Title: The Players Club

Author: Rachel Mills

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Publication Date: 4th June 2026

Rating: 4/5

Cover:

Summary:

If you could be anyone – who would you be?

Beth Greenwood has always imagined being someone else. Someone more successful, more exciting. More alive. What would it really be like to walk in another person’s shoes – just for a day? 

And then she gets the chance to do it, with the help of the Players Club. A secret group of women who have made it their mission to let one another live their dreams. Tell them who you want to try, and they will make it happen. Circus acrobat, traffic controller, woman-who-shops-in-Chanel: no identity is out of reach. Being alive has never been so much fun.

That is, until the stakes of Beth’s own life become dangerously high, and the line between self-invention and self-delusion begins to blur. Torn between her new friends and her real responsibilities, Beth has to ask herself: when it matters most, who does she really want to be?

Review:

The premise of The Players Club is what first drew me towards it, it sounded utterly fascinating and incredibly original, and it lived up to its intriguing concept really well. The Players Club takes the reader into the life of Beth Greenwood who finds herself longing to sort of role-play different lives to her own as a way to escape her own reality. She starts to do this and then gets involved with a group of women known as the Players Club who do exactly what she has begun to do on her own. They work collaboratively to enable each other to play out different identities for just a day and as Beth sinks deeper into their orbit the serious reality happening in her own life begins to blur and she has to start questioning who she really wants to be and what that really means. The idea of trying on different characters for fun is a hugely intriguing and interesting one but actually the real emotional core of this book comes in the form of Beth’s relationship with her sister. They are very close and as something earth shattering happens in her sister’s life, which has huge repercussions in Beth’s own, the novel becomes all the more affecting and thought provoking. The Players Club is a book that cannot fail to make the reader really think about subjects like identity, life, loss, love and reinvention. It is a moving, quiet, and empathetic novel full of layers and deep moral questions. 

★★★★

Thank you so much to Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours for inviting me on this tour and organising it. I kindly received a copy of the book from the publisher. My review is entirely my own honest opinion.

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