The Suicide Club

by Sarah Quigley

Three misfits - close to genius, close to the brink - come together in a desperate love triangle in this compelling novel. When Bright is suddenly catapulted to fame, he can't cope with the pressure. He decides to end it all by jumping from the 20th floor of a high-rise on his twentieth birthday. He's saved by the quirky, eccentric Gibby, and soon the two boys find themselves in a love triangle, vying for the attention of the beautiful, brilliant, unreachable Lace, and also trying to protect her from harm. The three misfits - close to genius, close to the brink - travel from England to a beautiful old spa town in Bavaria. Here, in an experimental institution under the colourful Dr Geoffrey, the pressure mounts. Soon it's no longer clear who's in the greatest danger, and who needs saving the most. Unflinching, but tender and often humorous, The Suicide Club is an examination of the last taboo in our society - as well as our deep human desire to connect. It explores why we feel the need to extinguish our lives, how we can pull back from the edge, and how - by saving ourselves - we can sometimes also save the people we love.

416 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2017

About the author

There is more than one author with this name
Born in New Zealand, Sarah Quigley is a novelist and non-fiction writer. She has a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Her work has been widely published and she has received several high-profile awards.

She has published several novels, two collections of short fiction and poetry, and a creative writing manual. Her new novel, The Conductor, tells the story of the writing of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony and its historic performance in besieged Leningrad in 1942.

Quigley lives and works in Berlin.

Reviews

[Reindert Van Zwaal · Rating 2 out of 5]

It took me around 90% of the book to get into this one, which is way too long. I just couldn't connect with any of the three main characters. Well, the ending was good, so because of that just 2 stars.

[Angelique Simonsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

quirky and engrossing

[Helen Varley · Rating 2 out of 5]

i struggled with this book. from the outset, i found the style too melodramatic. there's no let-up in the pace - everything is over-described, over-whelming, over-exaggerated. things are constantly happening "suddenly" and it's frequently "too late". maybe it's supposed to be evocative of the adolescent hormonal turmoil that the main characters are immersed in, but for me it simply became boring, and meant that any real climaxes were lost in the crowd. the characters are too deliberately "quirky" to gain my empathy, and the many extraneous over-embellishments made it all feel pretty gratuitous. as for addressing the "last taboo" of suicide - hmm; it was too difficult for me to get past the OTT of it all to find anything really thoughtful about this.

[b e a c h g o t h · Rating 4 out of 5]

Half of me wanted to give this book 9 million stars. The other half wanted to throw it off my apartment building balcony.
Do I love this book? Yes
Or hate this book? Uh...yes?
Not fast paced enough I think, but EXTREMELY BEAUTIFUL WRITING. Like a
warm croissant on a cold fall morning, it's absolutely dreamy and delicious. But now you're thinking how many calories are in that croissant and you're quite cold because you forgot your scarf. Those sensations, are this book.

[Louise Donegan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book improved immeasurably in the second half once the characters arrived in Bavaria; unfortunately I found it a bit of a slog to get to that part. Potentially because I found Lace’s character so sad and the style in which her chapters were written quite difficult to read and her story dominates the narrative. An interesting novel about grief, loss and mental health but a slow burner.

[Nelson Wattie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of all the depressive worlds I've been inside (and there have been many) this is the funniest. The Conductor was a tragedy, this is a comedy but with a serious undertone and with a tragic ending, at least for one character. Brilliant!

[Ian Lambert · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has some structural faults from my point of view but they're far outweighed by the wonderful writing.

[Jacinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dnf, book in 2 sections, read 1st and stopped. Beautifully written but not much happens. Narrator talks to reader which is a bit jarring.

[Adrienne Flitcroft · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated the style of writing & didn't make it past page 59!

[Nicole · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

[Prue Kennard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very strange, alarming insight into unsound though near-genius minds of young people in a rehab treatment centre in Bavara. Not entirely credible

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an utterly brilliant book.

The first few chapters just made me feel totally inadequate as a writer. The characters, the plot, the language and the scene they painted were all so well written and absorbing that I was blown away.

I don't want to say too much about the plot, because you have to go and find a copy of this book, buy one, borrow one, or tell your local library to order one. There are three main characters, all in their early twenties. Bright is a flamboyant red-haired writer and sceptic, who throws himself off a twenty story building. Gibby is a awkward young man who inadvertently leaves his newspaper cart at the foot of the building and in doing so saves Bright's life. Lace is a beautiful young woman that everyone loves and desires, but no-one reaches. All three are brilliant in some way and are thrown together at an exclusive therapy retreat in Bavaria.
I was engaged from the first line and loved the story right the way through to the end. This is a very different book to Sarah Quigley's last, The Conductor, set in war time Stalingrad. This time we are not in the realm of real life characters, but instead we are drawn much closer into the lives and minds of the three central players.
This novel should be "The Secret History" of the twenty-teens.