What a brilliant read. I really enjoyed the character development, family history and journey between past, present and future. I thought the story went at the perfect pace and really enjoyed getting to know all the characters. Also lots of great themes in this book such as family and loss.

I was drawn in from the first pages to this novel.The dynamics of the family particularly Kates relationship with her mother.Dark emotional novel highly recommend,#netgalley#pushkinpress

A well written book which does a great job of capturing family dynamics and the tensions beneath the surface of even the most conventional looking lives.

It took me a while to get into this book but as the story and characters developed it drew me in. I found Kate to be a very complex yet sympathetic character and the author vividly portrayed the family relationships, particularly Kate’s relationship with her Mother. A lot of the issues such as Kate’s anorexia were dealt with sensitively within the narrative. Overall, a decent read once you grew to understand the family relationships.

It’s Halloween 2018 and Kate Gleeson has a dinner party planned for her family to mark the anniversary of the loss of her twin sister Elaine. Her brothers Peter and Ray attend but not their mother. At the end of the night Kate has unraveled and not for the first time. The story is told in several timelines from 1999 at the family farm in Carlow, in 2006 when Kate attends Trinity, Dublin and in 2018 and 19.

This is a hard book to review as in places it’s riveting and in others rather slow. It’s a character driven novel with some really good descriptive imagery to demonstrate the character’s feelings and the atmosphere in the Gleeson household can be incendiary. Kate is the central character and she has so many demons, she’s extremely sensitive, struggling for years with eating disorders. The loss of Elaine weighs heavy on her, she’s hollowed out and can’t find her way through. Her relationship with food is handled sensitively and carefully by the author and your heart aches for Kate. The most vivid character portrayal is mother Bernadette who is very difficult to say the least, she can be vivaciously vile and Kate often bears that brunt. She’s the Queen at the centre of the family hive and expects them all to do her bidding. Kate’s brothers are lovely, they are kind and understanding. It all comes to a head in 2019 at the farmhouse Halloween dinner and it seems like after all this time the ‘boil is lanced’. The grudges, resentment and their mammy’s verbal cruelties reach a crescendo but there seems to be hope on the horizon and survival especially for Kate. However, the ending feels very abrupt and though you sense things look better there’s some lack of resolution.

Overall, despite the pacing issues it’s an intriguing book and I’m glad I read it.

With thanks to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for the arc in return for an honest review.

Thanks to Pushkin Press and Netgalley for this ARC. I found this book to be a bit of a difficult read, and the pace was slow.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for this ARC. I'm sorry to say that I didn't enjoy this book at all and honestly considered giving up on it multiple times. I never DNF and this book nearly made me. It's pitched as a 'dark and twisty novel that thrillingly unravels into family secrets and tragedy' that centres around one dramatic dinner party. Let's break that down (beware of spoilers from this point onward):

- The titular dinner party is over within the first 10% of the book and nothing that could be described as 'dark and twisty' happens at it. The narrator is obviously suffering from psychological turmoil but the most exciting thing that happens is her chucking a baked alaska in the bin. That happens in the Great British Bake Off, I have higher standards from novels that pitch themselves as 'thrilling'.

- The majority of the novel's events are narrated via a weed brownie induced drug trip which honestly feels like a deeply lazy device of the 'and then I woke up and it was all a dream' school of writing.

- This novel is dark, but it is not twisty. There are no actual family secrets revealed. We establish very quickly that the narrator has a dead twin, her dad is also dead and her mother is clearly mentally ill, abusive and has a terrible relationship with her children. These facts continue to be hammered home throughout the novel. If you know from the first few pages that the narrator's twin is dead, it is not a 'twist' when the twin dies via flashback.

In general, this novel felt incoherent. It jumped around in time a lot and seemed to lurch from one episode to the next very clumsily. It felt like it was trying to tick boxes of plot points it wanted to cover without actually covering any of them sufficiently thoroughly to mean anything to the reader. I was utterly perplexed by the decision not to cover any of the narrator's treatment for her obvious trauma and instead just jump from her being at absolute rock bottom to her being more or less completely fine. It made the ending feel unearned and rushed. I do not recommend this book to anyone.

Sarah Gilmartin’s Dinner Party begins with the titular event then explores the fraught family dynamics leading up to it. Every year the Gleeson family meets at Halloween, the anniversary of Elaine’s death, but this year Kate has decided to host a dinner party for her two brothers and her sister-in-law. Aged thirty-three, recently dumped by her weaselly married lover, engaged in work well below her capabilities and with few friends to turn to for support, Kate is catapulted into a crisis after the evening ends prematurely, not the first she’s suffered. Her third year at university saw her hospitalised for the anorexia that had offered an escape from the constant nagging pain of loss and her mother’s angry litany of criticism. A year later, another dinner party marks the seventeenth anniversary of Elaine’s death but this time things are different for all three siblings.

