Ellery Lloyd is the pen name of the married writing team Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos. The Club is their second book together, following People Like Her (2021), a thriller set in the world of social media influencers. The titular club is an exaggerated version of Soho House, an exclusive private club for people working in creative industries. For several years, Lyons served as its editorial director and even contributed to the launch of one of its locations: Soho Farmhouse in the Cotswolds. The novel’s setting, the fictional Boucher Island, is not one of Soho House’s locations, but it also borrows from real life: Osea Island is a privately owned island in the United Kingdom where the couple once stayed so that Lyons could review the resort.

The Club owes an even larger debt to Lyons’s experiences as a journalist for women’s magazines. In her own words:

Before that job [Soho House], I had spent a decade working in fashion magazines, and just like Home’s membership director Annie (who has a similar professional background) I had more than a few enlightening celebrity experiences, lots of them wonderful, some of them very far from it.