Gwendolen Kelling is a World War I nurse who, after her service, finds work in a library. She is asked by a friend, Cissy, to go to London to find Freda, Cissy's teenaged half-sister, who ran away to find fame on the West End stage. Gwendolen finds herself working undercover for the police to infiltrate the dancing establishments owed by the Coker family. The historical novel provides a good story about the Jazz Age in Soho, with its dirty cops, dance parlors, and drugs. The true humor in the novel is the running commentary on librarians. Kate Atkinson is to be commended for the dry humor and zingers she throws toward the profession. Absolutely hysterical.

This novel is set in London in the 1920s, covering a sprawling cast of characters - seriously, j lost count of how many third person POVs we saw somewhere after 8 or so. There’s Nellie Coker, a slightly shady nightclub impresario just out of jail, a bunch of her adult children (and young daughter), a policeman trying to take Nellie down and solve the disappearances of a number of young girls, a girl named Freda who has run away to London with her friend Florence, a woman named Gwendolyn who has come to London searching for Freda, and more!

Oh, and in addition to switching POVs, the chapters don’t always proceed in chronological order - you’ll see a scene, and then you’ll see a scene from another character’s point of view that took place before and explains something that happened in the other scene. So, I can’t lie - I spent the first quarter or so of this book feeling pretty confused. But after that, I finally got the hang of who everyone was and somewhat of what was going on, and then I started really getting into it. And as more and more of the characters and plot strands intertwined, I got invested! Only to then have the book end kind of abruptly, with certain plot strands very quickly wrapped up, and others left dangling. So, mixed feelings!

It’s interesting, the early Goodreads reviews for this one are quite glowing, so allow me to interject a little reality into it, even though I’m going to give it 3.75 stars, rounded to 4 for Goodreads purposes. I’m just going to say it - this a complicated and confusing book, best read as quickly as possible in both days and chunks of time spent reading. I’m going to predict that there are going to be A LOT of DNFs of this one. It’s also definitely not well-suited to audiobook form, so read it rather than listen for sure. (Indeed, I was doing a buddy read of this one and 3 of the other 4 beside me gave up on it, and 2 of them were listening to the audiobook.)

All that being said though, I did enjoy it! It was very atmospheric with a great sense of place and time, and the characters and little mysteries were all really interesting. It just was not up there for me with her 5 star masterpieces Life After Life and Case Histories.

3.75 stars

I have been a fan of Kate Atkinson for a while and I enjoyed this book just as I have enjoyed her previous ones. I liked the 1920s setting. Thanks for letting me check it out!

Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, Shrines of Gaiety is a change of pace. Set in 1920s London, the novel opens with the release from Holloway of Nellie Coker, “Old Ma Coker,” a middle-aged woman who presides over an empire of London nightclubs. It’s taken a lot of hard living for Nellie to climb to the top of this world, and it takes even more to stay on top.


Nellie’s brood of children feed off the empire in various ways. She has 5 total: Niven, Edith, Betty, Shirley, Ramsay and Kitty. The “three eldest girls were the crack troops of the family,” with Edith her mother’s “second-in-command.” Edith “understood business and had the Borgia stomach necessary for it.” Nellie’s eldest son, Niven, was conscripted into the army, and survived. Stepping outside of the family, he is now part owner of a car dealership and has various other business interests. With a German Shepherd as his constant companion, Niven is an “enigma” to his family. The youngest son Ramsey feels he’s left out of the family inner circle and is “continually beset by the feeling that he had just missed something. ‘As if,’ he struggled to explain to Shirley, his usual confidante, ‘I’ve walked into a room but everyone else just left it.‘”

One day, Niven assists Gwendolen, a young woman new to London who is mugged on the street. She gets a job managing one of Nellie’s clubs, the Crystal Club, but Gwendolen is a woman on a mission. She’s in London to discover the whereabouts of her best friend’s sister, Freda, who ran away to London with dreams of being a dancer. Gwendolen has connected with Inspector Frobisher to work undercover. The delinquent Coker empire is a house of cards that Frobisher aims to topple.

The filthy, glittering underbelly of London was concentrated in its nightclubs, and particularly the Amethyst, the gaudy jewel at the heart of Soho’s nightlife. It was not the moral delinquency–the dancing, the drinking, not even the drugs–that dismayed Frobisher. It was the girls. Girls were disappearing in London. At least 5 he knew about had vanished over the last few weeks. Where did they go? He suspected that they went through the doors of the Soho clubs and never came out again.

Shrines of Gaiety presents a giddy, tawdry world of 1920s London. Post WWI society craves fun, and dour Nellie Coker, a woman who doesn’t appear to know the meaning of the word, is there to provide it for those who can pay.

