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 Emporium. The cost of taking part is the purchase of the book to be discussed, and books are available to collect 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. Most recently, we have read One For Sorrow, Two For Joy (Marie-Claire Amuah), A System So Magnificent it is Blinding (Amanda Svensson) and Diary of a Void (Emi Yagi). 

About the book this month:

Rouge by Mona Awad

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been obsessed with her skin and skincare videos.When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted.There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass. Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze.Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.