The Club(91)
We’d both like to thank our super-smart and ever kind and supportive agents Emma Finn at C&W and Hillary Jacobson at ICM – we cannot tell you how much we appreciate your wisdom and cheerleading. Luke Speed (thank you for answering our endless questions about everything, we think you are great!) and Anna Weguelin at Curtis Brown; Kate Burton, Jake Smith-Bosanquet, Matilda Ayris and the lovely rights team at C&W.
At Harper, thank you to Doug Jones, our editor Sarah Stein (one day we will go for those pancakes!), Hayley Salmon and Katherine Beitner; the sales, production and publicity and marketing teams; and the art team who created a brilliantly atmospheric cover for The Club.
At Mantle, our editor Sam Humphries, Samantha Fletcher, Alice Gray, and the sales, production, marketing and publicity teams. Our early blurbers, thank you – Harriet Tyce, Cesca Major, Holly Watt, Charlotte Philby, Eliza-Jane Brazier. We really appreciate it!
To the Book of the Month team, and complete legends Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan and the WHSmith team, for selecting our debut novel, People Like Her, to be a pick.
Collette would like to thank: the wordy women on the other end of WhatsApp through successive lockdowns and beyond – Holly Watt, Rebecca Thornton, Alice Wignall, Celia Walden; Sebastian Isaac, Richard Acton and Robert Boon for their professional expertise; Catherine Jarvie and Karolyn Fairs for being our trusted first readers, as always; Lesley McGuire, Sagar Shah, Eleanor O’Carroll and Tanya Petsa for just general everything; Amy Little (we survived!), Graham Banton and the tribe of Banton boys for sanity-saving Sunday walks; Alicia Clarke and Annick Wolfers for their camera skills; the wonderful women of Churchill & Partners – Beverley Churchill, Shelley Landale-Down; and Jo Lee and Dan Henshaw.
For their help, advice, support and encouragement over the years, Paul would like to thank: Cara Harvey, Sarah Jackson, Julia Jordan, Louise Joy, Eric Langley, David McAllister, Adrian Poole, Peter Robinson, Claire Sargent, Oli Seares, Katy Stewart-Moore, Jane Vlitos and John Vlitos, as well as my friends and colleagues in the School of English Literature, Film and Creative Writing at the University of Surrey.
And of course our daughter, who is already in training to join the family band.
Enjoyed The Club?
You’ll love Ellery Lloyd’s thrilling debut novel People Like Her
** A Richard & Judy Book Club Pick **
People like Emmy Jackson. They always have. Especially online, where she is Instagram sensation Mamabare, famous for telling the unvarnished truth about modern parenthood.
But Emmy isn’t as honest as she’d like the fans to believe. She may think she has her followers fooled, but someone out there knows the truth and plans to make her pay . . .
A smart and thrilling debut that delves into the darkest aspects of influencer culture, Ellery Lloyd’s People Like Her is about what you risk losing when you don’t know who’s watching . . .
Turn the page to read an extract now . . .
Prologue
I think it is possible that I am dying.
For quite some time now, in any case, it has felt like I have been watching as my life scrolls past in front of my eyes.
My earliest memory: it is winter, sometime in the early 1980s. I am wearing mittens, a badly knitted hat and an enormous red coat. My mother is pulling me across our back lawn on a blue plastic sledge. Her smile is fixed. I look completely frozen. I can remember how cold my hands were in those mittens, the way every dip and bump of the ground felt through the sledge, the creak of the snow beneath her boots.
My first day at school. I am swinging a brown leather satchel with my name written on a card peeking out from a small plastic window. EMMELINE. One navy knee sock is bunched around my ankle; my hair is in pigtails of slightly unequal length.
Me and Polly at twelve years old. We are having a sleepover at her house, already in our tartan pyjamas, wearing mudpacks and waiting for our corn to pop in the microwave. The two of us in her hallway, slightly older, ready to go to the Halloween party where I had my first kiss. Polly was a pumpkin. I was a sexy cat. Us again, on a summer’s day, sitting cross-legged in our jeans and Doc Martens in a field of stubble. In spaghetti-strap dresses and chokers, ready for our sixth-form leavers’ ball. Memory after memory, one after another, until I find myself starting to wonder whether I can call to mind a single emotionally significant scene from my teenage years in which Polly does not feature, with her lopsided smile and her awkward posing.
Only as I am thinking this do I realise what a sad thought it is now.
My early twenties are something of a blur. Work. Parties. Pubs. Picnics. Holidays. To be honest, my late twenties and early thirties are a bit fuzzy around the edges as well.
There are some things I’ll never forget.
Me and Dan in a photo booth, on our third or fourth date. I have my arm around his shoulders. Dan looks incredibly handsome. I look absolutely smitten. We are both grinning like fools.
Our wedding day. The little wink I’m giving to a friend behind the camera as we are saying our vows, Dan’s face solemn as he places the ring on my finger.
Our honeymoon, the pair of us blissed out and sunburned in a bar on a Bali beach at sunset.
Sometimes it is hard to believe we were ever that young, that happy, that innocent.
The moment that Coco was born, furious and screaming, whitish and snotty with vernix. Scored into my memory forever, that first glimpse of her little squished face. That moment they passed her to me. The weight of our feelings.