We get Nellie’s hard-scrabble back history which goes a long way to explaining the woman she has become. Atkinson based the tale on the real-life Kate Meyrick “The Nightclub Queen.” The novel introduces a lot of characters right away and the novel is best read in large chunks in order to keep the juggling points of multi plot and time lines in the air. The novel’s strength is in its recreation of the times and the atmosphere. And while there are a dizzying number of characters, the novel doesn’t do a deep dive on character but instead the narrative remains on the surface of life: light, dense and expository.

review copy

The setting of this novel in London during the 1920s was marvelous. The author really created a time and place that felt real enough to visit. Unfortunately the characters living there did not exude the same realism. Most felt like stick people without much depth. Whether they were the villains or the heroes, I was unable to care about them. Still, the plot was interesting and it was a mostly enjoyable read.

Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for the ARC to read and review.

I absolutely loved this! Kate Atkinson never disappoints. This was a wild ride through the underbelly of London during the roaring 20s with a large cast of characters who were well-developed and from all walks of life. The story moves quickly and I had a hard time putting this one down. Nellie Coker is the self-made wealthy owner of several London nightclubs and mother to 6 young adult children who are to inherit her empire. Just released from prison, Nellie is anxious to ensure the security of her empire's future while others are anxious to gobble it up by whatever means necessary. Sharp and witty, with mystery and intrigue, murder and a little romance, this would make a fabulous TV series that could be drawn out into a few seasons - and the ending leaves enough room to play with expanding on future storylines for these characters! I would absolutely watch and I'm already imagining the costumes and the set designs! Strongly recommend this to any fans of historical fiction, the 20s, or Kate Atkinson in general. This isn't to be missed!!

I love a good piece of historical fiction and Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson does not disappoint.

The writing is lyrical.
Set in London during the roaring '20's, the reader finds herself smack dab in middle of the city's seedy dark underbelly and the shrewd, lewd nightclub owner just released from prison leads the cast of characters through a detailed, twisting turning tale..

This book is quite a tour de force with more than a dozen characters and several plot lines to follow. It does take a few chapters to get into the story and I thought the book started a bit slowly but the story picks up quite nicely and I love the ending.

This book is Atkinson at her finest and lovers of historical fiction won't be disappointed.
Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

“Justice should be swift, not slow. It should be a knife in the heart.”

I adore Kate Atkinson, I adore 1920s glitter and gossip. Can’t go wrong with a crime family, too. So overall I mostly adored this.

My main issue is that there are a LOT of characters, and it takes this book a while to get going because Atkinson introduces you to everyone’s backstory before really taking off with the plot. But once the plot and mysteries finally revealed themselves, I was all in.

The ending was a little TOO devastating for my personal tastes, but I can’t deny it all came together quite deftly. Don’t mess with Ma Coker. At least until the next war begins.

This is a tale of gangsters, cops, starlets, socialites, and family all vying for fame and dominance in post WWI London. It grabbed me from page one and kept me reading late into the night. The dialogue is sharp and witty, the cast is varied and complex, and the setting is colorful and vivid. I felt like I could hear the music, taste the cocktails, and smell the smoke (and even the fetid Thames).

The story centers around ruthless nightclub owner Nellie Coker who has just been released from jail. She returns to an empire imperiled by the police who want to shut her down, criminals who want to steal her clubs, and her 6 children with their own issues. Nellie quietly watches and maneuvers around them while regularly consulting her Lenormand deck for insight.

There is a large cast of characters that includes naive country girls seeking fame in the city, jaded London social climbers, hardened war veterans, corrupt cops, drug addicts and alcoholics, and victims of poverty. Their paths cross and recross. Some will meet with tragic ends and others will make good, although not necessarily in the ways they were seeking.

Atkinson was inspired by the real life of Kate Meyrick, owner of multiple London nightclubs in the 1920s. It is meticulously researched and feels authentic and lived in. I loved this book…highly recommend.

Thanks to Net Galley and Doubleday Books for this ARC edition.

A perfect book. Can't do better than the book itself. Just read it, buy it, start a book group with strangers, etc. What a gem.

I really wanted to love this book but I had a hard time getting into it. I felt like the story dragged on even though I enjoyed the writing. I didn't connect with the characters and didn't love them.

