Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson is a lively and richly detailed novel set in post-WWI London, where nightclubs, crime, and intrigue collide. The story centers around Nellie Coker, a shrewd and powerful club owner, as she navigates the dangerous world of ambition and corruption. Atkinson’s signature blend of sharp humor and historical depth brings 1920s London to life, with colorful characters and an engaging plot full of twists. The novel’s atmospheric setting and fast-paced narrative make it an entertaining read for fans of historical fiction with a dash of wit and drama.

This review originally published in <a href="http://www.lookingforagoodbook.com">Looking For a Good Book</a>. Rated 3.0 of 5

It is 1926 and London is still reeling from the Great War, but it is the age of jazz, booze, and gaiety as the people find ways to enjoy life after so much death. SoHo is where the liveliest action happens and it's there that Nellie Coker, ambitious and cut-throat nightclub owner takes charge. She will do anything and everything so that her six children can get ahead in life.

But Nellie isn't subtle about anything she does and her ruthlessness may be the death of her. Steamrolling through life will bring about more than a few enemies who don't like being pushed out of the way. And the best way to hurt Nellie Coker is stop her children from getting ahead.

The Roaring Twenties are in full steam and Nellie is the lion roaring loudest.

I've never read anything by Kate Atkinson prior to this, but I've seen her name as I've browsed the book stores. I don't know if this is the sort of book she usually tends to write (historical fiction/mystery) but I enjoy this time period (as do a lot of readers, apparently) and it didn't look like a book late in a series, so I decided this would be a good book to start.

While I've read more than a few books set in the 1920's, I can't recall off hand how many of them have been set in England. Perhaps because I'm American, I tend to think of the Roaring Twenties, with its jazz music and revelers and flappers, as uniquely American. Clearly I'm wrong. (I blame history education classes.) But I liked this time-frame and I liked this location. Atkinson makes this sound like an energetic, fun Dickens story.

Except for the characters.

Nellie Coker is a nicely defined character, but everyone around her is quite bland. And that's a LOT of blandness. There's a Dickens-worth of characters here but the people in Atkinson's book are ... well ... dull. Nobody other than Nellie stands out enough to care about them and the plot is generally slow enough that the characters aren't given anything to do until so late in the book that it doesn't matter anymore.

I had hoped for a little more gaiety in this book, given its title and historical timeframe, but the book was quite a slog. It did not make me eager to read something else by Kate Atkinson.

Looking for a good book? Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson, set in 1926 England, disappoints.
I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

I struggled to get through this, my attention wandered both on audio and the Kindle, but I managed to finish it. Too many characters, too many disparate plots, too many loose threads and questions. I do enjoy books set during the roaring twenties though.

Nellie Coker is the queen of the 1920's club scene. She has four or five clubs, each one managed by one of her children. Nellie has just gotten out of prison and is ready to take back the reins. But there is trouble brewing. The police are closing in with a new Superintendent determined to bring Nellie and the rest of the Cokers down for good this time. Two other men prominent in the underground life of London want all that Nellie has built up and they sense she might be weak at the moment.

Into this swirl of events steps Gwendolyn Kelling. Gwen was a nurse during the first world war and is at loose ends now that it has ended. She was working as a librarian but when she found that she had inherited money she decided to move to London. Two local girls had run off there and Gwen promised the families she would look for the girls. But she is pulled into the nightclub scene. The new Superintendent wants her to spy on the Cokers. The eldest Coker son is entranced with Gwen and is courting her and Nell has offered her a club to run. Will Gwen betray the family? Will she find the girls?

Most readers know Kate Atkinson from her Jackson Brodie detective series. But she has written other novels that explore feminine power and this one is a great example. Both Nell and Gwen are independent women full of plans and goals and determined to do whatever it takes to fulfill them. There are lots of subplots and many fascinating characters and the reader wonders how she will ever resolve everything. But Atkinson always has a satisfactory ending and this novel is no different. Everything is wrapped up with knowledge of what happens with all the many characters and plots. This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.

Atkinson's Shrines of Gaiety is set in 1926 London and starts off with the prison release of Nelle Coker, the queen of local clubs. Nelle has had much success with her many clubs, but is starting to pass the reins over to her children but there's some upheaval and nefarious goings on that are making it hard for the clubs to survive.
This book had a rather sprawling plot and cast of characters that often made it difficult to discern what was going on but it had the effect of making me feel like it was on purpose to keep the reader off kilter to engage in the mystery and upheaval of the time frame. I enjoyed this book quite a bit even with the off kilter feeling but the ending felt a bit rushed and I feel like some of the characters were short-changed in their send offs. Thanks to NetGalley & Doubleday for the free e-book.

