This book was Stella’s point of view of the friendships of a group of five university friends now in their forties. The challenges of motherhood, marriage, divorce, being gay, unmarried, affairs and one with the husband of one of the group. Each of these women with different lives connected solely by university. Many eventualities seems to have been thrown into the mix with all playing a strong part in the book.

There was not enough substance for me in this book with the middle class, privileged people whose worlds were not fulfilling enough to give them a full rounded concept of life.

I found it hard to know when Stella was referring to herself or one of the group. It was more a character study than a smooth flowing story. It was very disjointed in how it was written.

I had high hopes for 'The Group' by Lara Feigel. The comments on its front cover by Tessa Hadley and Rachel Cusk promised "pure pleasure," and a "very funny and intelligent book," and I was excited to read a story about women of a similar age to me, negotiating their lives and friendships.

However, from the get go I didn't enjoy this book and ultimately gave up on it quite quickly. This was largely because of the style in which this book was written. The point of view of the novel was solely Stella's, even when she wasn't present in the room and was describing the introspections of the other characters. This made it hard to invest, particularly as Stella didn't appeal to me as a character. It was also because things seemed to move very slowly and therefore I wasn't encouraged to keep reading in order to find out what was going to happen.

Probably more like 2.5 stars rounded up to three.

In some ways I am the ideal reader for this book: a few years younger than these women but very much of a similar era, from the same university, with a close set of university friends also grappling with motherhood and marriages and the meaning of life. This grabbed me enough for me to continue reading through the slow start, but the book fell flat for me overall. It was thoughtful, and contained a lot of truthful insight, but I struggled with:
- the third person narration by Stella of all her friend’s lives
- the lack of speech marks
- the literary setting - two writers, three agents, the smugness of Stella on her career
- the fact so little happened in the whole book
- the mentioning of brexit and metoo almost aged the book already.

It has, however put me off ever getting therapy as the therapist seemed such a waste of space in the book and a conceit for already extremely privileged women. It also made me reflect on life, our friendships and choices.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC copy, all opinions are genuine.

Cultural historian Lara Feigel took inspiration from Mary McCarthy’s "The Group", a landmark 1963 novel, as a model for thinking through contemporary women’s lives in twenty-first century London. As a fan of the original I was looking forward to a modern take on it, but found myself disappointed.

Due to the way this book is narrated, (one of the group of friends narrates for all of them), the women who make up The Group in this book, come across as fairly bland characters. The distancing through the narrators commentary makes it hard to work up any emotion for them or their plights. They are all dealing with various relationship issues. One's husband has had an affair with another friend in the group, one petitions a friend to have a child together, one worries she doesn't like her kid and has a weird struggle going on with her cleaner...and so on.. Here's the thing. I just found it all so dull. I could barely tell the characters and their husbands / paramours apart they seemed so interchangeable.

The age old story of women being expected to bear the brunt of housework and childcare is still central, and the #metoo movement is discussed within, but there is no real bite or jeopardy to the stories and it left me feeling very detached.

With many thanks to NetGalley for providing an ebook arc.

This is an intelligent book, telling the story of a group of nearly-40 something friends who all used to live together at university. Following their lives for a while, the novel incorporates themes of love, marriage, children and careers. Inspired by Mary McCarthy's seminal work, this is an updated version of a timeless story, made more complex by feminism and the #metoo movement. Slight in plot, this is not a page turner, but it is a thoughtful novel about issues which affect us all today.

I was really looking forward to this book after the description said 'a funny and brilliant book', however I did not find it funny at all and unfortunately found it quite boring. The characters were of a similar age to myself so I thought it would be quite a relatable book, but I found the writing style quite strange. Stella the narrator wrote in first person then her friends were described by her and I often found it confusing as to whether it was fact or opinion. Unfortunately this just wasn't for me which was a shame.

I found myself wondering why this story seemed strangely familiar. Then I remembered Joanna Rakoff’s A Fortunate Age, and a quick online search showed that they are based on the same source material - Mary McCarthy’s The Group. Anna Hope’s recent ‘Expectation’ also seems to cover similar terrain, but with three women who graduated at the same time rather than the five or six that Feigel and Rakoff focus on, or McCarthy’s even more unwieldy eight. The two more modern books do unavoidably have a large cast of characters.

I really enjoyed Lara Feigel’s non-fiction The Love-Charm of Bombs and there is much to like here too. I particularly liked the narrator Stella, the lesbian/bisexual Helena who is trying to have a baby and start a new relationship, and the depictions of contemporary London. There were a couple of things I wished would be interrogated more:

- Despite either being unmarried, divorced or working in the creative industries, or having partners who also work in the creative industries, the women seem to have no financial worries
- One of the male characters is involved in a MeToo scandal. While the women spend a lot of time talking about this, it’s never quite clear how they feel about it and overall seem to remain tolerant and fond of him, saving their ire for Brett Kavanaugh, who doesn’t impact their lives in the same way as this guy.