Review will be posted on 10/5/22
It's post World War I London and Nellie Coker is an important person in society, clearly ahead of her time. She owns five nightclubs that attract all sorts of people including the British Royalty, criminals, mob bosses, starlets, and more. It's where people from all walks of life can rub elbows as her nightclubs appeal to all. Coker is a mother to six children and has created an empire for herself and her children. However, things haven't always gone swimmingly. Like many others, Nellie started off struggling and she has even spent time in jail. Once released from prison, she realizes that her enemies are trying to take her down. There's an investigator who wants to bring her to justice and there's someone new on the scene, Gwendolen Kelling, who is mysterious and has captured her eldest son's eye. Can she be trusted? Meanwhile, there's a mystery throughout the novel surrounding two missing girls that kept me flipping the pages. Fans of historical fiction as well as Peaky Blinders will especially enjoy this historical romp through the underbelly of London in Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson.

Nellie Coker has major Aunt Polly vibes. If you are a fan of Peaky Blinders, you know what I am talking about. I adored her even though she is tragically flawed. She is like the Kris Kardashian of London and has children working underneath her as well as an entire nightclub empire at her fingertips. Who doesn't love a strong woman in charge? Her background is also complex, as you might have guessed, and I really enjoyed being lost in Nellie's world. Also, her six children were somewhat important to the story, but I found myself drawn to Niven's story the most, who is her eldest son. He served during WWI, so he was a complex character as well.

Atkinson brings post WWI London to life so well in Shrines of Gaiety. It was very atmospheric and moody; I felt like I was there. The nightclubs, the gangsters, the opulence of the clubs, the wealth juxtaposed by the extreme poverty was all well done. I am not sure I have read another novel that brings to life the dark side of London post WWI better than Atkinson.

Boy, can Atkinson write! I have never read her novels before, so I was completely blown away by her writing style in Shrines of Gaiety. She is just so good at what she does. Her vocabulary, her ability to describe a scene, and develop characters is nothing less than expert. There's a lot of different points of view in this novel, but I think she handled it very well as it weaved a big web of a story. Atkinson is one of the best writers out there today.

So, are you a fan of historical fiction? Is Shrines of Gaiety on your TBR list? Fans of Peaky Blinders need to stop what they are doing and pick up a copy today! You'll thank me! Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Atkinson never disappoints! In her newest, her three dimensional characters jump off the page. This book, occurring post WWI in 1920's London has a diverse set of characters. It takes a little patience as Atkinson juggles points of view, but the pay off is worth it. From the elegant houses of the rich to life on the grimy streets, Atkinson delivers.

A rich historical fiction with a variety of interesting characters. The author masterfully creates the atmosphere of London post WWI in this intriguing mystery. It took me some time to acclimate to the many different viewpoints but once I did, I was fully immersed in this well-written story.

ARC was provided by NetGalley and Doubleday Books in exchange for an honest review. Pub Date: Sept 27, 2022

Shrines of Gaiety’
By Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, 384 pages

What can’t Kate Atkinson do? The dame of the Order of the British Empire is a three-time winner of Costa Book Awards — formerly the Whitbread — whose books encompass police procedurals and time travel, spies and alternate realities, has turned her attentions to the light historical novel with “Shrines of Gaiety,” a sprawling picaresque set in the full swing of London’s Roaring Twenties.

“Shrines of Gaiety” follows the tribulations of the Coker clan, a family running an underground jazz club empire under the canny eye of their matriarch, Nellie — a formidable presence modeled on the historical “Night Club Queen,” Kate Meyrick, who also inspired Evelyn Waugh’s Ma Mayfield in “Brideshead Revisited.” Chief Inspector John Frobisher sets himself to ending their reign of vice with the aid of a peppy librarian, Gwendolen Kelling.

Readers familiar with P.G. Wodehouse and Waugh will find much that is pleasantly familiar in “Shrines of Gaiety” — toffs and toughs, antique cars, flappers, corrupt policemen, hardboiled policemen. Ms. Atkinson’s work as a detective story writer has served her well; it is in the crime novel strain of this latest book that her skill for plotting is most evident. Despite its scale, “Shrines of Gaiety” comes together like the innards of a fine Swiss watch.

While the book eschews the experimentation of Ms. Atkinson’s early novels, playful postmodern techniques occasionally make their sly way in. “Gwendolen wondered what it would be like to find yourself in a novel. Infuriating, she suspected,” she writes in an aside about the librarian. “Writers needed to think a great deal, in fact they almost needed to do more thinking than writing,” she comments on a would-be novelist.

Playfulness is the dominant mode in “Shrines of Gaiety,” and, while it serves the kaleidoscopic tableaux of London’s glamorous nightlife well, it jars the reader when Ms. Atkinson treats the heaving battlefields of World War I. Gwendolen’s father had been a manufacturer of barbed wire, and she herself had served as a nurse at the field hospitals in France. The reader is consequently treated to the usual catalog of grime and violence.

