I initially received this novel as a NetGalley ARC, but had problems with the publication properly displaying on my Kindle. I'm not going to lie, I (incorrectly) assumed it was the publisher's careless editing, but someone from Pushkin Press reached out. By that time though, I had already put the ebook on hold at my library and received it shortly after. I just finished it today, and I'm happy to report that it was an enjoyable read!

It's worth noting that the title and summary are easily confusing: firstly, I assumed that the story and flashbacks were going to happen during the titular dinner party that the protagonist, Kate, throws. That's not the case.

I found the length of this story well-timed, and appreciated Gilmartin noting the year and location of each section in her work. As I read through a well-loved short story collection, the lack of clarity of the time/timeline makes the experience both confusing and frustrating, so I cannot thank Gilmartin (or her editors) for the inclusion of both a date and location.

I think the premise of Dinner Party: A Tragedy is really good, and I think that the execution was quite good. Unfortunately, I felt that the initial dinner party was anti-climactic as was the final dinner party that readers get to observe, but I wonder if that's an indication of Kate's reconciliation of her and her siblings' relationships with her mother. But Gilmartin was able to capture the tension among family members so well. There were moments when I stopped reading and thought, "This could be anyone's family. The ways in which Gilmartin wrote Kate and her siblings Peter, Ray and her twin sister Elaine made me think about how my sister and I interacted and treated one another as children, and it was those moments that shined for me.

I would also like to note that I recently read Megan Hunter's shorter fiction The Harpy, and the ways in which Kate's mother reacts to her life and where her life has brought her (not in the emotional outbursts but rather the ways in which she questions her decisions) reminded me of Lucy's sentiments as she passively moves in and out and through her life. While there isn't a one to one correlation between the two women, the lack of joy that their lives had at times felt similar.

I hope to read more of Sarah Gilmartin's work in the future!

If you're a fan of Irish literature/fiction, family dynamics/drama, food content, and/or reading about women overcoming severe emotional trauma, then this is the book for you!

Many thanks to One/Pushkin Press and NetGalley for kindly letting me read an ARC of Dinner Party: A Tragedy by Sarah Gilmartin!

If I had to pick one word for this book it would be mundane. It starts on the 16th anniversary of Elaine Gleeson’s death. Her siblings, two older brothers, Peter and Ray, and her twin sister, Kate, come together for dinner at Kate’s house.
The disfunction of this family is apparent from the beginning, but after we are transported back to when Kate and Elaine are 11 we see how bad the disfunction truly is. We are given glimpses into the lives of the Gleesons up through college, but we don’t find out about how Elaine died until about halfway through the book. A lot of the focus is on the truly mundane of every day life, and while other people’s lives are interesting, the mundane is just that.
This was originally published in Ireland and is just now making its US debut and I’m not really sure what the point is. The family clearly has problems, but we aren’t granted the ending of seeing how they deal with them. In addition to the death of Elaine, this book briefly touches on bipolar disorder and anorexia, alluding to the former and naming the latter towards the end. In addition to to a poorly thought out story line, there were so many typos in the advanced copy I read it made for a very unenjoyable read- things like “f” being left out of certain words repeatedly, to the point where I actually Googled to see if they were Irish words (they are not). I hope the editors fixed all of the errors before releasing the book. Thank you to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for the advanced copy. This book hit the shelves in the US on March 7th.

A realistic look into the life of a family dealing with loss. The plot of Dinner Party focuses mainly on the family relationships between the characters. The focus of the story is on Kate. Her twin sister, Elaine, tragically passes away at sixteen, and Kate never really deals with this loss. She develops an eating disorder, and struggles with it throughout much of the novel. Another large chunk of the story involves the fraught relationship that Kate and her brothers have with their mother. Mrs. Gleeson seems to hold her children to an unattainable standard, and judges them greatly for falling short. She doesn't know how to appropriately deal with her own sense of loss, and often takes it out on her children. There's a lot of strain in this family.
This novel is definitely dark, but if you know what you're in for when picking it up, it's worth the read. A deep and insightful view of loss and how a family can react to it.

