The Enlightenment Club
"I liked this book for its complete disdain for the way in which most contemporary novels get written - reticent, unobtrusive, but delicately written and with big themes boiling away beneath the surface, and above all, harbouring a sense of the random, if not chaotic, way in which the majority of lives get lived."
Critic and novelist DJ Taylor
"Clever, intriguing - Stella is a very good voice."
Beryl Bainbridge
Stella Tranter wants to be a Nietzschean heroine, proudly blazing an intensely personal trail through late 70s Britain – campus radicalism, punk…
The trouble is that she’s also rather shy, given to ironic self-observation and keener on Mozart than Siouxsie and the Banshees.
But is it really enough for her to marry well-meaning Rotarian Bobby and settle down to domestic bliss in Dulwich…?
The Enlightenment Club is a gentle, witty, very English novel about a gentle, witty and very English young woman and her search for a meaningful life.
It is the first of three novels in a trilogy of interlinked stories. I am working on the next one, Orange and Blue, about a young musician growing up in Belfast at the time of the troubles.
