SUPPER CLUB

Two young women launch a supper club that lets its female-only members embrace their appetites in British writer Williams' (A Selfie as Big as the Ritz, 2017) delicious first novel.

Before Roberta meets Stevie, she is disconnected, depressed, a person to whom life mostly happens, and not always in a good way. Having left the cozy home she shared with her mother for an urban university, she is disappointed to find herself not joyously liberated, as she had imagined she would be, but emotionally confined and isolated from her peers. To kill time, satisfy a hunger for comfort, and buffer herself from academic life and social interactions, she takes up cooking, spending hours in the kitchen of her shared flat conjuring increasingly elaborate dishes and then eagerly devouring them. Roberta lives furtively, apologetically, in time moving on to a generally solitary job at a fashion website. It is there she first encounters Stevie, an aspiring artist who is as free-spirited as Roberta is inhibited, and with whom she forms an immediate bond. “I liked Stevie so much I felt embarrassed….It was like falling in love,” Roberta muses as their friendship deepens, quickly transitioning into a roommate relationship with a distinctly “matrimonial dynamic,” with Roberta delighting in cooking for someone she cares about. Not long into their head-over-heels friendship, the young women hatch an idea that combines Roberta’s knack for cooking and Stevie’s artistic sensibilities and skill for forging social connections: They will form “Supper Club,” an initiative to intermittently bring together women in a bacchanalian celebration of appetite—for food, for connection, for breaking boundaries and occupying space and approaching life on their own terms, without asking permission or offering apology. Eventually, however, in the midst of these energetic enactments of emancipation, Roberta is compelled to confront and contend with the difficulties in her past—especially those related to men who have disappointed and degraded her—and decide where, for what, and with whom she stands. Mixing together insights about food and friendship, hunger and happiness, and the space women allot themselves in the world today, Williams writes with warmth, wit, and wisdom, serving up distinctive characters and a delectably unusual story.

Williams’ debut novel will satisfy your craving for terrific writing and leave you hungry for more from this talented writer.