I found it interesting that Rakoff and Feigel used this book as a jumping-off point into fiction, in the same way that Francesca Segal uses Henry James. However, while they still have one foot in non-fiction (memoir rather than history) it’s clear that the other two are accomplished fiction writers a couple of books later and I look forward to seeing something from Lara Feigel that’s a little more her own.

The Group has a strange narrative structure that takes some getting used to. Stella narrates for herself, and then for her female friends. Stella lived with these women in college, and has maintained friendships with them since, to varying degrees of success. She doesn't seem to like any of them that much, and considers them very critically. None of the men in their lives do any of the emotional heavy lifting, and mostly get away with being a bit crap.
There isn't much edge to these women's lives. Some of them work hard, but they are all privileged and don't have to struggle for much. There is a sort of Me Too strand in the book, about how men used to behave compared to now, but it seems to me that these women enable their men to carry on regardless. Three stars.

I thought this book would be ideal for me as the characters were supposed to be exactly the same age. Unfortunately I found it hard to relate.
The way it was written was the main barrier, all the people in it were sort of jumbled up. Sometimes referred to by their names and sometimes not. The narrator, if she was a narrator, seemed to mix her views of people with their own views so I wasn't sure what was true and what was an opinion.

A group of girls share a house at university (apparently a top one, not named), and remain friends, all living in London. Now turning forty they have all had different experiences in their carers and family life. I found the women to be indistinguishable from each other and not particularly pleasant people. They all agonize over their decisions to have babies or not, to develop their careers or not, to have affairs or divorce or whatever. I lost interest. The author's style compounded this lack of feeling - there is hardly any direct speech and what there is is not punctuated. It is written in the present tense for some reason, which was irritating. There is a preoccupation with sex, there is much introspection. I thought it was a little bit like the TV series The Split, where a group of privileged high-flying women are dissatisfied with their lives and make a mess of it.

This book follows the story of women over a year as they turn forty. Friends from university they have stuck together, more or less, for the last two decades and reflect back on their life and where they are now throughout the course of the book. The narrative is unusual, one of the characters takes on an omniscient narrative to her friends’ perspective. Is it her projecting on them? Is she meant to be omniscient? It is never made clear.

In brutal honesty this book was a chore. It was described as ‘funny’ and ‘engaging’ where as in actual fact it was a long winded moan. We are meant to empathise with these white middle class women With stable careers and relationships (-ish) and acknowledge that all their moaning is justified. They all come across as at least mildly depressed and to be honest I pitied the characters rather than empathised. Maybe I am in the wrong demographic. As a 20-something I just couldn’t relate to the characters and I found myself hating them for endlessly bemoaning their lives when they actually had so much to be thankful for. It dragged on and it was a relief when it ended.

Unfortunately I found this book extremely boring, it was too middle- class for me a good old working class gal. I failed to connect with the characters from the get- go. I don’t want to give any spoilers for potential readers but it just not for me

I thought this book was beautifully written and easy to relate to, although I am quite a bit older than the characters in it, who are all 40 or approaching 40. I enjoyed the way that their friendships are portrayed. The structure is original in that we hear Stella’s point of view and she also describes what’s going on in her friends’ lives. There are so many realistic moments relating to motherhood where I thought, ‘yes, I felt this too’. The author has a lovely light touch and I felt involved in the lives of the group. They all face challenges and approach them in different ways. Their friendships and marriages shift, it’s all very lifelike. I found it an original and interesting read.

A well written book but ... if you are looking for a plot or a direction then this is not the book for you. It looks more into the flaws of us as human beings, what drives us, what makes us slam on the brakes in life and look for another direction.
The book is slightly disjointed as it tells the story from each persons view point but with the added opinion of the main character Stella. After a while the characters do become slightly tedious in their perfection ... an over privileged group of women whose biggest problems are that of what to have for their next meal.

I tried to get into this book, I really did! I turning forty myself this month and meeting university friends (also turning forty) for a weekend catching up on our lives I thought this would be perfect for me. The main problem for me with this book is the way the narrator (Stella) switches between talking about herself and other members of the group. I found myself confused and not knowing who was doing the narrating. An example is at location 1062 - ‘Polly thinks about it. She thinks .....’
Sometimes the ‘she’ is relating to Stella and sometimes it relates to another member of the group. I would have preferred it if the chapters alternated between each member of the group doing the narration. Felt like this book was confused between being a book narrated by Stella and also from other people. Thank you for the chance to provide an honest review.

