The Dinner
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3.5 • 120 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The darkly suspenseful tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives—all over the course of one meal. Now a major motion picture.
“Chilling, nasty, smart, shocking, and unputdownable.”—Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl
It’s a summer’s evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.
Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act—an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children, and as civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
“A European Gone Girl . . . A sly psychological thriller.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Brilliantly engineered . . . The novel is designed to make you think twice, then thrice, not only about what goes on within its pages, but also the next time indignation rises up, pure and fiery, in your own heart.”—Salon
“You’ll eat it up, with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”—Entertainment Weekly
“[Koch] has created a clever, dark confection . . . absorbing and highly readable.”—New York Times Book Review
“Tongue-in-cheek page-turner.”—The Washington Post
“[A] deliciously Mr. Ripley-esque drama.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Under the urbane veneer of two couples meeting for dinner lies a dark and terrible secret. An international bestseller just released on these shores, this novel dances around family tensions and even crimes in a magnetic way. Set in Amsterdam, it at first gently skewers the puffery of meeting up at a fancy restaurant. But then it takes a Gone Girl-style twist toward the sinister as manners unravel and true colours emerge. As the tension mounts, The Dinner flits from funny to intriguing to chilling in a powerful, don’t-miss-it way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This chilling novel starts out as a witty look at contemporary manners in the style of Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage before turning into a take-no-prisoners psychological thriller. The Lohman brothers, unemployed teacher Paul and politician Serge, a candidate for prime minister, meet at an expensive Amsterdam restaurant, along with their respective spouses, Claire and Babette, to discuss a situation involving their respective 15-year-old sons, Michel and Rick. At first, the two couples discuss such pleasantries as wine and the new Woody Allen film. But during this five-course dinner, from aperitif to digestif, secrets come out that threaten relations between the two families. To say much more would spoil the breathtaking twists and turns of the plot, which slowly strips away layers of civility to expose the primal depths of supposedly model citizens, not to mention one character's past history of mental illness and violence. With dark humor, Koch dramatizes the lengths to which people will go to preserve a comfortable way of life. Despite a few too-convenient contrivances, this is a cunningly crafted thriller that will never allow you to look at a serviette in the same way again.
Customer Reviews
The Dinner
This book caught my eye because it was an "Editor's Choice", and I am very glad that I read it. It has such a mixture of humour, suspense, moral dilemma and family bonds of love/dislike that it was very hard to put down. Herman Koch put me on a literary roller coaster that I truthfully was not prepared for, but was pleasantly surprised. I hope in the deepest corner of my heart that I will never be forced to make a decision like the characters in this novel had to make-it would be, and was, gut-wrenching. I'd highly recommend this book to everybody!
The Dinner
This book started out with a bang and had me hooked after a few pages.It was very interesting and the characters were well drawn.
Unfortunately by the middle of the book the whole dynamic changed and it really became a book about sociopaths and not really a book about moral dilemmas for the two main characters.
If this is your thing go for it but with more normal people it could have been a truly great book about doing or not doing the right thing and what it implies for mankind.
It just left me feeling rather sick.
The Dinner
A craftily constructed novel which changes directions, place and time with seamless perfection. Humorous, tender and hard hitting, all at the same time.