I am a huge fan of the author and have read most of her books. I didn't get a chance to finish the DRC before it expired but I plan to buy the book and will definitely read it soon!

When I saw that Kate Atkinson had a new novel being published this fall, I was anxiously awaiting its arrival. And spoiler alert, I loved it. Kate Atkinson can WRITE.
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It’s 1926 London and the country is still feeling the effects of the Great War. The nightlife has become notorious and attracts people from all walks of life from gangsters to corrupt cops and young women who want to perform. The queen of the clubs is Nellie Coker who has created an empire, one that others want to possess. She’s a shrewd businesswomen and a not very maternal mother of six. The nature of her business is dangerous, not just for her, but those in her employ.
There’s now way for me to do this book justice. It has a huge cast of characters that took me a minute to get straight, but they all became individually vivid in my mind as the story progressed. I came to care about each of them, even the morally questionable ones. I love this look at Roaring Twenties London. There were some Peaky Blinders moments for me, and I could totally picture Nellie’s clubs. I was completely absorbed and sad when it ended. Loved it.
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Ma Coker is being released from prison. Detective Inspector John Frobisher sits in his car watching the spectacle of her release. Her children crowd around her for the camera. The notorious Queen of Clubs got locked up for a minor infraction, but Frobisher knows that she is rotten and he will make it his life's work to see her back behind bars for good. His job is to root out corruption and catch the bad guys, even if they're coppers. Because to have avoided prison for so long Ma Coker has to have someone on the inside and Frobisher is seconded to the Bow Street police station to find out just who that is. Which is how he met Gwendolyn Kelling. Miss Kelling is a mild mannered librarian from York. After the death of her mother she has surprisingly come into quite a bit of money. Two girls from York have gone missing; Freda Murgatroyd and Florence Ingram. Miss Kelling is friends with Freda's half-sister Cissy and Gwendolyn agrees to go to London to look for them. Freda is a silly girl with dreams of being an actress and she obviously just dragged Florence along for company. But these kind of girls can get chewed up and spit out by London and they often end up working in Ma Coker's clubs. So when Miss Kelling shows up at the police station asking for help Frobisher is entranced by the young woman. She's so forthright, so put together, unlike his wife, that he will think up any reason to see more of her. Therefore he says he'll get his men looking into the girls disappearance, but that she might want to check out the clubs, and if she's going to go there she could help him. Miss Kelling is up for the challenge. She walks into the Amethyst, the crown jewel of Ma Coker's clubs, on the arm of an undercover cop, and ends up helping out a gang member who's been shot. This brings Miss Kelling to the attention of Ma Coker. She could use someone like Gwendolyn. Someone able to stand her ground and have a cool head in a crisis. Therefore she asks the librarian from York if she wouldn't mind running a night club. It even comes with it's own apartment. Miss Kelling jumps at the opportunity. She claims for DI Frobisher it's so she can help him from the inside, but maybe, just maybe, it's because she's drawn to Ma's oldest son, Niven. There's something about him that is intriguing. With all the clubs and all the people and the seething vast metropolis, anything is possible, but one thing is certain, at this moment in time London revolves around Ma Coker. But with an enemy list as long as hers how long will this last?

Over the past few years historical fiction set during the roaring twenties has undergone a seismic shift. Books about the "bright young things" are no longer the rage, instead the focus has shifted to those of a lower economic class. The shift started by first embracing an Upstairs, Downstairs vibe, the we're all in this together and together we can get through this. But the world has changed, a pandemic, poverty, and political upheaval has worn us all down. The best example to hand is Downton Abbey. When the first movie arrived on screens in 2019 I adored it, the cast of characters pulling together for King and Country. When Downton Abbey: A New Era arrived in 2022 with the characters flaunting their wealth and vacationing on the Riviera, I couldn't help thinking, perhaps Julian Fellowes should have read the room. This wasn't the escape I was personally looking for after two years of hell. In fact it made me hate all the Crawley family for their excesses. How dare they behave this way? And I wasn't the only one who felt this way, the fact the film made $100 million less kind of speaks for itself. Which is why readers are right pointing out that this is the book that speaks to us now, there's pain and suffering after the end of the first world war and we're focusing on the lower classes who are fleecing the parasitic bright young things. Criminals are the new heroes, I mean just look how many books have been written about Alice Diamond in the past few years and you can see the trend that Julian Fellowes was blind to. And Kate Atkinson has a way with creating memorable characters. This book might be said to have a somewhat bloated cast, one of my friends thinks there were twenty-six "main" characters, but when I started to add it up I think it was higher. Because there is no such thing as a minor character in this book. Everyone gets a backstory, everyone has their lives lovingly told in beautiful language right up until the moment Kate Atkinson got bored with them all. That is the only way I can explain how this book ended. She wrote these complex, if very self-centered characters and then just stopped. Did she hit her allotted word count? Because she kills off DI Frobisher in a death that is almost stupider than Dan Stevens's on Downton Abbey and it opened up of the floodgates; jumping all the over twentieth century clinically listing when and how the characters died, but stoutly refusing to solve Florence's disappearance or Vivian Quinn's murder. Though what made me furious with this book, beyond all the unresolved plotlines, is that Gwendolyn and Niven's future and romantic fate is "suspended between coming and going forever." That is where she left the main narrative? Now that is a hanging offense.

