With a nod to Mary McCarthy, Feigel’s “Group” of five women met at university. But in their case Oxford where they shared accommodation. Some were “first generation” university students others were from more financially secure backgrounds. But it is now twenty years later and all are living in London. Their “stories” since meeting are recounted over the course of a year by Stella, who is struggling. So journaling month by month she will reflect on specific issues for herself and the other four as they develop. Stella has divorced her husband but has chosen to have their second child alone so is balancing a brand new baby, older daughter, while living alone and working full time in a publishing firm facing management issues. Kay, supposedly once the most intelligent woman and with the greatest promise, had married early to a writer now very successful. She had resigned herself to teaching literature and has recently had her second child too. Over the year she will start to rebuild her creative life after an emotional crisis. Priss, previously a history student, has married Ben a literary agent. She did not choose to develop a career and with children was a full time mum. Finding that her husband has had an affair with Stella she will be questioning her life choices, although wanting to retain her marriage. She will set up her own café business and start to move into other circles. Polly, single, is a successful senior doctor but with a married lover (her boss). She leads an otherwise quiet life, financially supporting her parents back home. She is reaching the time where she has to decide if she wants to have children and if so with whom. She will finally reject her lover. Helena, apparently the most successful, is a famous documentary producer. She is gay and with her time clock ticking too has to decide how she will have a child and with whom. But can she sustain a new relationship with another at the same time as a single pregnancy?
This is a clever novel that uses the relationships of the five to explore many of the quandaries of women of a certain age. You have one life only, but it sits within the time you live in, with all the constraints or expectations that it has brought with it. The group met at university – at a time when they were trying to create a new life for themselves away from their families. As the friendship continues the group are the people who each have the longest relationship with each other and who have seen themselves both young and now growing older. Within the five individual links might be deeper or more significant, but that too can be fluid as their life experiences change. Modern life with dispersed families and movement away from one’s early home means that friendships can provide key stability and security at times of challenge or difficulty.
This is also a novel talking to the changes in women’s lives but is also very much of its time. Overlain with the day to day realities of the five is the “issue” of the “me too” generation. Stella’s boss in the publishing house, Helena’s uncle, is accused of inappropriate touching of women around him in the past. As these allegations become more widespread, the five will have to consider their responses (both personal and professional). They suspect that refusal to loudly and publicly condemn such actions – as those of us of a certain generation know were absolutely standard in nearly all workplaces – will be seen as collusion and a sign that they are “unfit” to work within modern professional spheres. Social mores are changing – and apparently very, very, fast. The women are being required to move into places they are not necessarily happy to be. Not least because they come from a generation where aspects of intimate life were not carried on in such a “public” way – and not opened to scrutiny by all – often with little consideration for future impacts.
So a seemingly simple storyline carries great depth of analysis and meaning. It is not just about now but about one’s evolving past. It is about the personal – about coping with basic day to day demands of womanhood, motherhood and friendship in a changing “political” world with even more rapidly changing expectations. Twenty years on from university, the women face their next twenty, but their stories (as is life) are unresolved – do not expect immediate happy endings. This is “reality” fiction.

I couldn’t get into this book at all. I tried a few times to go back to it but the writing style wasn’t for me. And interesting premise and the characters were real but I’m afraid I couldn’t finish it.

A sincere thank you to the publisher, author and Netgalley for providing me an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review. This is not my usual genre, I’m more of a crime/thriller reader therefore am extremely pleased and grateful for opening up my mind to something totally different. 4 stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟

My thanks to Netgalley for my copy of The Group, an intellectually written novel about a group of women friends as they approach their forties.

Despite the references to the #metoo movement and Love Island I felt that the novel felt less up to modern and almost seemed to be set, maybe in the 1940s. These women, members of the 'group' come across as a bunch of white, middle class, smug and self obsessed individuals that I found very hard to like or even empathise with.

I found that the fact that it was narrated by just one voice who seemed to know exactly what was happening, even what the others were thinking long after she'd left and gone home quite disconcertingly confusing at times.

I find it hard to understand why their brand of feminism has to cast all men as the enemy, although I appreciate that they didn't take it as far as the women younger than them now do.

Although I found it a strange book it wasn't an effort to read but it gave me no real pleasure and I was totally nonplussed when it just finished, no conclusion, nothing.