I think the first 40 pages of this novel would have made a great short story. I love the writing style, there is plenty of tension, and this chapter tells us everything we need to know about Kate and her family. The remaining 200 pages are backstory, filler, and don’t add much. The suspense is gone because we already know how everything turns out. The why doesn’t seem to matter.

I didn’t know what to expect from this book but the cover and plot sounded intriguing to me so I’m glad I got to read this.
I do like reading about slightly dysfunctional families as you can’t choose your family so this book was really interesting! I struggled a bit with some of the characters and didn’t connect with them really but still not a bad read!

To mark the anniversary of her sister’s death Kate plans a dinner party. She has it flawlessly planned from the fancy table settings to the Baked Alaska waiting in the freezer. However, by the end of the evening, old tensions have flared, and Kate is spiraling out of control.

Dinner Party switches between the past and the present day and is a nod to the messiness of modern family life- featuring Kate and her perfectly dysfunctional family.

I must admit I struggled with this book. It was a slow burner with long chapters, which is the alternative to my usual go-to. However, I couldn’t give up on the themes which the book presented: loss, trauma, eating disorders and other mental health disorders to name just a few. I thought it was insightful seeing how different family members dealt with the trauma and the significance of generational trauma and how it can impact younger people in the family if parents don’t deal with it.

Overall, I am giving this book two stars. Some interesting themes, but it was hard to keep my attention.

Also, whilst I appreciate this is a proof copy and therefore I don't expect it to be error free, it was one of the worst proofs I have ever received. There were a number of errors throughout the book e.g. different was spelt ‘dierent’. I did find this incredibly frustrating as I had to guess words and therefore this may have impacted my rating.

EXCERPT: She burst into tears again. It was the loneliest she had felt in a very long time. Four and a half years of trying to pretend she was okay. She squeezed her eyes shut as the memories unloaded. The white oak coffin, how her mother had screamed the house down when it arrived with the wrong type of handles. The busyness of Cranavon, so much busier than her father's funeral, as if there was a rule: the younger the person, the bigger the crowd. Everyone had kept saying that Elaine looked exactly like herself, which wasn't true at all. There was so little of her sister in the waxy face and pale lips, in the slightness of her shape, the way her body seemed to be eaten up by the folds of white satin. There was no trace of Elaine's vivacity. If anything, Kate saw herself in the coffin. And she was not the only one to notice this. One night, not long after the funeral, Kate had woken up to find her mother in Elaine's bed. Barely a metre away, her eyes boring into Kate, pinning her to the mattress. Because it was her fault she was alive. Her mother had never said it, or maybe she had said it once in a fit and then taken it back, but either way, she was right. The wrong twin had died.

ABOUT 'DINNER PARTY: A TRAGEDY': Kate has taught herself to be careful, to be meticulous.

To mark the anniversary of a death in the family, she plans a dinner party – from the fancy table settings to the perfect Baked Alaska waiting in the freezer. Yet by the end of the night, old tensions have flared, the guests have fled, and Kate is spinning out of control.

But all we have is ourselves, her father once said, all we have is family.

MY THOUGHTS: There is plenty of dark humour in Dinner Party to offset the tragedies, the sadness. This is a messy family, one that revolves around the matriarch, Bernadette, and her erratic behaviour.

Bernadette needs to be the centre of attention; she needs to be not merely the best at everything whether it be scone baking or championing her daughter's horse-riding career, but to be KNOWN to be the best. She cannot stand to lose at anything, not an argument nor a tennis match. She can be cruel and vindictive, and often is. Challenge her at your peril.

Kate, even though the older twin by some six minutes, is used to coming off second best when compared to her fraternal twin, Elaine. Elaine is somehow more vivacious, more beautiful, and gets away with a lot more with her mother than Kate. Elaine understands how to both play her mother's game, and play her mother. Kate feels like a paler copy of her sister, a shadow, the negative of the photo. This feeling only intensifies after Elaine's death.