A group of women have been friends since university. Now turning forty, they assess where they are in their lives.

A closely observed slice of life from the perspective of educated, white, metropolitan middle-class (a.k.a. the chattering classes) females. The characters are variously married with kids, divorced with kids, lesbian and wanting kids, or single. Most of the group is having an affair, often with a friend’s husband. All have a career except Priss who is career-less by choice, and Polly is the token working-class made good friend.

The novel comments on motherhood, the division of labour between parents, opting out of the rat race to be a non-working mother, the #MeToo era, the email generation and Love Island.

Includes some poignant moments, such as when a mother soothes her child upstairs then returns to the dinner party in progress, with her mind still in the moment with the infant.

Feigel is skilled in showing the inner workings of her characters as they reminisce and analyse themselves and their world. She achieves a very accurate reflection of people moving in this privileged sphere. Despite this, the narrative fails to engage the reader and reads more as a series (albeit a triumph of a series) of character studies.

The blurb claims the novel is ‘very funny’. It is not. This isn't a case of an author trying to be funny and failing, but rather of a misleading blurb.

My thanks to NetGalley and to publishers John Murray Press for the ARC.

The idea behind this book is a good one, but I really struggled to read it. It seems very long-winded, and frankly not very much happens. None of the characters is sympathetic, and I just felt irritated with a group of privileged women moaning about their lives/men/children/lack of children etc. The book is oddly written, partly in the first person, and partly in the third, and no character seems to have a distinctive voice. Not one I would recommend I'm afraid, and it definitely isn't humorous.

The Group is a compelling story which follows five female friends for nine months as they approach (or have already reached) the age of forty. It addresses and examines what it's like to be a woman in the post 'Me Too' era as well as looking at male perceptions of women. It also analyses how women regard themselves whilst simultaneously challenging their own as well as other people's expectations of them.

Lara Feigel uses the five university friends to illustrate that although contemporary women have the liberty to choose their own path in life, there is still an imbalance between the genders.The enormity of having children (or not, in some cases) is a subject that features throughout the novel and parenthood appears to weigh heavier on the mothers than it does on the male characters. However, this book does not sanctify women; they are portrayed as human beings who make mistakes and bad decisions and who are capable of betraying each other.

I found The Group to be an intellectual and experimental novel. It begins with a first person narrative in which the protagonists are introduced by Stella. However, the subsequent sections, each named after the person they involve, are written by an omniscient Stella in the third person. It is initially unclear whether these sections are authentic descriptions or Stella's reveries and merely a method she uses to impose thoughts and actions on others, as a means of justifying her own conduct.

Dialogue is scarce and the author has chosen to omit speech marks. To begin with I found that the effect of using Stella as narrator, combined with a substantial use of the present tense, created a distancing effect and a lack of emotion. At times it reminded me of the voiceover narration in Louis Malle's 'Les Amants' but I soon warmed to the style and became involved in the story, engaging with the characters and wanting to know how the different strands would unfold.

The description of The Group on Netgalley states it is 'very funny and brilliant.' I agree with the latter but did not find it 'funny' and thought it rather dark in places. However, it is a very deep and contemporary book that I enjoyed a lot and recommend to others with the warning that it's most definitely not 'Chick lit'! Thank-you to Netgalley and John Murray Press for allowing me to read this advance copy.

This book holds some promise, but unfortunately it was unable to keep me interested for long enough, for me to be bothered to hang around and find out what that promise is.
I found the writing style quite different, but it grew on me.
I very rarely do not finish a book, but I really couldn’t see where this book was going at all.
The premise is there is a group of friends who have known each other since sharing a house together at university. The book just seemed to be page after page of describing each person, their life, their marriage etc.
It might be that something happens later in the book that really brings it to life, but with so many other books shouting at me to be read, I’m afraid I wasn’t prepared to struggle on.
It was missing a vital something to make me want to continue, but it’s hard to explain what exactly.
I’m sure this type of book might appeal to some people.
However the word “hilarious” in the description is woefully inaccurate and misleading.
I would rate this book 2⭐️ based on it being unfinished.

There are various reasons why I just cannot warm to this book. I don't find that any of the characters come to life. Maybe it's the dispassionate writing style that makes each of the women's lives seem flat and dull.

The constant analysis of relationships, both emotional and physical, does not appeal to me at all. It just feels self-indulgent.

In terms of the narration, Stella in the first person is plausible, but Stella as third person narrator does not work.

It's unusual for me not to finish a book and maybe had I persisted it could have come to life in the second half, but I gave up just short of half way through.