Horrors long familiar become mere lists of numbers and triangulating physical descriptions. Twenty million men died in World War I; black mud, thundering guns, the sharp whiff of gas. So prose narratives about the horror — especially fiction, the putative goal of which is to entertain, to be novel — must always go further. Eight million horses; whistling bullets, a yellow sky, the stink of gangrene. It all begins to smack of the sideshow.

Ms. Atkinson tries to make a point by contrasting the parade of London’s postwar hedonism with the grim flashbacks; for this reviewer, it does not come off. Ms. Atkinson is no Wilfred Owen, and she never entirely subverts the bright note. “The war would never be vanquished. And, even if it was, another one would come along and overlay the memory of this one,” Gwendolen thinks to herself. “One must be cheerful.” This sort of summary seems flip.

The failure of the war passages points to the underlying want in “Shrines of Gaiety.” Ms. Atkinson has written an intricately plotted book with memorable characters and prose that is carefully crafted, if not always successful. She is clearly interested in writing about deeper subjects — the war, relations between the sexes. Yet her treatment rarely rises above the general — the war was bad, women’s empowerment is good, and so on. This is disappointing.

Perhaps this is asking too much, or missing the point. “Shrines of Gaiety” is what its title describes: an entertainment, albeit a cut above the usual beach read. Yet one cannot help but feel that Ms. Atkinson’s venture into genre fiction is a distraction from deeper work. Michael Chabon comes to mind — a writer of massive talent who is popularly thought to have been sidetracked by fun but inconsequential projects. Let us hope it is not so for Ms. Atkinson.

although I have read all her previous books, I couldn't get into this one. I felt it lacked the charm of her previous books and was all over the place. Maybe next book.

With ‘Shrines of Gaiety,’ Kate Atkinson spins an entertaining yarn set in 1920s London

Synopsis: An adventurous woman seeks to penetrate the city’s seedy underbelly. Kate Atkinson, known for creating the Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, brings an all-new batch of characters to her new historical fiction book, "Shrines of Gaiety."

By Joyce Sáenz Harris
6:00 AM on Sep 22, 2022

It has been three years since Kate Atkinson’s last novel — Big Sky, the fifth in her Jackson Brodie detective series — and her longtime readers had the feeling that it might be time for another installment of her best-selling historical fiction. Perhaps something along the lines of her much-lauded novels about siblings Ursula and Teddy Todd, Life After Life and its companion/sequel, A God in Ruins.

Atkinson has delivered on the historical fiction, it turns out, but not on more tales of the Todd family. She has written something that, like her wartime spy novel Transcription, is inspired by a real time and place.

Shrines of Gaiety is set in London in 1926, with the Great War less than a decade in the past and the Great Depression of the 1930s and even-greater world war of the 1940s still in the future. In 1920s London, unlike in the United States, there is no Prohibition to put a damper on legal nightclubbing. So an ocean of booze (with its attendant narcotics, violence and human trafficking) flows every evening on the louche fringes of Soho.

The queen of this glamorous-if-seamy nightlife is Ellen “Nellie” Coker, an aging but seemingly omniscient and omnipotent businesswoman. The novel opens with the celebratory release of “Ma Coker,” as she is known to London’s coppers and scandal sheets, from six months in the Holloway women’s prison.

Nellie’s imprisonment has worn her down, though, and “she feared it would not be long before she was worm food. She must prepare.” She needs a plan of succession, a plan to keep her six grown children busy, solvent and out of the nick. “For perhaps the first time in her life she was wearying of the relentless drive required to keep their lives thrusting forward. … She knew that her health would not survive incarceration a second time.”

Among the festive crowd watching Nellie emerge from prison is Scotland Yard Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher, a stoic cop and secret romantic who still misses the Shropshire of his boyhood. With him is Gwendolen Kelling of York, a dauntless veteran war nurse, now orphaned and alone in the world. But “she was not yet thirty, she reminded herself. She had lived beneath the shadow of the war for long enough. She could be free of it now.” She is done with being a librarian and tired of being called “sensible,” and she’s looking for a little excitement.

She’s also looking for two missing York teenagers, runaways Freda and Florence, who came to London to seek stage stardom and have since vanished. She goes to DCI Frobisher for help in finding the lost girls, and he enlists her for a job: spying on the Coker empire. “Could she do what Frobisher had asked? She had no idea, but she would give it a go. It would be an adventure. With any luck it would not be sensible.”