Note to self: stop trying to listen to Atkinson’s books. I have enjoyed the books I’ve read by her, but every time I try to listen, I have problems following the plot. More literary writers are like this. From now on, I’ll read her books. I did catch on to the love story between the investigator and his recruit, but most of the rest of the plot was lost of me. Maybe I’ll read the book some day.

No one writes high-brow historical fiction quite like Kate Atkinson. She threads the needle between genre fiction and compulsively readable mysteries and crime novels. Shrines of Gaiety is another great novel.

While the excitement of the plot takes some time to build, Atkinson has such beautiful prose that you won't mind continuing on until the story picks up. The story jumps around in perspectives and timelines but you manage to come out the other side fulling engrossed in the tale of Nellie Coker, her children, associates, and antagonists.

Full of the Roaring 20s corruption and charming façade, Shrines of Gaiety is sure to please readers of mysteries, crime, and historical fiction.

I think this would make a great book club book for a literary driven book discussion. Definitely a super dense read, but very well constructed.

I started off a bit confused with this one but ultimately did end up enjoying it. I typically bond with the female characters in the books I read and this novel was no different. The story is written eloquently after you gather your bearings and get everything straight.

Kate Atkinson once again delivers in “Shrines of Gaeity”. The novel begins in 1920s London with characters awaiting the release from jail ofthe notorious Nellie Coker, a savvy business woman of London’s underworld. Nellie, the owner of several nightclubs, and her many children constantly are dodging the law while living on the outskirts of high society. Because of the Cokers’ lifestyle, they are under surveillance of Frobisher, a detective, and are in kahoots with a crooked cop and his associate. Intermingled with Coker’s story is the mystery of dead girls floating down the Thames, a librarian hired to infiltrate the Coker family, and two runaways. Atkinson effectively shows the lasting effects of war since many of the characters were in WWI or lost someone in the war. It seems like WWI is a ghost who haunts all the characters.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, it would be beyond most of my high school students except for a few in Advanced Placement Literature & Composition. It is obvious that Atkinson researched not only the time period, as there are many allusions to historical events, literature, and people.

Thank you to Kate Atkinson, Doubleday Books, and NetGalley for the ARC.

This book had so much potential. It is by Kate Atkinson! It is set in London! It has a (potentially) immersive plot and list of characters. Unfortunately, for me, it fell flat. It is as if you had all the ingredients for a great cake but somehow it was just okay.
I could see what Atkinson was trying to do with the novel and at times it almost got there. However, it never quite achieved the levels of greatness that some of her other works have. The characters felt a little one-dimensional and the plot was convoluted. Ultimately, I didn't care about either plot or characters.
That does not mean it is a terrible book. After all, even an okay cake is still cake and most of us love cake. It had some good elements. Atkinson has a way with words and any book she writes is going to be clever.
This isn't going on my shelves to be read over and over as Life After Life is but I'll be eagerly awaiting Atkinson's next novel.

London of over 100 years ago is eager to recover form WWI’s carnage and nightclubs offer all kinds of vice. Good times can be found in five establishments run by middle-aged Nellie Coker who at the beginning of the story has just been released from prison. To keep her empire thriving Nellie relies on her network of sons and daughters plus policemen who are paid off the books to alert her to any trouble. Entering Nellie’s orbit is Gwendolen Kelling, a spirited spinster of not yet 30 whose time in the trenches as a combat nurse seemed to suit her far more than her current job as a librarian. Gwendolen teams up with straight arrow police inspector John Frobisher to clamp down on the nightclubs. Lines between good and evil are blurred in Atkinson’s tale that is both complex and engaging.