Gilmartin’s novel explores the well-trodden literary ground of family tragedy refreshingly well. Bookended by the two dinner parties, Kate’s story reveals her mother to be a dominating figure, fuelled by a sour anger which has eaten away at each of her children in different ways. Lots of room for cliché here but Gilmartin neatly avoids that, spicing her novel with a little dark humour now and again. Altogether an assured and thoroughly enjoyable debut.

I absolutely loved this tender, moving, funny novel, spanning about 20 years and moving between rural Ireland and Dublin. A brilliant depiction of family life interrupted by unimaginable tragedy and of the sibling relationships that anchor Kate to the world when so much else is lost. My only quibble would be that the ending is fairly abrupt - there was a lot more to be mined from the confrontation at the final dinner party, in my view. Very much recommended, thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Dinner Party: A Tragedy is one of the best books I have read this year. This is an ambitious story about family and how background, a particular past (a complex, probably frustrated mother, a large family, being a twin, death, character, etc) makes one who she is (she is the protagonist, Kate, just 30 something, living in contemporary Dublin, and cooking a special dinner for her siblings as the novel opens).

The story is well told, moving backwards and forwards in such a seamless yet unexpected manner that facts (and ideas!!) are discovered in a rather thrilling manner. Descriptions of place and people are just and revealing (eg an outing for afternoon tea with their aunt to which the twins are taken by their mother will show how Kate's mother operates in an excruciatingly funny vignette; or the ordeal of a liaison through a session at the beauty parlour...) Events are presented in a matter-of-fact style that create suspense in such a way that even as you know they will be relevant you don't see them coming: they surprised me and, again, that unexpectedness added to the development of characters and the depth of the story.

The title operates in the best possible way, telling yet sufficiently neutral yet it also made me read the novel as a classical tragedy... which it also undermined cleverly, I thought. And also like in Greek tragedies, whilst Kate is the protagonist, she is not the only one with a story (her story is one of dependency, insecurity, anorexia... but yet another strength of this novel is how every character could have had their own distinct novel, with the same backbone story.

I recommend Dinner Party without hesitation.

Thanks to Pushkin Press and Netgalley for this ARC. Living in lockdown has rekindled my love of reading so I decided to sign up to Netgalley and get back to reviewing as well. This is my first Netgalley review.

Dinner Party: A Tragedy is a fantastic debut novel about identity, loss, and family.

The story begins with a dinner party for four: our protagonist Kate, her brothers Peter and Ray, and Ray’s wife Liz. Kate is hosting the party to commemorate the anniversary of her twin sister Elaine’s death 16 years prior. Notably absent is their mother, who refused to come the whole way to Dublin. Awkward, but not out of character for her.

As the dinner party winds down and Kate is left with only an empty apartment and her memories, the novel flashes us back to her childhood in Carlow, then on to her teenage years and eventually to her college years in Dublin. Drinking too much, eating too little and pushing herself too hard, Kate has a hard time fitting in when she leaves home. This is the story of a young woman and her relationship with a difficult mother, a lost sister, two brothers who won’t quite say what’s truly on their minds, and what exactly constitutes a breaking point.

The word that came to mind over and over again for Kate is “untethered” – having thought of her sister and herself as ‘the one person in two separate bodies’ and having lost too much too young. The jumpy chronology just highlights the same untethered energy. Having said all that, this is not a harrowing read. Certain lines made me pause for a moment to appreciate a turn of phrase or a dark turn of events; yet for the most part this was a hard book to put down. Kate is an easy character to root for, and that kept me turning the pages in anticipation of things hopefully getting better.

Sarah Gilmartin really knows how to pace a novel as well – dropping hints here and there to foreshadow future (/past) events so that you can’t help but speculate about certain passing references and phrases. Everything that’s set up early in this novel is later delivered on, every question raised is eventually answered. It was also lovely to read a book set in rural Ireland in the ’90s. A character mentioned something being ‘codology’ which is an excellent phrase fallen fairly out of usage for no good reason. The nostalgia of reading the sections set in the 90s and early 00s in rural Ireland added something unique to this read for me.

Overall a brilliant novel with sadly realistic characters. Highly recommend. 4/5

The description of this book was a dinner party that unearthed secrets about a family, I don't really think it did the actual plot justice.

The book jumps between the nineties (and significant event in the family of Kate, our protagonist's life, linked to her family) and modern day (2018). I would say that the first part of the book (possibly because of the names and farm-setting) didn't feel like it was set in the 90s - I found myself grappling because it could have been much earlier, Cranarvon feeling stifled and old-fashioned. I'm glad I persevered though, particularly because of the middle section of the book which had me up late at night because I couldn't put it down.

