This one split us clean down the middle.

Camp one: Deborah, me, Gail. Camp two: Fiona, Bridget, and the quiet one, who said "I don't care about either of these girls" out loud, in a library, and absolutely meant it.

Deborah's whole argument was about the shoes. She kept returning to the shoes. Her position is that the entire neighbourhood is in those shoes, and if you aren't interested in them you aren't interested in the book — and Fiona said she was extremely interested in the shoes and still found Lenu a bore.

Gail's take, which I've stolen since and used at another club as though I'd thought of it: it's a horror novel about a friendship, and the horror is that Lenu keeps going back.

I'm in the first camp but weakly. It took me a third of the book to care about either of them, and I had to keep flipping to the family list at the front, which I resented and then stopped resenting somewhere around the wedding.

Eight. I've read the second one and haven't told the club, because Fiona will say I'm defecting...