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Sophie Wan’s latest novel – The Social Circle – interrogates what happens when we mix business with friendship. It’s billed as “The Social Network meets Daisy Jones & The Six“, which was enough to convince me to move it straight to the top of the to-read list. My wonderful friends at Ultimo Press kindly sent me a copy for review.
The story unfolds across two settings. In 2005, Maggie transfers to UC Berkeley and befriends two neighbours, Adam and Charles. Together, they have an idea for a website that will allow students to exchange information about the various clubs on campus. With the addition of another friend, vivacious and hilarous Hari, the site they call Circle quickly grows into something none of them could have imagined.
In the present day, Maggie is the exhausted sole founder and CEO of a new start up, and she is invited to reunite with Adam, Charles, and Hari – all of whom still run Circle – on a private island off the coast of Norway. It’s to be a celebration of Circle’s ten year anniversary, apparently,
As The Social Circle unfolds, we learn how Circle grew to be an unwieldy beast with billions of users, how that growth impacted the friendships of the four founders, why Maggie was ultimately ousted as CEO and why now, after all this time, they’ve invited her back.
The Social Circle marks a major leap forward in Wan’s writing from her previous novel, Women Of Good Fortune. The prose is inviting, the plot is well-paced and plausible, and there are brilliant moments of humour that relieve the tension. I think that grounding her writing in a more realistic conceit allowed Wan to truly flex her character development muscles, and that’s where her writing shines. It’s like reading the story of Facebook from Eduardo Saverin’s point of view – if that story had a nicer, neater ending (that’s not too trite).
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