Dinner Party

Sarah Gilmartin

This is an excellent debut novel! (Apologies that I’m so late getting to it…I thought I had read it but had it mixed up with a different one 🫣)
I absolutely loved it. I always enjoy a good family drama, especially where there’s dysfunction and difficult relationships and Dinner Party brought it to the table in abundance! The characters felt so real and I could not tear my eyes away from the page when narcissistic, abusive mother Bernadette was in a scene. (I would love to read another book all about her)
Subtle, tense, honest and beautiful …I also adored the pure Irishness of
the writing. Brava Ms Gilmartin. I will be buying a copy to keep.
And I wait to read book number two. 😊

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read & review this title.

I wanted to enjoy this one more than I did - I saw the comparisons to Anne Enright and got hooked. Alas it did not grab me in quite the same way. I found Kate a difficult character to warm to and a lot of her issues around food set me off slightly. Perhaps that should have made me empathise more with the protagonist but instead it rather set me against the book. I have a messy family similar to this myself - Northern Irish rather than from the Republic - and we have had our fair share of uncomfortable dinners too. This is a beautifully written novel with some fantastic character studies but it was just incredibly uncomfortable for me. I finished it feeling like I was starting a headache.

The sections of this book that had the siblings together were my favourites.
Genuine warmth between them,but with all the usual annoying ness that comes with having brothers and sisters.
It all seemed so normal,until the mothers toxicity came to light.
I found the parts featuring just Kate less interesting.
As she struggled and starved herself in the aftermath of her sisters death.


My first introduction to this authour,and I enjoyed it enough to look out for more.

For me, this family drama dinner was not to my taste. To predictable and not enough characters to sympathise with. It was however an easy read.

Well written depiction of imperfect family, with all the dramas. Really captures the little things that make or break us.

A good enough dark mystery - revealing the inner secrets of its protagonist slowly. Perhaps a little obvious to those who have first hand experience to see what is being hinted at, long before it's revealed, but not a bad effort at conveying an ill, disordered mind. Easy to read prose style and good characterisation throughout.

This book was everything I look for in a book. It was so exciting. The plot was fantastic. It really had me on the edge of my seat, and my heart racing. It was very well written and flowed well.

This book is not an original concept, but quite an easy read. I didn't like any of the characters and they really started to grate on me- there was a lot of self-pity and woe. Not for me.

Great family drama which takes a look back into the history of the characters brought together at the dinner party.

This book was one of those ‘slight’ novels but it really does pack an emotional punch. As I started to read Dinner Party, my brain meandered back to my university days and the first time I read Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, which was like nothing I’d ever read. The above quote, following Kate through the city as she shops for the dinner party she’ll be holding that evening, reminded me of the scene where Clarissa Dalloway takes the omnibus. The writing is simply beautiful, we’re on a bus ride so nothing much happens but everything happens all at once. We get such a sense of Kate from this short passage: her anxieties, her fears, the irritability with other passenger’s foibles, the disgust with food and how her senses become overloaded to the extent that a baby crying takes all the joy out of her.

Today Kate is cooking a meal for her siblings to mark the sixteenth anniversary of their sister Elaine’s death. Every year the Gleeson siblings gather, but this year is a little different. Elaine was Kate’s twin, and she still feels utterly bereft:

‘But a twin can never get over a twin. It was like someone asking you to forget yourself.’

Kate has decided to host the dinner party for her two brothers and her sister-in-law in the flat she plans to leave soon after. As the four settle round the table, to enjoy the food Kate has taken so much trouble over, they begin to talk about their mother. Peter defends her as he always does, but Ray and his wife Liz challenge his excuses for her cantankerous nature. When they leave, earlier than she expected, Kate performs the mental ritual of counting the number of bites she’s taken. Several life events seem to have plunged her into a crisis. She has just been rejected by the married man she’s been having an affair with, which somehow seems worse now she’s thirty-three. Her work holds no challenge and could be done by a junior colleague and she has fewer friends to support her. This is not her first mental crisis, they started in her third year at university when she was hospitalised for anorexia. Counting bites and controlling her food offered an escape from the pain of loss that never seems to go away, not to mention her mother’s anger and constant criticism. The author then takes us to a year later, as another dinner party marks the seventeenth anniversary of Elaine’s death but this time things are different for all three siblings.

