Bad Women Book Club - The Old Woman with the Knife

Name: Bad Women Book Club - The Old Woman with the Knife
Start: 2026-05-31T16:00:00+02:00
Location: Møllegade 10, 2200 Copenhagen, Denmark

Schedule

Sun, 31 May, 2026 at 04:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Møllegade 10, 2200 Copenhagen, Denmark | Copenhagen , SK

We are so thrilled to be starting the year with a new, fifth edition of Bad Women!
The Bad Women Book Club explores fiction that presents fresh, transgressive, and morally questionable takes on contemporary female protagonists. Whether you join one meet-up, two, or all of them, and whether you’ve read just a chapter or finished the book twice, you are always warmly welcome to share your thoughts, feelings, and interpretations of the works.
The books are available for purchase at our bookshop. If you would like us to reserve a copy for you, please send us a message!
Below are descriptions of the three fictional titles we will be reading and discussing this season.
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The Queens of Sarmiento Park by Camila Sosa Villada (2019)
Auntie Encarna's is the queerest boarding house in the world.
For Camila, it is a refuge, and the raggle-taggle band of queens who gather there are like family. At night they dress up and head out to Sarmiento Park to earn money. They stand together in the cold, sharing stories and a hip flask of whiskey, waiting for a car to slow down.
Until, one freezing evening, Auntie Encarna hears crying in the bushes and wades in to investigate. When she finds an abandoned baby boy, she will hear no arguments: she is bringing him home to care for him. Life for Camila and the others will never be the same again.
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Endling by Maria Reva (2025)
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick biologist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to give up, settle down, and start a family. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides uninfluenced by feminism and modernity.
Nastia and her sister Solomiya are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother—a flamboyant protestor who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt as Russia invades.
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The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-Mo (2013)
At sixty-five, Hornclaw is beginning to slow down. She lives modestly in a small apartment, with only her aging dog, a rescue named Deadweight, to keep her company. There are expectations for people her age--that she'll retire and live out the rest of her days quietly. But Hornclaw is not like other people. She is an assassin.
Double-crossers, corporate enemies, cheating spouses--for the past four decades, Hornclaw has killed them all with ruthless efficiency, and the less she's known about her targets, the better. But now, nearing the end of her career, she has just slipped up. An injury leads her to an unexpected connection with a doctor and his family. But emotions, for an assassin, are a dangerous proposition. As Hornclaw's world closes in, this final chapter in her career may also mark her own bloody end.