The Sisterhood Book Club

The Sisterhood Book Club is a friendly book club for adults, discovering and rediscovering female protagonists in classic, modern classic and contemporary world fiction written by women.

We meet monthly to informally discuss a book read in advance, over refreshments at The Village Hub opposite Chalkwell Park. The cost of taking part is the purchase of the book to be discussed, and books are available to collect either at the previous book club or they can be posted out to you at least a month prior to the book club.

We were originally inspired by Penguin Books' Sisterhood Collection, which included titles such as Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and Pride and Prejudice, but now we read an eclectic mix of books. Recent reads include Crooked Cross (Sally Carson), 12 Ways to Kill Your Family at Christmas (Natasha Bache), and The Mountains Sing (Nguyen Phan Que Mai). 

About the book this month:

The Woman in the Hall by G.B. Stern

She didn't want men to be in love with her. She wanted power and a dangerous gamble and the fun of winning and putting herself over as a sweet saviour, till at last she came to believe it herself. Lorna Blake is a woman able to create her own reality a pathological liar, narcissist conman, and devoted single mother to two daughters, Jay and Molly.

When her eldest needs lifesaving treatment that they cannot afford, Lorna takes up the risky but thrilling activity of taking her young daughters to the halls of wealthy strangers to beg, with tales of husbands dead, deserted, and insane. But as her daughters grow up struggling to differentiate between fact and fiction, it ultimately becomes harder for them to cleave themselves from their mother's web of lies and justifications. Acted out in the hallways of London mansions and across several continents, The Woman in the Hall is part psychological drama, part cat-and-mouse chase, as well as a darkly comic portrait of how the figure of a single mother could wring pity from 1930s society.