The Radcliffe Ladies’ Reading Club Julia Bryan Thomas

For readers of Martha Hall Kelly and Beatriz Williams, “a story of female freedom and constraints that doesn’t shy away from the trauma—and joy—that faced U.S. women”(Kirkus) during a pivotal period in American history. Literature impacts us all uniquely — but also unites us. Massachusetts, 1954. Alice Campbell escapes halfway across the country and finds herself in front of a derelict building tucked among the cobblestone streets of Cambridge, and she turns that sad little shop into the charming bookstore of her dreams. Tess, Caroline, Evie, and Merritt become fast friends in the sanctuary of Alice’s monthly reading club at The Cambridge Bookshop, where they escape the pressures of being newly independent college women in a world that seems to want to keep them in the kitchen.