But it is when Kate leaves home for university that the real trouble begins. Instead of the freedom she expected to feel, life becomes even more complicated.

Set between the 1990s and the present day, the entire book is narrated from Kate's point of view. The writing is dark, yet witty, as Kate's life unravels and family secrets are revealed.

I both enjoyed and was unsettled by this read. Bernadette and my mother had a great deal in common.

⭐⭐⭐.5

#Dinner Party #NetGalley

I: #SarahGilmartin @pushkin_press

T: @sarahgbooks @PushkinPress

#contemporaryfiction #family drama # irishfiction #mentalhealth #sliceoflife

THE AUTHOR: After completing a BA in English and German, she completed a master’s in journalism, “mainly because I loved writing and thought this would be a way to continue”.
She got her start working for a public affairs magazine, followed by a business and finance magazine. She travelled quite a bit in her 20s, and even did a stint in the bank – “probably the most secure job I ever had, like, a grown-up job”.

But even job security couldn’t shake the bug out of her system. She needed to go back to her “first degree and first love”, fiction.

In 2011, she left the bank and began writing a novel. She spent three years writing, but ultimately, the book didn’t get picked up by publishers.

“That was tough. It felt, at the time, you know, what am I doing? Maybe I need to go back to the bank or give up on this.”

She turned her focus to arts journalism. She had been publishing reviews here and there, so she built on this.

“But then every so often I’d have an idea for a story and I’d start tipping away,” she says. Gilmartin then applied to do an MFA at UCD. “I decided kind of in a rush I was going to do it. And from that point on, things have taken off a little bit. I’ve had some luck with stories, and I grew one particular story into this novel.”

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Pushkin Press via NetGalley for providing a digital ARC of Dinner Party: A Tragedy for review. All opinions expressed in this review are my own personal opinions.

To mark the anniversary of a death in the family, Kate meticulously plans a dinner party - from the fancy table setting to the perfect baked alaska waiting in the freezer. But by the end of the night, old tensions have flared, the guests are gone, and Kate is spinning out of control.

Set between from the 1990s and the present day, from Carlow to Dublin, the family farmhouse to Trinity College, Dinner Party is a beautifully observed, dark and twisty novel that thrillingly unravels into family secrets and tragedy.

Haunting and unforgettable, it explores how the past informs the present, the inevitability of childhood damage resurfacing in later life - and yet how, despite everything, we can't help returning home.

I have never related to a book so much before. I get it with the dysfunctional family. This was my first and not last read by Sarah Gilmartin. Really enjoyed the story and cannot wait to read more.

The Dinner Party, by Sarah Gilmartin, is a beautifully written character study of how tragedy and dysfunction affect each of the children in the Gleeson family, particularly Kate Gleeson, whose twin sister dies suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 16. It is a story that examines how family dynamics affect perceptions of ourselves and our experiences through adulthood. It questions how famial bonds can continue to grow and strengthen despite childhood trauma and constant emotional volatility.

It is a thought-provoking book that would be Iead to interesting discussions for any book club. Thank you you NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the ARC.

I was really looking forward to reading this because I’m usually a sucker for Irish family sagas or thrillers but this didn’t interest me. The tale is very sad and quite depressing about a family trying to handle the death of a family member. It just failed to hold my interest and also none of the characters were particularly interesting either.

Firstly my thanks to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for granting this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

It’s taken me a lot of persistence to get through this book which in the most part was dry with not an overly exciting plot. That said, the family dynamics that are outlined and how those relationships play out across a non-chronological time frame are skilfully written.

Set around a dinner to mark the anniversary of Kate’s twin sister’s death, it begins slowly and I was hoping it was building towards a climax hence I kept plodding on with it. Unfortunately, it never arrived.

This book is a true to life narrative about the ordeals that family members encounter when negotiating loss. It tackles topical mental health issues in a sensitive way.

