Just Finished Reading … The Revenge Club by Kathy Lette. London: Head Of Zeus, 2024

 Four women, university friends, have reunited after many years. They have all become successful professionals. Jo is a special effects artist in Hollywood who has returned to London to work at Pinewood. Penny is a highly successful TV journalist who has been in war zones. Cressida was an actress until her ambitious  lawyer husband Rupert persuaded her to throw her energies into his career instead. Matilda, the Aussie of the group, is a novelist with fifteen successful books behind her, and a new one she is expecting to get a contract for, as usual. They are all very good at what they do. 

Unfortunately, they have all committed the crime of reaching middle age in a man’s world. 

Jo, who knows all about special effects, experiments with living as a man. She hasn’t transitioned, she just wants to see what will happen if she applies for the job she lost, as a man. 

It works. Now she has met her old friends, all of whom have lost their jobs because they are no longer young and attractive to their bosses, and one of whom, Cressida, has found her husband in bed with a pretty young thing. He doesn’t want a divorce, as that will spoil his chances of getting a job in the High Court, and makes her life difficult, to stop her divorcing him. 

This is the start of the Revenge Club, when the four meet to plot ways to make the men who wronged them pay for what they have done…

Kathy Lette is best known in Australia for the book Puberty Blues, written with Gabrielle Carey, which became a film and a TV series. She has written a lot more since then, but this is her most recent novel. I bought it after hearing the author interviewed on the radio. 

The novel is good fun, with an over the top story. I read it in a day and a night. I don’t read much mainstream fiction, but thoroughly enjoyed this one.

Definitely a story for anyone who enjoyed the film The First Wives Club! 

It has just been released, but should be available everywhere soon.