The Group, Lara Feigel
The Group, Lara Feigel
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The Group

Author: Lara Feigel

Narrator: Helen Duff

Unabridged: 12 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: JM Originals

Published: 06/11/2020


Synopsis

'A very funny and brilliant book. Feigel does a thorough and virtuosic job of describing the dilemmas of contemporary middle-class women' Rachel Cusk

Lara Feigel's first novel, The Group, is a fiercely intelligent, revealing novel about a group of female friends turning forty. Who has children and who doesn't? Whose marriages are working, whose aren't, and who has embarked on completely different models of sexuality and relationships? Who has managed to fulfil their promise, whose life has foundered and what do they think about it, either way?

The Group takes its cue from Mary McCarthy's frank, absorbing novel about a group of female graduates. The relations between men and women may be different now but, in the age of Me Too, they're equally fraught. This is an engrossing portrait of contemporary female life and friendship, and a thrillingly intimate and acute take on female character in an age that may or may not have been changed by feminism in its different strands.

(P) 2020 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

About Lara Feigel

A writer, critic and cultural historian teaching in the English department at King's College London, Lara Feigel is the author of four books including The Love-Charm of Bombs, The Bitter Taste of Victory and, most recently, Free Woman, a book where Lara examines her own life alongside Doris Lessing's to explore what freedom (sexual, psychological, political) might be and whether it's attainable or desirable. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, writes regularly for the Guardian and lives in Kensal Rise, London, with her two children. The Group is her first novel.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Wayne on March 13, 2016

I can remember my Dad's married sisters discussing this book (they were voracious readers always) in the 1960's. I was determined to read it and finally got hold of it in 1967 when I was studying to be a Catholic priest. My Student Director immediately confiscated it, so I knew its reputation was s......more

Goodreads review by Greg on March 07, 2013

After tearing through Mary McCarthy's The Group, I'm kinda shocked that it hasn't been inducted into the canon yet. The book is a stunning, scary look at gender relations in the 1930s, yet so searing that it's a shock to see it was written in the 1950s. Even Mad Men, written from the perspective of......more

Goodreads review by Ines on October 12, 2019

I do it fast and simple: A charade of facts, events, places and characters... but nothing that has kidnapped me or anythin significant that has remained in my heart. Yes, this book slipped away from me with absolutely nothing.... I immediately say that there by there, the girls of Vassar College in q......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on October 28, 2008

This is pretty much my ideal novel. It's set in 1930s New York and follows the lives of several Vassar graduates. There has been only a few truly slow portions of this novel. I laughed aloud in several parts of the novel. All of the talk of New York high-society, 1930s politics, Freudian psychothera......more

Goodreads review by Christine on August 15, 2011

You know when you're in the middle of a good book and you have to put it down, you still think about the characters and the story? Well, that was NOT the case with this book! I never connected and never felt anything about it. Apparently, this book first came out in 1954 & 1963 and I think the reaso......more


Quotes

A very funny and brilliant book. Feigel does a thorough and virtuosic job of describing the dilemmas of contemporary middle-class women

An elegant, vivid, fascinating novel, with a profound vision of these lives and this moment in our culture. Pure pleasure Tessa Hadley

The mix of caustic insights and sudden tenderness make the group dynamics arrestingly real. I can't remember the last time I consumed a novel so hungrily Guardian

The Group works because there is nothing self-satisfied in its tone . . . The mix of caustic insights and sudden tenderness make the group dynamics arrestingly real Observer

Feigel shows all this to attentive readers in a novel playing with its own fictitiousness a clear statement of the novel's timely and clever investigation of otherness and sameness Guardian Review

Thought-provoking . . . with flashes of brilliant perception Daily Telegraph

A clever, modern book The Times

The humour is sharply observed, drily delivered and laced with ruefulness. While Feigel articulates her characters' fears with sensitivity, she also illustrates their lack of self-awareness and limits of experience with angry frustration that makes for a claustrophobic, often deeply uncomfortable and sometimes agonising picture Financial Times

Crisp and clever TLS