Other Women: Emma Flint

Product Information

Beatrice Cade is an orphan, unmarried and childless. London is full of invisible women who struggle to find somewhere to work through their grief. But Bea is determined to make a new life for herself. She takes a room in a Bloomsbury ladies’ club and a job in the City. Just when her her new world is taking shape, a fleeting encounter threatens to ruin everything. Kate Ryan is a mother and a wife and is used to lying for her husband. Looking in from the outside, they seem like a perfectly happy family, but looks can be deceptive. Planning to buy Other Women for your group? Buy books from Hive or from Bookshop.org and support The Reading Agency and local bookshops at no extra cost to you. The tension grows throughout the book until it's almost unbearable. This is a book that will stay with you. -- Ann Cleeves

Emma Flint was born and grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne. She graduated from the University of St Andrews with an MA in English Language and Literature, and later completed a novel-writing course at the Faber Academy. She lives and works in London.

Historical context

Loosely based on a real murder this novel is set in 1920s London. It is told by two women, Bea and Kate, and has two timelines. Bea is one of the many women at that time, after the First World War, who work in an office for a low wage and live in a hostel with other women and no real expectations that anything will change. But then, when a new employee, Thomas Ryan, joins the firm as a buyer she is flattered by his attention and falls in love with him, despite knowing that he is married to Kate who also works for the company in a regional office. When someone is murdered suspicion immediately falls on him, he is charged with murder and the trial ensues. This is a story of love and obsession and I enjoyed it and found it interesting.” Tune in to the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show to hear the live feature on Tuesday 7 March. You will also be able to listen to the full-length interview on BBC Sounds. We follow the stories of Beatrice who is a single woman in her thirties who falls for the charms of a married man, and of Kate Thomas, his wife. On the south coast of England, an anguished moment between lovers becomes a horrific murder. And two women who should never have met are connected forever. Fans of historical crime fiction will love this book, with Emma Flint bringing the past to life in fine style. But Other Women should appeal any fan of tightly plotted and well conceived crime writing. It has the ability to pull the reader in right from the start, and keeps up that momentum right to the very end. Like Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray, one of my top five books of 2022, it beautifully, chillingly, portrays life in the aftermath of World War I – and like Two Storm Wood, I’m thinking about it still.

London, 1923. The city is slowly rebuilding itself after the First World War. Beatrice Cade is part of this, having moved here after the deaths of her parents and brother. She’s a quiet and reserved woman, sharing a boarding house with others just like her - the middle aged invisible spinsters, unnoticed by men, passed over for the younger, prettier ones. Mesmerising and haunting, Emma Flint's Other Women is a devastating story of fantasy, obsession inspired by a murder that took place almost a hundred years ago. When I started writing Other Women, I was in my early forties. I was single and financially independent, with a career I loved, friends, hobbies, ambitions, dreams. The woman who inspired the character of Beatrice Cade was around my age and she had all these things too – yet she risked every one of them for a relationship with a man she knew was married and unavailable. It is brilliant. I was swept up in a turmoil of emotion as I read. This is a book that starts as a love story and turns into something much darker indeed. -- Harriet Tyce, author of The Lies You Told Bea had a rich and happy life. She had people who cared for her, people who would miss her when she waas dead. Other Women was born from a fury that the life she created for herself could be so entirely destroyed, and from a determination that she would not be forgotten.Staggeringly brilliant, harrowing, haunting and entirely beautiful. Other Women takes a thrilling yet compassionate look at the making of a murder, at loneliness and love, at fixation and the sting of shame. A wonderful novel. -- Chris Whitaker, author of We Begin at the End This beautifully written, pitch-perfect historical mystery is based on a real case - here, a murder that took place in 1924 . . . a moving study of loneliness, desperation, shame and public prurience. -- Laura Wilson * The Guardian * Just a few years after the end of World War I, Britain is still coming to terms with the high price of victory. The country is mourning its dead, and thousands upon thousands of women are living without husbands, sweethearts, fathers, brothers and sons. Single and unattached, at 37 Bea Cade isn’t one of them and she cuts a solitary figure as she attempts to conjure up a new life in London.

I don’t have any easy answers to this, but perhaps one answer lies in the fairy tale belief that beauty equals goodness. This maxim is usually applied to women, but Mahon and Bundy – conventionally attractive men – seemed to have no trouble attracting admirers who believed their stories even when the extent of their crimes were revealed. Utterly, utterly brilliant. Other Women is compelling, thought-provoking, harrowing and incredibly urgent. -- Caroline Lea Set in the early 1920s, this clever mix of romance, thriller and courtroom drama proves love and heartbreak never ages, whatever the era. * Woman & Home * Based loosely on a real-life murder case from the 1920s, we are thrust into London six years after the end of the first world war.Huge thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review, and for hosting the Readalong - the discussions have been fantastic, and I adore how our perceptions and opinions of the characters shifted as the book went along. Bea is early thirties, unmarried and lives in a room in a Ladies Club in Bloomsbury. She works as a typist and is very aware that after the horrors of the war that have left a shortage of young men that she is facing life as a spinster. Well read and intelligent, she's a solitary figure, looked on with pity by the younger girls in her office, yet she has dreams and it becomes clear that she is passionate. When newly appointed salesman Tom arrives in the office for the first time, Bea feels something that she's never felt before, and Tom's knowing glint only encourages her. She falls in love.