Female friendships, haunting secrets, shadowy characters, and page-turning plots, nobody does it better than New York Times bestselling author Kate Quinn, so you won’t want to miss her book launch event for her next historical novel, The Briar Club.

Join us at Kate’s first event celebrating The Briar Club and be the first to hear about how she captures the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evokes the changing roles for women in postwar America. Kate will be in conversation with New York Times bestselling author Michelle Gable.

Registration

Registration for this event is not required, as it is free and open to the public. However, copies of The Briar Club are available for pre-sale below to be delivered to the event for signing. Books will be also be available for purchase and signing at the event.

About the Author and Book

Kate Quinn is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction. A native of southern California, she attended Boston University where she earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Classical Voice. She has written four novels in the Empress of Rome Saga, and two books in the Italian Renaissance, before turning to the 20th century with The Alice Network, The Huntress, The Rose Code, and The Diamond Eye. All have been translated into multiple languages.

Her new novel, The Briar Club, is a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?

Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.

To schedule a book club visit with Kate or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

About the Moderator

Michelle Gable is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, including her April 2024 release, The Beautiful People.

About the Carlsbad City Library