarthy in 1963 and set in the 1930s in America. I am intrigued and I’m going to hunt a copy out as I’d love to read and compare the themes addressed in both novels.

If smart, insightful novels about modern life are your thing then The Group could be for you. It is insightful, relevant and current and days after reading it I keep thinking about it. Recommended.

Thanks to NetGalley and The Publisher for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to like this book, but I found it irritating. I found the characters unlikable and stereotyping of white middle class women. It tried to address too many moral issues and was too judgy in trying not to be judgemental.

Well written and nice to see a book about this age group of woman, but I couldn't connect with it, so was left disappointed.

The Group centres around exploring the lives of five friends (Stella, Priss, Polly, Kay, and Helena) as they approach their fortieth birthdays.Unfortunately I just couldn't get into it at all

Stella, Priss, Helena, Polly and Kay were flat mates from university and are still friends as they approach their forties. Over the years they’ve married, had affairs (some with another’s husband!), had children and generally lived. 

And that’s about all I can say about The Group. Sadly, I finished the book and realised that I couldn’t think of any real plot or message in the story. Yes, they’ve all had their issues, but it was all a little bland. There were no exciting developments, no trauma, nothing to make it come alive.  

The other problem I struggled with, was that the whole book was ‘narrated’ by Stella. Most of the time this wasn’t really an issue, just occasionally confusing. However I found it quite disturbing when it came to discussing the sexual antics or thoughts of the other characters. This just didn’t sit right with me.  

Sadly The Group is not a book I would recommend.

I was fortunate to receive a copy of this book to read from NetGalley. 

Unfortunately I just couldn't get into it at all. I understand this is the author's first fiction writing. The characters were very hard to like and connect with and just having the one narrator for all the friends felt a bit odd. I felt the book was trying to cover too many current topics for the sake of it, rather than being relevant to the story. 

I'm sorry to say this is a very rare DNF for me, at 30%.

I really wanted to enjoy this book as the synopsis suggested it was right up my street being a woman of the same age group however a quarter in and I was struggling. The story is told using a mix of first and third person narration using 5 main characters which I found too much and too confusing. I just didn't warm to any of the characters either as they all seemed very unlikeable women. 
I did finish the book but found it hard going.

Thanks Netgalley for this EArc

I found this book really difficult to get into - I felt that the plot meanders a bit. It was well written but maybe just not one for me.

Reminiscent of Erica Jong, this is an intimate portrayal of women's lives, motherhood, marriage and friendship. Stella narrates her life and those of her four University friends as they enter their 40's. She longs for the time when life seemed so simple. Newly single, and Mum to two young children, she is trying to navigate her way through a new relationship, a new group dynamic and the secret that she's hiding from one of her friends. As each friend is trying to deal with their own uncertainties and confusion, their group seems fractured and fraught with tension. Searingly honest about the demands on women's lives, their disdain for men, but also their need for them, this is a book that women everywhere will identify with. It normalises the frustration and fears that all mothers deal with on a daily basis. It also deals with the issues of sexual harassment and assault that more and more women are prepared to talk about, and does not attempt to polarise this subject as an either/or, easily navigated subject, but rather shows all sides of the argument. 

I really loved the pace of this book, the intimate glimpse into the lives of each character and though the truths were at times hard to read, they are reflective of the reality of life at this time. When Kay runs away from her life and says 'How absurd it is ever to think you're doing more than slipping, slipping and just about holding your balance before you slip again,' I really identified with that sentiment. 

A book that will draw you in to the lives of these five women, I can't recommend it enough to any woman who thinks she's alone in her struggle.

The blurb of this book was very appealing, but unfortunately, the experience wasn't that great. The writing style was a bit jarring with the first and third person together. The plot and characters weren't that interesting. 
So, I'm afraid it wasn't for me. 

Thanks a lot to NG and the publishers for this copy.