Kate Atkinson is a great writer. She tends to write two types of novel: powerful historical ones depicting 20th century life like Behind The Scenes at the Museum or Life After Life and griping crime thrillers featuring her hero, Jackson Brodie. Her new book is pretty much a combination of the two.
Basically, it focuses heavily on the ups and downs of a fictional major crime family in a world still reeling from the devastating impact of the Great War in the 1920s. It's a bit like the recent TV drama, Peaky Blinders but much lighter and funnier than that was. It also alternates between York and London.
It's good.

The setting is 1926, London and (Ma) Nellie Coker is just being released from Holloway. She's the owner of several nightclubs, while she was in prison her adult children have been keeping them going, but there's trouble as others want to nab her clubs at a bargain basement price. Chief Inspector John Frobisher of Scotland Yard has been sent to Bow Street Police Station to shake it up a bit, there's police corruption and he intends to stop it, with a bit of undercover help. I really enjoyed this one which has what seems like an authentic post WW1 atmosphere with interesting characters and plot.
I was sent a digital copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley, to review.

With such a vast array of colourful characters, it is inevitable that description gets in the way of action. No sooner did I become involved with one character, then the narrative moved onto another setting. Much as I enjoyed the novel, I found this jumping around a little disconcerting and interrupted the flow of the novel. .
This gritty story of post war London underworld was interesting and illuminating.

I enjoyed this book a lot, the time period is one of my favourites and I felt that Kate Atkinson captured the variety of experiences well within her range of characters. The plot was well constructed, with humour and kindness too, and with an especially enjoyable denouement. I appreciated the inclusion of queer characters, although a little more happiness might have been better too!

Overall an enjoyable book that I can definitely see myself rereading

*I received a free ARC from NetGalley and the publisher*

A riotous and murderous look at London’s nightlife scene in the 1920s!

The book took me a little while to be gripped by, largely due to quite a lot of characters who take a while to become connected. The story picks up once though and is a wonderful fictional look at a historical period.

Nellie is a self made nightclub mogul who is trying to keep her businesses and her family afloat. However her lucky start may be about to come to an end.

Great characters who all interplay brilliantly. The impression is of a world full of duplicity!

A great writing style that keeps you reading.

Kate Atkinson is one of my favourite authors and I was so pleased to be given access to this title.
The story, like its 1920s London setting, fizzes along with a cast of characters from all walks of life. It is set In a world where the upper echelons of society mix with the criminal underbelly in the nightclubs of Soho.
The central family, the Cokers operate the nightclubs and are being challenged on all sides by both other criminals and the police - and even the police may not be on the side of law and order. Ma Coker is the queen of the family and the nightclubs, and trying to ensure her family and wealth survives. Gwedoline Keeling has come to London to search for 2 missing girls,
Atkinson combines comedy, mystery and well drawn characters to create a memorable story which was thoroughanky enjoyable. A good read!

“The war was history, and history didn’t interest Freda, she’d had no part in it. She was vibrant with the present and hungry for the future.”

Shrines Of Gaiety is the fifth stand-alone novel by award-winning, best-selling British author, Kate Atkinson. It’s in the late spring of 1926 that the notorious Nellie Coker is released from Holloway prison, having served six months for a liquor licencing offence. Clearly, her paid policeman, DI Arthur Maddox, has fallen down on the job. Probably intentionally, Nellie thinks, and planning to take over her business as his own.

Her five nightclubs have been operating under the management of her adult children, but her stint in jail has diminished her. Nellie has her finger firmly on the pulse, though: she realises that Maddox isn’t the only threat she faces, and she won’t go down without a fight.

Gwendolen Kelling has come from York to look for two fourteen-year-old runaway girls. Freda Murgatroyd, half-sister of Gwendolen’s friend, Cissy has dragged her best friend Florence Ingram to London, promising a singing and dancing career on the stage. The reality isn’t as sparkly as they had hoped, but Freda is determined. She may not be entirely street-smart, but she’s far from the naiveté Florence evinces.

Having lost two brothers in the war, a father to illness, and then cared for her demanding, dying mother, Gwendolen quits her job at the library and seeks out DCI John Frobisher at Bow Street Police Station, assured that he is the man to help her find the girls. Frobisher is, indeed, concerned about the number of girls going missing in London over the last few months, believing that Nellie Coker’s clubs are swallowing them up.