I wasn’t blown away by this book but I think it’s a good conversation starter for mental health topics.

This book wasn't what I was expecting from the title or blurb so I sadly don't think I enjoyed it as much as I should have done because I was left a bit confused where the book was going. Having finished it I can say it was a great book, it was beautifully written, I'd definitely read more of Sarah Gilmartin's books, and I found the story interesting and each character well-developed. But sadly for me it had seemed like the book was going to be a mystery and I kept waiting for the mystery element to come and wondering when the secrets would start coming out. I definitely would have enjoyed it more had I realised going into it to expect a story of a family coping with loss and other issues through the ages and how it affected each of them.
My only complaint about the actual content of the book would be the lack of chapters. It was split into sections with the different timelines but some of those were rather long and there were points within it that could have been split into chapters to make it easier to find a stopping place while reading. Other than that though the story was beautiful and I loved it, I just think the blurb could perhaps be a bit clearer about what to expect.

Thank you to the author, Pushkin Press and NetGalley, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Had I realised this first came out in 2021 with the tagline "A Tragedy", I don't think I would have applied for an ARC. As it was, I had to stop at approx. 30% and DNF, as I could not cope with the dysfunctional family dynamics and the toxic matriarch pulling the strings. The author can write, the prose is beautiful, but this story was not for me.

I found this one a little boring. I guess maybe I’ve been reading too many family get together mysteries and have been over it. It did not grab my attention. I worked my way through but found it nothing out of the ordinary.

A brutally confronting, melancholic tale of the ordeals of a muddled, dysfunctional Irish family headed by a dominating, intimidating, matriarch. The story revolves around Kate and how she battles with her personal demons following the death of her twin sister. It’s a sadly too-true-to-life narrative of the ordeals and coping mechanisms of family members torn apart by anguish and loss and the hand they’ve been dealt. Yet despite the oppressive tone of despondence, hope springs eternal.

An excellent debut by Gilmartin.

My thanks to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for granting this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

DInner Party was a novel set in Ireland in the 90’s and the present, a family drama of toxic mother’s, the death of a sibling and the ways we cope to survive the emotional turmoils of our family.

Kate is throwing a dinner party to remember the death of her twin sister. She has invited her family for what she hopes will be a nice dinner for remembering those gone and to connect as a family. Everything goes awry. The novel then take the reader through different eras in Kate;s life and how she learns to cope with the trauma of her twin’s death and her toxic family life.

I enjoyed this novel and would recommend this for fans of Patricia Scanlan or Erica James

Thanks to Netgalley, Pushkini Press and the author for the chance to read and review this books

An intriguing tale of a deeply dysfunctional family which gathers on Halloween to celebrate the life of one of them. Kate's twin Elaine died mysteriously (it will be revealed) and she's never been the same. This moves around in time and place to tell her story as well as that of her siblings Ray and Peter. They have a horrible mother who turns on Ray's wife Liz at Kate's dinner party. This plot might not be fresh but the atmospherics are well done and I liked the setting. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

To be honest, I did not really like this, I felt it was too slow and nothing really seemed to happen. The description and premise sounding really promising but it just did not work for me and I was left disappointed. Saying this, I did think the writing was good and the book has a lot of good reviews so I think it may just not be for me.

I started reading this yesterday just to see what it was like but before I knew it I was nearly half way through, something about the writing and the various characters ( probably the mental health issues presented) resonated with me. The dinner party of the title is how the book opens. It’s at Kate’s flat and her two brothers and sister-in-law are the guests. The reason for the dinner is it’s the anniversary of her twin sisters death. The book jumps back in time to their childhoods in 2009. Elaine, Kate’s twin is almost an opposite personality, rebellious and vibrant. Their mother, well she’s demanding and moody at the very least. There are a couple of other time jumps at significant moments in the family’s history. I found it a compelling, character driven book although the pacing is a bit uneven.

This is another book that I picked up in the read now section of Netgalley which I couldn’t get in to. The description sounded right up my alley but it didn’t turn out to be.