Gwendolen’s adventure begins badly, with a street robbery by purse snatchers, but she is rescued by a handsome, elegantly dressed man driving a swanky Hispano-Suiza. His name, he tells her, is Niven. But only later does Gwendolen discover that he is Niven Coker, the eldest, most respectable and most mysterious of Nellie’s offspring. Soon, she’s nursing fully requited crushes on both Frobisher and Niven.

Meanwhile, runaways Freda and Florence have fallen into the cesspool of Soho, and both Frobisher and Gwendolen seem always a step or two behind in their searches as one girl sinks out of sight and the other struggles to remain barely afloat.

Along with her trademark barbed humor, surprising twists and penetrating observations on human nature, Atkinson gives her readers a sharp, glittering portrait of a mostly forgotten slice of London social history. Much of her depiction is based on the life of Kate Meyrick, who was the real Nellie Coker of Soho. Atkinson also provides satisfying codas on what happens afterward to most of her characters, which may be an old-fashioned fillip of storytelling, but it’s one that some of us can’t help but wish we got a little more often.

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson is a multi-person story, a saga of the time immediately following the Great War in the underbelly of London. For a brief moment all these people come together before they move on. There are the two girls who run away from home to try the stage; the police, both corrupt and not, who “protect” the public from the corrupting influences of alcohol, prostitution, and nightlife; the family who provide those things. The characters are “Ma” Coker and her five children. “Ma” has just been released from prison and will never be the same. She had been betrayed by a copper who had been on her payroll for years, and now, through her contacts, she discovers that he plans to take over her empire. This story follows them all for a time as they work together and against one another to survive and to prosper in a world which seems be be stacked against them. The nice thing is, Atkinson doesn’t simply end the story. She tell us how and where each of the people involved ends up. We have become so invested, it is the least she could do.

Atkinson built a world here, full of interesting people, all with backstories, which she told us, until the moments they came together in this world of spies and double-dealing. Who is at the center of the story? A librarian from York, who has come to London seeking a new life, but ostensibly seeking the runaways: the sister of a friend, and that girl’s hanger-on. There is hate, love, duty, and a myriad of mistakes, all plotted masterfully by an experienced author, who was trusted to tell this story, loosely based on a true character. It was a long read, it had to be to cover the lives of so many. The editing was excellent as I discover no issues within the story and no loose ends which were left hanging. It was a masterpiece, one that needs to be read to be appreciated.

I was invited to read a free e-ARC of Shrines of Gaiety by Doubleday, through Netgalley. All thoughts and opinions are mine. #Netgalley #Doubleday #KateAtkinson #ShrinesOfGaiety

It’s 1926 and Nellie Coker, matriarch of the London nightclub scene, has just been released from prison. Worn down and less herself than she was before incarceration, she has to contend with what’s left of her empire, while fending off threats from the police and other gangsters as well as the ineptitude and varying degrees of usefulness of her six children. Inspector Frobisher just wants to fight off the corruption both inside the police force and within Nellie’s business but he’s also kind of falling for Gwendolen, who is there to find two girls from home, but also seeking adventure and enjoying her new-found freedom. And who the hell is the creepy mummy roaming the town?

Do you ever read a book and think well this was good but the movie/limited series would be fantastic? That’s this book. The sheer number of characters as well as the glamor and darkness involved in this strange place between the wars and between extreme wealth and living on the streets just scream out visual delight. I liked this book but I can’t say I loved it like I loved Atkinson's Jackson Brodie books or Life After Life. All that said, I REALLY want someone to adapt it. Thanks to Doubleday Books and Netgalley for the eARC. Available now.

Pub date: 9/27/22
Genre: historical/literary fiction
One sentence summary: In 1926 London, Nellie Coker runs an empire of popular clubs, but there's a seedy underbelly beyond the glitz and glamour.
Thank you Doubleday for my e-ARC and PRH Audio for the complimentary audiobook

In Shrines of Gaiety, Atkinson transports the reader to post-WWI London; this book is the very definition of atmospheric. I loved stepping into this glittering, dangerous world, and Atkinson's complex, flowing prose was a perfect match for the setting. If you get a chance to listen to this one on audio, narrator Jason Watkins is fantastic!

I think some readers may struggle with the sheer number of characters and perspectives in this book - characters include Nellie, her six children, detective Frobisher, former librarian Gwendolen, runaways Freda and Florence. The perspectives shift within chapters, so you definitely have to pay attention! Be aware that this is a character-driven book, not a plot-driven book. The main plot sees detective Frobisher investigate recent disappearances, but this is used primarily as an in to explore the roles the various characters play in this world.

If you enjoy character-driven, atmospheric novels, you may enjoy this one! It was a 3.5 star read for me, but many other reviewers gave it 5 stars.