Review: The Briar Club

Title: The Briar Club

Author: Kate Quinn

Publisher: 18th July 2024 by HarperCollins Australia

Pages: 400 pages

Genre: Historical Fiction, Women’s Fiction, Mystery

Rating: 5 cups

Synopsis:

A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; police officer’s daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has ended along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare. 

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?

My Thoughts

When Kate Quinn has a new book out, you drop everything to read it! You are guaranteed not only a great story (her writing is out of this world) but a brilliant lesson in history as well (her research is second to none). Kate is one of my favourite writers and her latest, The Briar Club is a fascinating look at American society during the McCarthy era of the 1950s.

‘… living in a world where a push of a button could end things in one big mushroom cloud. Hard not to wonder if we took a wrong turn somewhere along the line. If we could have done better.’

This book reads somewhat differently to Kate’s previous ones - and I like it! This is very much a character based story with a murder … or two! The Briar Club is the name given to the female tenants of Briarwood House who come together on Thursday nights to share a meal and so much more. Each woman living at the house is given her own chapter and, being such a diverse group, the insight into being a woman in America at this time is eye opening. It is most definitely a slow burn with even the house being a character and providing its own voice to events. 

‘You couldn't find a more different batch of women than the Briar Club … but after so many suppers together they had somehow acquired a shared funny bone, a way of setting each other off that made the laughter contagious when the right joke caught fire.’

When readers draw near to the end and the women’s lives become enmeshed and the pace really starts to increase. Everything you’ve learned about them as individuals comes crashing together and it is here that one really appreciates Kate’s mastery as an author. Seeing how the women bonded and, individually and together, became a formidable unit. The Briar Club was Kate’s post-pandemic book and as she details in her endnotes it “erupted out of a desperate need for light, for connection, for friendship. A need (like Grace's) to gather round the table, to feed, and to fix.”

‘This is the land of second chances … She might have lost her childhood faith that it was the land of opportunity, but second chances? Yes. Opportunities were things that fell in your lap, but second chances had to be fought for - and you could always reinvent yourself in this country.’

The Briar Club is an exploration of female friendships with the burden of secrets set against the backdrop of the McCarthy era USA. The social pressures faced, particularly by women, are brought vividly to life. A slow burn tale that, under Kate’s deft authorship, comes to a thrilling climax.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. The quoted material may have changed in the final release.