We know from very early on that Kate is troubled and the book hints at the issue from Kate's perspective, without actually coming out to say it until relatively close to the end.

I didn't love the ending, but I didn't hate it. I would have liked a bit more detail about Kate's future romantic life (maybe a follow up book, because I came to really care about the characters who were complex and flawed but not unrealistic). I find in stories like this that flaws can sometimes feel like a mechanism to move the plot along, but that wasn't the case here.

It would have been 5 stars had it not been for the difficulties in 'placing' where the story was intended to be set in the early part of the book. I'd probably recommend this book to others, with that caveat.

A dark read that is slow to build but showcases the writer's ability perfectly as a wordsmith. The dinner party narrative is exquisite. To allow the reader that long in one scene so that they experience every nuance is rare, probably because it poses a particular challenge for the writer. Gilmartin aced it. A ponderous read but worth sticking with and one I'm happy to recommend.

I had expected this book to be a fast paced thriller-esq holiday read with a "what's the hidden secret" theme holding it together but this isn't that book. Instead it is a vey beautifully written look at the heart of a functional family dealing with themes of narcissism, anorexia, grief and mental health and how these feelings tangle themselves in the web of siblings holding them close but with a pain that they don't necessarily admit to. These topics are handled well with respect and without overly inflated drama however because of this realism I do think the book should carry some trigger warnings for readers.
Whilst the subject matter may seem too heavy to enjoy as this is such a sensitively and well written book I found it an enjoyable journey to take with the family, the characters all building and having their own sense of individuality whilst also feeding in to the family dynamic in their own ways.
I wonderful book that I would definitely recommend to those that enjoy a more involved read.

Slow start. But then it became interesting, a messed up family, deaths, eating disorders, relationships and friendship.

I went into this book with confidence however I left it feeling very disappointed and as if I have wasted my time. I was intrigued with the premise of a dark and twisty novel that thrillingly unravels into family secrets and tragedy. However what I was given was a jumpy, long winded journey that led to nowhere.

I found the plot line to be shallow, and although details were given and subsequently revealed at to how the deaths occurred and the demons the family members suffered after these events it all felt flat to me. I couldn't bond with any of the characters, some of the side characters were not necessary, the likes of Liam who had an intense and damaging affect on Kate was not given enough time to develop in my eyes. He was mentioned, it was explained what their situation was and the damaged caused by it, and then he was gone. In some ways I don't feel he was needed as such.

The chapters were dedicated to specific times in the characters lives which I liked, but there were very long winded and could have been broken up further, especially the one based in 1999.

This novel does speak about and delve into many serious topics which is always a positive to see tough topics being covered such as death, grief, suicidal thoughts, and eating disorders, but again all was covered somewhat lightly and the storyline moved onto the next focal point quickly.

I was thinking of DNF this book. However, I wanted to finish to see if it could redeem itself with the ending, but unfortunately it didn't. The book just kind of ended.

Final point, the title and cover for me doesn't seem to fit the book.

First off, thank you Pushkin Press and NetGalley for this ARC!

The Dinner Party is complex story covering several subject areas throughout the span of the novel - tense family dynamics, crippling loneliness, eating disorder and grief, to name a few.

I'll be honest, I found this a difficult read, mainly because the pacing was slow, chapters a little too long-winded and confusing, flitting between the past and present. Nonetheless I found the story decent, especially when it explored Kate's emotional depth in relation to her twin sister and father's passing, Bernadette's borderline manipulative and overprotective nature and the strained relationships between each sibling.

It's a raw depiction of strained familial ties and coming to terms with the inevitability of death.

Not my usual type of read due to it's slow-burn nature, but fairly decent all in all.

I enjoyed this book though is a fraught, emotionally charged novel.

This explores so many difficult topics - grief, mental health, adultery, family dynamics. It is written well and moves between the recent past and current

The Dinner Party of the title is a catalyst for the author to present the story of Kate and her family and the issues that have affected them over the last 20 years. It presents (a familiar?) image of family life, resentments simmering underneath, things left unsaid and does it in a really realistic way.

This book is a really good read and I recommend this to any fans of literary fiction.

A thought-provoking read about the dynamics of a dysfunctional family that come together for the anniversary of someone’s passing.

Not my usually read, I was apprehensive about it when I saw others’ reviews however I would suggest you judge for yourself.

I found this a confusing read. Reading one section then it jumps to a flashback without warning and well, maybe it was just me, but I got totally lost. What happened to the dinner I asked myself?

I started again but then found the pace very slow and I had to give up as I just didn't get it. Sorry!