This is a psychologically complex novel and I loved that, being a therapist. Kate is constantly over-thinking, re-evaluating and performing rituals in an exhausting monologue that seems constant for her. As the product of a critical parent, her self-talk is largely negative. She has internalised her mother’s criticism and now carries it with her wherever she goes. It stifles her ability to self-soothe, a vital skill for adult life that allows us to make ourselves feel better. Instead she needs constant input and encouragement from something outside herself, often a person who shows merely a hint of kindness or approval. However, another means of gaining approval is through achievement and Kate is definitely an over achiever, constantly setting herself standards and markers against which she can better herself and feel more valued:

‘She could never pin down the problem; it was a shifty kind of thing, something to do with routine. Shopping in the same supermarket, buying the same foods, wearing the same outfit in different colours, or even with things she enjoyed like music or exercise, running the same stretch of beach, having to reach the railing she’d reached the day before—all these arbitrary markers of success or failure that seemed to somehow captivate and imprison her. Devika said it was just the break-up blues making her feel inadequate, but the truth was, it had been going on for years, long before Liam, this impulse to do things to exhaustion. It was extreme living. Or it was living for two. Wringing the sponge, Kate felt the energy leave her body. She sat on a stool and began to count. Three. Then five—no four—it was only four. And a sprout. Less than ten bites in total, a miracle with all the food.’

The author has created incredible multi-dimensional characters here with all their flaws and imperfections on show. We spend a lot of time inside Kate’s head and it’s a very tiring place to be. Even shopping and cooking for this simple dinner becomes a marathon as she stretches her culinary abilities with a Baked Alaska for dessert that doesn’t make the table. However, don’t think this is a litany of misery. The author’s depiction of the sibling’s dreadful mother is almost comical in it’s awfulness. Yes it’s a very dark sense of humour, but I understand it. This is just one of the defensive strategies the siblings have; if they find her funny it doesn’t hurt so much. Despite Kate being our doorway into this world, it’s important to remember that Elaine’s death isn’t just Kate’s loss. This is a family tragedy and everyone grieves in their own way and at their own pace. Kate seems to know that their mother’s irascibility has been heightened by the loss of her daughter. All the remaining siblings know they can’t measure up to a ghost. The Elaine their mother misses probably isn’t a real person any more. A mother doesn’t just grieve her daughter, she grieves the life she’d imagined for that child: the achievements and milestones of life like her wedding day, or a first grandchild. Death has erased Elaine’s flaws, creating a saint-like girl that no living child could live up to. Perhaps this is why the siblings hold their anniversary dinner without their mother, or maybe because her criticism has subtly damaged each of them, just in different ways. Yet, their mother isn’t a two-dimensional monster, which she could have become in a lesser writer’s hands.

I liked the structure of bookending the story with each, very different, dinner party. I could imagine the book being turned into a play or screenplay very easily. I loved the forays back into the past, to see all the siblings but mainly how Kate and Elaine related to each other. The past sections truly do inform the present, either explaining a sibling’s present behaviour or simply showing us the depth of what this family have lost. With themes of mental ill health, anorexia and suicide this isn’t an easy read at times, but nor should it be. The author is showing us how tragedy can be a legacy, one event leading to inter generational pain and trauma. I found her depiction of this moving, but also helpful in a strange way. Some parts are painful, especially if you’ve lost someone very important to you like I have. However, it’s also enlightening and leaves you feeling that you’re not alone in the world. That there are other people who have once felt and thought like you. The trick is to stop the pain passing on to the next generation, to let the trauma end with you. This is a wise and beautifully written debut from an author I’ll be watching out for in the future.

I really enjoy a family drama novel and so was drawn to The Dinner Party when invited to join the #blogtour. We meet Kate as she is preparing to host a dinner with her brothers and sister-in-law. To be honest I was expecting something slightly different when I read the blurb but what I got was much much better! We know that this dinner is planned to acknowledge the anniversary of a family member but I won’t spoil things by telling you who. We get to look on as the dinner party unfolds and learn a little of the main characters. There are suggestions and hints at some of the difficult relationships and old wounds. We then move back a few years and see what life was like for the family and get more of a sense of where it all unravelled and how each little action fed into a greater chain of events for each character.

What I liked about this book was the underlying tension. Weirdly I felt a bit of stress at different points as I read, almost like watching a car crash, you could see how a situation would go wrong but as the reader could do nothing to stop it! The siblings all bring different personalities to the family but the unit as a whole is fractured at so many different points that it is amazing how things didn’t fall apart sooner. I’m trying so hard not to spoil plot points here that perhaps I sound a little too vague. What I want to articulate is that there is a really rich storyline and each character gets a decent amount of storyline and they all work together to make a great read. I read the majority of this book in one sitting as I really needed to find out what would happen. There are some difficult topics but here are covered gently and considerately and definitely help the story along. I really recommend this for anyone who likes a family style of story. It is well written and well worth your time!

