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 fiction written by women. We have an eclectic taste and our reading journey has taken us all over the world. New Members are alsways welcome to join us!

We meet monthly to informally discuss a book we have read in advance and have a fun social evening at Do it Like a Mother in Westcliff on Sea. The cost of taking part is the purchase of the book to be discussed, the profit from which pays for the venue. Books are available at least a month prior to the book club and generally books for next month are purchased at the end of each club. They can also be ordered here and delivered.

We were originally inspired to form by Penguin Books' Sisterhood Collection, which included titles such as Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and Pride and Prejudice but we have throw off our foray into children's fiction and most recently the books we have read have included Diary of a Void (Emi Yagi), Foxash (Kate Worsley) and Violeta (Isabel Allende).

About the book this month:

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman by Patricia Melo

From bestselling novelist Patrícia Melo comes a masterful thriller set in the far west of Brazil that is by turns poetic, inspiring, humorous and harrowing. To escape an overprotective family and an abusive partner, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about an epidemic of violence against women that seems beyond comprehension.

What she finds in the jungle is not only relentless oppression, but a deep longing for answers to an unsolved crime from her past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of warrior women on a path of revenge and recovers the painful details of her mother’s death. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is a psychological trip with a twist. It’s about the strength of individuals in the face of overwhelming violence, the problem of femicide in Brazil, and the haunting of a cold case.