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A Novel
by Rachel Mills
For fans of Lessons in Chemistry and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, a bold, big concept debut about a secret club of women who risk everything to ask the question: If you could be anyone…who would you dare to become?
Beth Greenwood has spent her life playing it safe. She's been a graphic designer at the same company for a decade, she dutifully meets men from the apps for dinner and sometimes casual sex, she thinks about decorating her sterile, small apartment. Her comfort and joy are her Sunday catch-ups with her sister Elspeth, whose perfect life, very different from Beth's, has recently started to unravel.
One day, Beth meets a woman who invites her to join a secret club. It's not knitting or books; it's living out an experience you've always wanted to have. Cirque du Soleil acrobat, gonzo graffiti artist, performer in the BDSM underground scene: these women will get you everything you need in order to—temporarily—be the person you might have been, had your life taken one or two different turns.
At first Beth is dazzled by her new friendships and the opportunity they offer her to test the boundaries of her identity, to escape from her quiet, ordinary life. But even the best of clubs can offer only so much distraction, and when the stakes of Beth's real life become uncomfortably high, she must ask herself, really and truly, who she's going to choose to be, and who is going to nurture her when she needs it most.
The Players Club is a high-concept but grounded debut about the power of female friendship, the bonds that hold us in place, the human need for creativity, and the seductive possibility of reinvention. As immersive as it is incisive, it introduces Rachel Mills as a wise and warm chronicler of the human heart.
"Mills takes big risks here but always manages to nail the landing. An original, surprisingly moving tale." —Kirkus Reviews
"[I]ntriguing if tonally uneven...The result is a striking but flawed tale of a woman's identity crisis." —Publishers Weekly
"Clever, brilliant and magnificent. In the absence of being able to join a Life-Playing Cradle, the next best thing is reading this." —Cathy Rentzenbrink, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Last Act of Love
"Original, layered, thoughtful and mind-bendingly plausible ... had me thinking about it a lot, even when I wasn't reading it." —Jennie Godfrey, author of The List of Suspicious Things
"Masterful, wise, and deeply moving, Mills dissects the complexities of time passing and the power of choice with empathy and precision. The Players Club is a breathtaking look at the masks we wear, and who we truly are once we take them off." —Kathy Wang, author of The Satisfaction Cafe
This information about The Players Club was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rachel Mills is Director and literary agent at Rachel Mills Literary. She is a regular contributor across UK media, including The Telegraph, Front Row, The Times and as a columnist for the Bookseller.
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