Content warnings: eating disorders (discussions of anorexia, bulimia and disordered eating)

Kate hosts a dinner party for Halloween in 2018 to make the anniversary of her twin sisters death. As the evening comes to an end, the dessert has been chucked, the guests have left and Katie is no longer herself.

I'm not sure if this book was exactly what I was expecting it to be. In fact, I don't think it was anything like I was expecting. The content warnings took me for a shock to say the least and I felt as though it was a bit messy in places. I think it just lacked originality?

However, the fleeting timeline was a strong point. I liked how the story was told from when Elaine was alive and when she had passed away. But, this story is quite hard hitting and I can see these topics having quite a heavy impact on people reading this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for a copy of this in exchange for an honest review.

This is a competent enough but somewhat lacklustre debut about the impact of the tragic death of one twin on the less shiny sister left behind. It's also a study of a controlling and volatile mother's destructive hold on her children, The book was solid enough to complete, but I think it could have been pared down a good bit. There are lots of extraneous details and excess dialogue that I felt added little to the book. An okay read, nothing more.

This wasn’t what I thought it was going to be at all. From reading the blurb i was expecting a dark thriller sort of book but instead it’s a very atmospheric read about a dysfunctional family which I thoroughly enjoyed ,
The opening chapter is the dinner party which sets the scene , we then go back and follow the events which which led to Kate’s ( our protagonist ) life spinning out of control. . Kate is such a believable character and really got in my head ( a sign of good writing !) and the author deals with an array of issues such as eating disorders, alcoholism , sibling rivalry in a way that keeps the reader engaged without being depressing . The other family members are good sub characters all with their own problems and the mother is certainly a complex character .
I
This was such a great debut and I can’t wait to read more from her in the future , a rising star in Irish lit!

This novel is a really interesting portrayal of how our childhood traumas are carried to adulthood.
I really loved it, even though at times I found it incredibly sad.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc of this book.

5 stars- not spoiling but this was such a thrilling immense book! i totally was hooked! totally reccomend for all

I've found a lot of strong Irish authors to enjoy in the past year, and it would appear Sarah Gilmartin is joining them. This story is about Kate, a woman in her 30's whose grief over losing her twin sister as a teenager has shaped her life. On the anniversary of Elaine's death, she hosts a family dinner party but things do not go smoothly and Kate ends up spinning out of control.

Although the dinner party of the title sets the scene, this book takes us back to the 90's and a family presided over by a difficult mother who has high demands and low tolerance for her children and husband. Told in snatches from before and after the loss of her sister, we come to understand present day Kate and the fractured relationships between the family members.

This is a quiet book, but don't be mistaken to think that means it is slow or gentle. I found the build up to Elaine's death, and the complex character of their mother, made for compelling reading. It was painful to see the impact of both upbringing and loss on Kate as she entered adulthood, and on her brothers too. This book really captures sibling relationships well, and I loved the 90's nostalgia of their youth.

That this is a debut makes me very excited to see what she does next.

Unfortunately this wasn't for me.
A bit of a "non-novel", nothing really "happens" if you know what I mean.
The story didn’t resonate with me at all. It lacks... something

What I really liked was how the author approached the fact that childhood trauma bleeds into a persons adult life and holds so many challenges that you are not aware of. I really felt for Kate, she was character that has been so much and you just want her to do well in life and someone to just reach out and hug her.
Kate always had a turbulent relationship with her mother since her early years. Her mother was evidently manipulative, embarrassing and abusive, alongside this she had a favourite child who was Elaine. Elaine and Kate were opposite and treated as such and her death caused unbearable grief in a variety of ways. Even as an adult, Kate has struggled to have a healthy relationship, she has an affair with a a married man, and struggles with her mental health.

Full review on my blog

I enjoyed this novel very much and would recommend it. It’s an atmospheric, literary read with brilliant characterisation. The novel starts with Kate Gleeson throwing a dinner party to mark the anniversary of her twin sister’s death. We gradually learn more about this complicated family and their difficult, troubled mother Bernadette whose influence over them in childhood and in the present day so impacts their lives. There are excellent scenes of family conflict, painful and raw at times. I liked the novel’s structure as it made it easy to get immersed in the story. Cleverly written and engrossing - five stars!