I am not a person you have to call to dinner twice, so when offered a book about a group of women who formed a supper club to celebrate unfeminine, belly full, can’t move have to lie down eating - of course I couldn’t pass it by.

We meet Roberta when she leaves a cosy small town to go to university, where she imagines a great adventure awaits: friends, boyfriends, parties, intellectual conversations. And it does. Student halls are full of freshers organising themselves into drinking and socialising. But guess what? She has always been a loner and a loner she stays. She would love to be friends with popular May Ling, but would she go out with her? No. She’d rather stay in her tiny room, lying on a single bed, picturing how fun it could have been to go out with May Ling.

You get so much free time at university it’s unbelievable. It’s up to you how to waste it, and Roberta decides to learn cooking. She creates elaborate meals for herself, aggressively unwilling to share them with flatmates. She starts with stews, reads up cooking tips, graduates to foreign cuisines, and by the time she’s out of uni - becomes an accomplished cook.

Starts a job that is just a way to make a living, befriends a colleague, and out of boredom they decide to experiment with what they think is radical: eating a lot. The idea is that society with its biased beauty standards forces us to be smaller and eat less, so it’s revolutionary to do the opposite. To make it even more rebellious, they break into places to have their five course meals and dance at toplessly.

I’m going to be honest here and say I did not like most of what I’ve read. It felt scattered. Crispy on the outside, undercooked in the middle. Raising a bar when the food was described. Falling back to the mediocre plot. Every now and then we’d get a recipe, out of nowhere, and even though I appreciated paraphrased Julia Child cooking tips (with a due reference given, of course), I’d personally leave them out for a cookbook.

Supper Club is the debut novel of Lara Williams, and it seems that first novel hiccups are not present here. Supper Club is a multitude of things that I will get on to in a moment but if I was to summarise I would say that it is exuberant, riotous and a complete carnival of good fun and good times. A celebration of what it is to be female and an exploration of feminism for millenials.

Supper Club is a gathering of women that takes place, a gathering of friends but more importantly a gathering of women. Women who are jaded, women who want more and women that want to feel free. Supper Club is a party, a carnival and a celebration. Roberta cooks meals that the women eat with abandon and swap stories. There are delightful recipes littered through this book.



Supper Club, for all its parties and hedonism has serious notes that are handled deftly and with intelligence. Flashbacks to Roberta's earlier years and the time she spent at university stick out and were quite difficult to read in places.

This book is intelligent, thought provoking and above all else relatable and memorable. I think we all could do with freedom from our constraints sometimes, to stand out and feel empowered. I feel that the author also tackled the theme of body image in a meaningful way.

Gripping stuff. I would love to read more of this authors work in the future she writes with real flair and insight and great depth.

‘Supper Club’ is the latest book by Lara Williams.

If you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into? Twenty-nine year old Roberta has spent her whole life hungry. So she invents Supper Club: a secret society for women sick of bad men and bad sex. Fed up of being told to talk less, take less, be less, they gather after dark to feast and dance through the night. But as their bodies expand, so do their horizons, their desires – and their urge to break the rules. You look hungry. Join the club.

Supper Club is seen through the narrative of Roberta, who now in her late twenties is trying to find her place in life.

The story is written in past and present sequences, when she’s at university and uses cooking to help settle in and to make friends. Roberta is a shy woman and cooking helps express herself. Years later, she makes friends with Stevie who works with her and they become inseparable, living together and work together. Using their passion for food and entertaining, they come up with an idea for the Supper Club, where they dive dumpsters for food to use for their supper club evenings, inviting women from all backgrounds.

Roberta is an interesting character, she’s trying to find her place in life and after being sexually assaulted at university, has trouble with relationships and believing in her worth. But she has a lovely knack of bringing people of out themselves and we see this from the supper club scenes where people confide in her.

The story is cleverly written focusing on female relationships as well as touching on sexual abuse, eating disorders and the lengths women go to, to fit into society. As Roberta is such a passionate cook, the book is scattered with recipes, which I thought was a lovely inclusion to the story.

A relatable and attentive story about the dynamics and insights of life, body shaming, isolation and pressure, ‘Supper Club’ is a generous helping of feminism, and realism with hearty recipes to get lost in.

You can buy ‘Supper Club’ from Amazon and is available for 99p on the Kindle Store for a limited time.

This book was not what I was expecting at all. It was raw, honest and in-your-face. It is full of rage and passion and hunger. It is disturbing and kind of brilliant, all at once. It reflects a starvation I think all women feel at some point or another in their lives – the need to fill a space we are made to feel we are not allowed to fill.

But in the way that hunger is presented, it transcends into darkness I was not prepared for. It is written full of anger, bluntly discussing rape, self harm and abuse in a way that made me feel almost repulsed. In the middle of a conversation it will bring in the most point blank feelings and thoughts that will jar you out of any sense of connection with the book.

The line between pleasure and revulsion can seem so very thin,

Supper Club follows Roberta through her life at university and 10 years later in an unsatisfying office job with an intern, Stevie. Stevie and Roberta end up living together and start supper club, an answer to their feelings as women of being made to feel small and non-threatening to the world around them. Supper club begins as a gathering of women, and evolves into something bigger and more criminal, with dumpster diving and breaking into venues. These are all an assertion of anger, a way to stand up and say women can take over whatever space they believe they can.

The book is peppered with descriptions of food. Even though these threw me a little when they spoke about meat in a certain way (as a vegan, this became jarring in itself), they were all around beautiful and they reflected the story quite well in the sense of growth, of ever changing and becoming something beautiful.

The plot was interesting and I thought it was paced well, the flashbacks between university and current day were long enough to not confuse the reader, and explained what had made Roberta so angry, the relationships and interactions that left imprints on her for the rest of her life.

Despite this, I still didn’t quite click with Roberta as a main character. Sometimes I related to her, and other times she came across as a selfish brat. I felt like the men in her later life were often dismissed and not sympathised with because of the men she had dealt with in her university years. It almost felt like a pure hate-letter to men in general at some point, which just plainly goes against any moral feelings I have. What I felt was missing in Supper Club was the realisation that in fact Roberta and these women were fighting problems they had with society, and not with men.

if it even exists at all.

The problems I had with the book stemmed mainly from being shocked by the content, so if you are deciding to pick it up, I would recommend it with a harsh warning of the jarring scenes. The execution was actually, I found, quite excellent, the writing passionate and beautiful. Just be prepared to be disturbed, forced to be introspective and constantly question your role as a woman in the modern age.

★★★★
3.5 out of 5 stars