Oh what a tangle this story is, in a good way. The Briar Club by Kate Quinn is about the women renting rooms at Briarwood House, a down-at-heel all-female boarding house in Washington DC. Starting off as a group of individuals, they slowly bond at their Thursday supper night. The story starts on the night Thanksgiving in 1954 with a prologue in the voice of the house. There’s a dead body in the attic and there is blood everywhere. Police are questioning witnesses. The narrative then backtracks four years. Set in the post-war McCarthy era when communists are reported by friends, family, neighbours and colleagues, at the time of this story no one feels immune from threat of denunciation. Not Bea, the former baseball player with a dodgy knee. Not Fliss, mother of baby Angela, both waiting for Fliss’s doctor husband Dan to come home from the Korean war. Not Nora, secretary at the National Archives, whose police officer brother steals her rent money.
At first The Briar Club seems long and languorous, taking its time to tell the background story of each female lodger one at a time. This is a clever device that first shows each woman as the others see them, the assumptions made, prejudices assumed, judgements taken; then the real person is revealed in their own viewpoint, the experiences that made them who they are today, the twists and turns of life that made them behave and speak as they do. But then there is a dead body in the attic apartment and the tangles become twisted, knotted and dangerous to everyone. Is it a lover’s tiff or something more sinister? Is it the reds? This is the time of the HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee] investigations, set against a rough Washington background of gangsters, sleaze, knife crime and wife-beating. The Thursday night Briar Club get-together gives the women a safe place to be themselves.
The first voice we hear in 1950 doesn’t belong to one of the lodgers but to Pete Nilsson, son of the landlady. When Pete is on the front stoop mending the screen door, he is interrupted by a tall woman wearing a red beret. She enquires about a room to rent and 13-year old Pete instantly falls in love. Grace March takes the dingy room, as big as a shoebox with dull green walls. Grace is the sun around which the lodgers and the story revolve. She is both at the centre of everything, seemingly all-knowing, all-seeing, but remaining an enigma. It is Grace who suggests a Thursday night supper club, it is Grace who encourages the other ladies to club together to buy spectacles for Pete’s younger sister Lina, and it is Grace who first encourages Lina’s attempts at baking despite the frequent burnt offerings. She is the bringer of light and flowers into a grubby house, the one who notices everything and knows how to keep a secret.
The stately telling of a complicated story, slow for the first 60% until the strands become entwined, character connections are made and deeply-held secrets and opinions are unveiled. From the beginning this is a consummate picture of the lives of women in 1950s Washington DC at the time of the communist witch hunts. Opportunities for women are changing post-war though many are still trapped by marriage, racism, expectations and low wages. The story starts with a mystery that becomes consuming as the paths of the fictional women cross with real-life historical people and events. And I loved that the house is given its own voice, because Briarwood House too seems a member of the Briar Club.
Very good. Slower in parts than the other Quinn novels I’ve read. All are different and I’ve enjoyed every one of them. The Briar Club morphed from a 4* to a 5* towards the end as I realised I wanted to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

Here are my reviews of two other novels by Kate Quinn:-
THE DIAMOND EYE
THE ROSE CODE

If you like this, try:-
‘Shrines of Gaiety’ by Kate Atkinson
‘Before the Fall’ by Noah Hawley
‘The Chase’ by Ava Glass #1ALIASEMMA

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE BRIAR CLUB by @Kate_Quinn https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-8mt via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:-