The Group cover art

The Group

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Group

By: Lara Feigel
Narrated by: Helen Duff
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

 '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©2020 Lara Feigel Fiction Friendship Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction

Critic reviews

A very funny and brilliant book. Feigel does a thorough and virtuosic job of describing the dilemmas of contemporary middle-class women (Rachel Cusk)
An elegant, vivid, fascinating novel, with a profound vision of these lives and this moment in our culture. Pure pleasure
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
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
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
Thought-provoking . . . with flashes of brilliant perception
A clever, modern book
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
Crisp and clever
All stars
Most relevant
Forced myself to continue with it having stupidly bought it without checking reviews- never again. Not often I leave poor reviews but I found all the characters dull and uninteresting as I did the book.

Tedious and not good as an audio book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I think this will appeal to others, but not me. There is something mournful about the telling. A fragmented narrative, orchestrated across the perspectives of the members of ‘The Group’, not very effectively. I just didn’t care about the characters. Perhaps it’s too subtle for me.

Pointless

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.