Frobisher is on secondment from Scotland Yard, at Bow Street to root out the corruption that is rife. He is convinced that Maddox is the main actor, but the man remains frustratingly absent from duty, and Frobisher is unsure which of the men at Bow Street can be trusted: who knows if they are in league with Maddox? The ones that aren’t lazy or stupid, that is.

Frobisher quickly decides that there is clearly more to this librarian than meets the eye, and Miss Kelling’s timely arrival somehow has him sending a civilian undercover into Nellie’s citadel club, The Amethyst. She might spot her runaways there; she might just see something else useful…

Once again, Atkinson has written a brilliant story with a wholly believable plot that twists and surprises. In a tale that includes murder, blackmail, theft, corruption, and a prostitution racket, there is also plenty of dark humour, some delicious irony, a few farcical near-misses, and dialogue with many amusing mental asides. Loyalty, trust and a perceived lack thereof, also feature.

As well as main characters of surprising depth, Atkinson gives the reader a marvellously entertaining support cast: a war veteran who rescues damsels in distress, a somewhat precocious, perceptive pre-teen who fends well for herself, an aspiring novelist inclined to melodrama, a dissolute gossip columnist, and a jewel thief bent on revenge.

She gives them insightful observations: “Men talked in order to convey information or to ruminate on cricket scores and campaign statistics. Women, on the other hand, talked in an effort to understand the foibles of human behaviour. If men were to ‘gossip’, the world might be a better place. There would certainly be fewer wars”

Her extensive research into the era is apparent on every page, and as always, she is expert at setting a scene rich in detail with succinct descriptive prose: “The Cokers all had very eloquent eyebrows. They could conduct entire conversations with them, without saying a word” and “Sometimes he thought he could feel the weight of history in London pressing down on the top of his head” and “Much as he disliked being chained to his desk – Frobisher bound, his liver pecked at by bureaucracy – this pointless trailing around was time-wasting” are examples. Superlative historical fiction.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Random House UK Transworld

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson writes so beautifully, with her characters and in the way that she sets the scene. This time we're in London's underworld in the 1920s. There are a large number of characters, which I did find challenging, but their lives interact beautifully and it all connects. This isn't my favourite novel by the author but still very well done.

I was hooked on this from the start. It is set after WW1 in London. The matriarch of the family has just been released from prison. She runs several nightclubs in Soho. We also hear the story of the police trying to nail the family in their illicit activities. And we get some of the stories of the girls who work in the club. And then there is a mystery of a number of dead bodies being washed up. All of the stories are woven together neatly. There is a great wrap up in the end, so we get to see where everybody ends up. I got this book for free from @netgalley @transworldbooks Publishing date 27 September.

I love Kate Atkinson's writing and have done for many, many years- but this just didn't quite do it for me. My bad- I think I loved Life After Life and its premise so much that I wanted something similar, and this is a much more straightforward novel. Having said that, it does have all the trademarks of a great Kate Atkinson novel- interesting characters, sparkling dialogue, humour, and a richly-painted setting. Maybe it was a case of wrong book at the wrong time for me and perhaps I'll revisit it and love it more, but it just wasn't quite what I had expected.

Enormous thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

How to review this without being ostracised by the book community? My honest opinion? More bad than good I’m afraid, and judging by other reviews I seem to be in a minority of one.

At over 440 pages, this book started on a back foot for me, as anything above 300-350 pages seems wasteful. It takes a good book to really warrant a longer page count, and sadly, I was deeply disappointed with this one.

This has got one of the largest casts of characters I’ve read in a long time and it took a long time for me to fully understand who was who and how they were related and how their stories were linked, and I think it would have been beneficial to the reading if some of these characters were dropped.

A lot of the early reviews I’d read said there was a strong Dickensian quality to it. As an avid Dickens enthusiast, I saw nothing of the sort anywhere in this book. Not in the writing style or the themes chosen so I’m not sure what they’re suggesting.

For a book that’s not too far off 500 pages, very little happens. There’s a lot of padding and a lot of describing things, but very little plot. I couldn’t confidently tell you what the main plot, or the secondary stories, was actually about, which is a shame - it just sort of plods along with no real aim.

Some of the storylines seemed unfinished or undeveloped and you wonder why it was even in there to begin with. You may read the start of a plot point, and then it’s not touched upon again for several chapters and you’ve already forgotten who they were or what was happening. It all seemed very slow but very rushed at the same time.

I will end on a positive though. What she has excelled at in this book is presenting the ups and downs of 1920s nightlife, a post-war underworld of drugs, drinking, crime and death.