Shrines of Gaiety is a rollicking novel with Dickensian-like characters that takes place in Soho after the Great War. Nellie Coker, mother of six grown children and clever entrepreneur, gets our of jail as the novel begins, and she proceeds to amass money at her various clubs and make some enemies at the same time. The plot is frequently dark but simultaneously funny and full of genius interactions. The children are all different, and they participate in the satire and romance with gusto. There is crime, humor, corruption, and secrets that lend the book many directions for the reader to proceed.

As well as the dysfunctional family, the book has detectives, with at least one with an intriguing, secret, and rather dark home life, There are also naive young women who come to London from the country looking for the proverbial fame and fortune. More than once, a deus ex machina is required to move the plot forward, and just when things seem to be proceeding fairly comfortably, they go off the rails. Certainly there is nothing comfortable or terribly logical about the book, but it does provide the reader with a certain sense of delight and interest in what will happen next.

I am a huge Kate Atkinson fan. This book got off to a bit of a slow start but I was very interested in seeing where we ended up. Atkinson clearly did a tremendous amount of research and it shows. While not my favorite of her novels, it was a fun way to pass a few hours and covered a subject I knew very little about previously.

Miss Atkinson is irreverent. Thank God. Her work is carefully researched, characters well-developed, and yet she is not at all stuffy. She is not overly serious, She knows her stuff and doesn't hide behind convention, and so are her characters.

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson is a book about corruption in 1920's London club scene. It shows perspectives of the club owners, the cops trying to take them down and the people who get pulled down in the muck with them. The characterization has really clever tidbits about every character and what their hopes and dreams are. The story is a bit of a mess since we get about 20 character perspectives and the story is sometimes told out of order. I'm familiar with this approach and felt it was way better done in her novel Case Histories but that is only with 5 perspectives compared to 20. When you get 20 or so characters your going to get characters the reader doesn't care for and I didn't care for 7 out of the 20. The story was interesting but I did not gel with the way it was told pretty much from the beginning. This was one of my most anticipated books of the year because my favorite book of all time is Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. Where that book is pretty linear I prefer that writing style from her. This book would have been so much better if it followed 5 perspectives that up to 20. for those that read it I would have chose, Nelly, Frobisher, Niven, Gwendolyn, and Freda maybe add Ramsey , but that is it, cut out all the random perspectives, or family members that don't matter. The climax was okay it jumped around a lot because of all the perspectives so we just get bits and pieces of it I much preferred the club shooting to the climax. The pace was not bad but the changes in perspective slowed it down. Thanks to Netgalley and Doubleday Books for giving me a copy to review. Shrines of Gaiety is published on September 27 2022.

Plot Summary: Nellie Coker has just been released from prison, she a club owner of 5 of the premiere clubs of London, and rival club owners, ex-lovers, and the police are trying to take her and her clubs down. Nellie has 5 kids that have been running he business while she was out and likes it that way. Frobisher is a cop that wants to take her down mainly because of the clubs deals in prostitutions of young girls. Frobisher runs into Gwendolyn of York as she is chasing down to girls who left York for London and dream of fame. Frobisher thanks Gwendolyn would be a great undercover agent since she has to go into the clubs anyway and recruits her to spy. Gwendolyn catches the eye of Niven Coker Nellie's son and lets her get in close to the family and the clubs. Freda one of the missing girls will experience the mean streets of London as she finds out fame comes with a price.

What I Liked: Gwendolyn and Frobisher were by far my favorite characters and the most fleshed out. I did like the running gag of London is cursed by King Tut as his remains were recently found and on display in London. I thought the clubs were interesting and wish they were featured a little bit more. I like what happens to Freda and Ramsey's characters at the end. I liked the time period of 1920's London it is one I have not read a lot of.

What I Disliked: Too many characters ruin the momentum of the book and the extra perspectives just weren't needed. I felt the serial killer plot was a real letdown and could have been featured more but felt like an after thought.

Recommendation: This hurts me not to recommend but this book was a miss for me on many levels. I will say this book does have it's fans who enjoyed the book far more than me since it is nominated for Best Historical Fiction in Goodreads Choice Awards. But the book didn't work out for me and can not recommend it to my followers. Do please read Life After Life by Kate Atkinson the book will make you think and take perspective on your own life. I rated Shrines of Gaiety 2 out of 5 stars.

While I've liked most of Atkinson's other works--Life After Life is still one of my all time favorite books--this one just fell flat for me. It was so long and, honestly, confusing. I lost track of all of the characters and as a result had a hard time caring about any of them.