August's Book Club: reading Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg
Intense and intimate, Twigg’s firecracker debut delivers a wild story of hidden passions, power struggles and feral freedom in a women’s commune on a remote farm in Kent.
Iris is adrift: thirty-two, newly single, living at home with her mother and working a dead end job. Her life changes when she meets the mysterious and beguiling Hazel, who lives at a women’s commune on a remote farm hidden in the Kent Downs. At the farm, the women can be loud and dirty, live and eat abundantly, under the leadership of the gargantuan Blythe.
Drawn to Hazel and the possibility of a new start away from a world of men who have only let her down, Iris throws herself into this alternative way of life, seizing on new experiences and hidden desires. But even among the women, she witnesses power struggles, cruelty and transgressions that threaten their precarious existence. When a group of men arrive on the farm, the commune’s existence is thrown into question, culminating in an act of devastating violence.