A great read. Kate's books are always so well written and I think this one is heartbreaking and I loved the characters. Thank you netgalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

It is 1926 and Nellie Coker, matriarch of her large family, is released tomorrow prison having served her time or numerous dubious activities a the strain of Soho clubs that she owns and runs. Her phenomenal success in London is astonishing considering that she started her married life in Edinburgh with aa doctor who not only drinks heavily but gambles and it is not long before they are penniless. She cuts her losses and flees to London with her children where they start to make a new life by taking rooms with a friendly old landlady. However, her sudden death, discovered by Nellie, sees them move on once again and from that time life starts to change for the better, but how?

The debauched late 1920’s saw the rise of sleazy night clubs that offer jobs as hostesses to young girls, most of whom have felt the need to head to London to seek fame and fortune., but very few succeed. As the years pass corrupt police officers arrear on the scene as well as criminals, but life continues, or does it?

Kate Atkinson has written another fast-paced and exciting page turner and I was sorry to reach the end!

Shrines if Gaiety by Kate Atkinson is a novel set around the notorious Nellie Coker and her family who ran some of London’s most seediest nightclubs in the 1920’s…lots of dodgy dealings to feast upon!
This is the first book I’ve read by Kate Atkinson and although the basis of the story was good there was just too much overloaded information at times which I found myself drifting off and having to refocus, which wasn’t helpful as there is a lot going on in the storyline. If you’re looking for a thrill which transports you into the dark world of ruthless Soho in the twenties you will enjoy this tale.
Big thanks to Kate Atkinson, Random House UK and NetGalley for this eARC which I chose to read in return for my honest review.

Shrines of Gaiety is set in 1920s London, following the lives of the Coker family and their nightclubs in the capital.

I struggled with this book from the start. So many characters are introduced very quickly, and I got completely lost as to who most were. As such, by the time I'd got them straight in my head, I'd actually lost interest in most of them and really didn't care about what happened. I found myself skim reading sections about certain characters who just seemed surplus to the main story.

That said, the author is very good at weaving amusing situations into what is actually a serious tale about murder, corruption, drug abuse and gang crime. I liked the characters of Freda and Grace, and the description of the pink flat above one of the clubs definitely provided an interesting vision!

I haven't put my review anywhere just because it's not a bad book, it's just not for me. I keep getting lost and don't know what is going on, so unfortunately I have abandoned the book.

Kate Atkinson cannot write a bad book! Every Library should have a whole shelf of all Kate’s books, this is the ultimate example of exceptional fiction. I have never until now been a fan of a Dickensian style of fiction but this equals Charles’ writing.
The characters feel real and you either understand their motivation or at the very least realise why they behave in the way they do, the storyline flows so easily that all of a sudden you find yourself at the end of the book and wonder how that happened and even whether it might be a good idea to start all over again just for the pleasure of revisiting. Thank you Netgalley, publisher and Kate Atkinson for the pleasure of reading this in exchange for an honestly glowing review.

The character of Nellie Coker provides the backbone to this period drama which combines mystery, romance and a healthy dose of Kate Atkinson's customary wry humour. I was totally transported back to the world of illegal London waterholes and the stark contrast between the strict social morals of the 20s and the hedonistic reality going on behind the scenes. I loved Gwendolyn, librarian turned super sleuth as well as the flawed Niven children and was invested in the story from the start. Another Kate Atkinson winner.

I think I was expecting a little more from Ms Atkinson after the fantastic Life after Life .
But having said that I did enjoy it. The notorious Nellie Coker - single handedly built her clubland empire whilst raising her 5 children . Whilst Nellie fights to keep control of her empire -there are young girls going missing and ending up in the Thames . These girls have links to the clubs Nellie owns and Detective Frobisher is determined to bring Nellie down . , It was an easy read -no surprises really and I thought the end was wrapped up a bit sharpish

Thankyou NetGalley in return for an honest review

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

1920s Soho, a place where the lingering loss of war tries to soothe a traumatised population with an exuberant release of gambling, wild partying and hedonism. The opportunity for fortunes to be made invites a tussle for power between dubious,entrepreneurial night club owners and corrupt law enforcement. Add to this, the draw of naive youth from the provinces, to the legendary golden paved streets of the capital.

The author paints a colourful vibrant canvas, which she then populates with detailed, well drawn, believable characters. Their lives, so different from each other, yet so carefully interwoven, bring this story to life.