I found this very difficult to engage with unfortunately - the style of writing just didn’t absorb me?l, and the number of characters made it difficult to read without having any emotional attachment to them.

I’m glad I persevered, but it’s not one I’ll reread.

Stella, Priss, Helena, Kay and Polly are old university friends . We meet them twenty years later as they negotiate children, work, divorce, adultery and depression.

I think that Laura Fiegel can write, but this novel seems to be some sort of experiment with the fictional form, in which you write with as little emotional engagement as possible. It was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. Stella is the omniscient narrator but towards the end of the novel Kay, who has struggled with depression, begins to write her own novel. So i did wonder if this novel is in fact meant to be the novel that Kay herself writes, the emotional distance and flat prose meant to indicate her own state of mind.
The five women are virtually indistinguishable from each other. Again i feel that this is deliberate but it doesn't make for very enoysble reading. I couldn't relate to their dislike of their children, or their endless extramarital affairs. It was a real struggle to finish this.

I did enjoy reading this book and to see how everyone’s lives are different and how it’s ok to be different and feel different things. However I was a bit confused at the end. It didn’t really seem to end even though I know the book went through the months and it was December when the book ended but I felt it lacked something.

Exploring the friendship of five middle class women in their forties who met as students at university, Lara Feigel’s The Group is a deliciously funny and poignant read. Moving between first person accounts of each woman, Stella, Kay, Polly, Priss and Helena, we’re treated to intimate ideas and insightful thoughts from each, as well as the relationships between them. Children, marriages, careers, relationships – all are up for exploration. Who has fulfilled their promise? Who is living life in the right way?

As well as their general lives, in a post #MeToo world the novel explores a controversial activity and the difficulties about knowing who is telling the truth. The modern landscape is difficult for both women and men, and the book doesn’t shy away from this.

It’s a little tricky to get into, and confusing at times, but very pointedly written. The women are a bot frustrating, and clearly very privileged – not that that means they can’t have problems.

It’s Lara’s first novel, and the critic and professor at UCL has written extensively about the lives of individuals in history, bringing in their personal lives to their public.

The Group clearly takes its cue from Mary McCarthy's 1963 frank, absorbing novel about a group of female graduates and is an interesting portrait of contemporary female life and friendship.

From university to mid thirties the group of five have kept in touch, expanding and contracting as relationships start and finish. The addition of children, returning to work or staying at home, the relationship eb and flow as circumstances change.

Lara Fiegel clearly is insightful and intelligent but I found the number of characters in her novel The Group unwieldy. I was constantly wondering who peripheral characters were. I found the device of one character being an omniscient narrator really odd and it didn’t work for me. Despite the fact that there were references to the Metoo movement and other contemporary issues, it felt strangely old fashioned, as if the women weren’t forty year olds now. . It was puzzling as, in many ways, it had a lot to say.

I absolutely love The Group by Mary Mcarthy so I was very much looking forward to reading this.

I think Lara Feigel was very true to the original and that might be why it's not necessarily that popular with many reviewers because in a way it's so difficult to relate to that sort of story in the modern day. It was easier to understand the difficulties of privileged women in the 1930s because no matter how privileged a woman was she was still "less than a man".

That said, I did enjoy this book because I just accepted that a story of privileged women in our time with very middle-class problems would probably mean that I wouldn't like them very much and on the whole I didn't, but I was interested in their lives mostly because of the excellent writing. All of them were imperfect and most of them were unlikeable to a lesser or greater degree and I felt that their stories offered a view of lives that we think we know about but really we only know what we see on the outside which I think the author was trying to tell us. Each of them seems perfect in their own way and each of them is flawed in their own way. They are all approaching 40 or have just passed 40, an age at which we think we should have it all sorted out only to get there and realise that we really don't and that we'll carry on getting things wrong and learning for as long as we get to live, that we may never have it all sorted but that's fine too.

The #MeToo story was done very well, I think because some of the women just refused to believe that this man they knew could be such a preditor. That was very realistic because much as we'd like to think that women stand together when they hear that x has done something unforgivable to y, we don't always. We try to find excuses if the preditor is someone we like. I hope that anyone reading the various reactions of this group will think carefully about their own reaction to accusations. Maybe!

All in all, an interesting read that I thought about quite a lot when I was reading and during the time I wasn't reading it as well. A book that makes me think is always a good read for me.

I really couldn't get into this and picked it up a few times over a couple of weeks but didn't finished. Some interesting characters but not enough to hold my interest. Great premise for a book though.

An absorbing unique look at a group of women who are about to turn forty.Best friends since college .They now are living their adult lives children marriages divorce.There is one overview one friend who comments on everyone’s lives decisions.At times hilarious at times snarky a book that is so well written will be recommending to all.#netgalley#johnmurraybooks

Feigel's "The Group" is modeled after McCarthy's '54 novel of the same name; it is a well-paced, well-written book, not paricularly funny, despite the blurb stating so, that mainly focuses on exploring the experience of the twenty-first century woman.

‘The Group’ by Lara Feigel is one of those novels that gives women a bad name. I appreciate that this is a pretty damning sweeping statement but it’s come from trawling through this story desperately hoping that at least some of her privileged five will become a little less self-centred and a little more outward looking.
Focusing on Stella, Kay, Polly, Priss and Helena, all of whom meet at university, the reader is presented with middle-class London lives in which all of them live in pleasant accommodation and enjoy interesting jobs – if they choose to! They angst about how difficult it is to look after their children, even though they have help or family close by. Or they choose to have children when they have been childless, or decide not to have children. Is Feigel giving us anything new? Or writing about everyday life in an engaging way? Or suggesting that we can learn something about our own lives from what her characters think, say and do? If she is, then this reader has massively failed to recognise these strengths!
Told in third person from recently divorced (and already partnered anew) Stella’s point of view, Feigel also uses the rather strange narrative device of Stella telling the others’ stories in third person too. Stella’s voice seems to fade almost immediately so that one wonders why the whole novel could not have been told in a more traditional third person narrative. This feels like a failed stylistic experiment.
I’m not a reader who has to ‘like’ characters before I can enjoy a novel. If that were the case, I wouldn’t have enjoyed classics like Graham Greene’s ‘Brighton Rock’ or the recent brilliantly written ‘Night Boat to Tangier’ by Kevin Barry. Feigel’s characters are certainly not likeable in the main: they are often self-absorbed, disloyal, and pretty dull but I can’t see what she is hoping to show her readers by presenting them as such. Is the patriarchy at fault? Not obviously – most of these women are using their men as much as the men use them.
Feigel can clearly write (hence 2 stars rather than 1) so this novel feels like a wasted opportunity, both for her and the reader!

Sorry but I really couldn’t get into ‘The Group’ by Lara Feigel. I dint finish the book as I couldn’t get on with the character and I found the writing a bit clunky.

This book completely drew me in.

It’s well written and relatable given the subject matter.

Revealing story of female relationships.

This book describes the lives of five women who met at university and remain friends 20 years later despite affairs, marriages and children. Narrated by one woman it is difficult to differentiate between them all. There is a sameness to their lives and indeed their expectations. They all come across as self absorbed, selfish one sided characters. I find these types of novel very difficult. There is no reality to their narrative. This particularly lacks something that would make the reader want to read more. I wanted to shake them in their "woe is me" mentality.

This was a book that I was excited to read and was glad to be auto approved, since it catered to characters of my age. I don't find many books where all or most of the protagonists are of the age group in late 30s or in their 40s, and this one was about female friendships in the current world.

The story revolves around the friendships of five women - Stella, Kay, Polly, Priss and Helena. They were a tight knit group in college and they remain friends into their 40s as well. The story is narrated by Stella, but there are PoVs for each character, but narrated in third person I think. All the women think the other has a perfect life or has it all, whereas, underneath, each woman is struggling in their own way.

The book touches upon some important subjects like gender equality, women having to manage career expectations with motherhood expectations, monogamy, sex, etc.

Unfortunately, I had to DNF this book after reaching half way through in the book. I tried my best to read further to see if my views on the story and writing changes, but that didn't happen. I think my only issue with this was the writing style. The narration felt complex for me to follow and the lack of dialogues made it slightly boring for me, despite the interesting subject matter.

I'm sure this book will be enjoyed by many others and readers should give it a chance. However, it didn't work for me :)

Disclaimer - I was sent a free digital copy of this book by NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Honestly I first I found it a little hard to get into this story and didn’t feel that pull to keep on reading. I think the book may be better suited to those maybe a little older than myself. However, I think the book does hold some promise and would be a good read for those around the 40 yo age.