Book 72 - Dinner Party: A Tragedy by Sarah Gilmartin

Reading date - April 2021

My first book on NetGalley and what a corker. This is the type of family saga I like to read about. The book is about the Gleeson family who live in Ireland.  Every year on the anniversary of the death of their sister/daughter they gather for a dinner party. The book is set across different times and different locations but always told from the view of one person, the twin sister of the girl who died.

I started reading this two nights ago and I couldn’t put it down. The chapters are large, I believe there are only five in total but it is such a gripping book. All the characters are well rounded and I feel the focus on one is done very well, the author doesn’t cram a lot of unnecessary detail in.

Would definitely recommend this if you like noir books about dysfunctional families.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lockdown is dun out ere

Image
July 9 2020 So, the lockdown is pretty much over.  The only things that remain closed are offices (we work from home), the theatres and cinemas.   *update* As of July 24th, you can't go shopping without a mask. It is already compulsory to wear them on the tube but now you have to wear them everywhere apart from when you go out to eat or drink..which I think is really stupid but we need to get back to some kind of normality. I'm still reading so I'm going to carry this blog on with the books I read but there's no way I will get through books as fast as I have been doing for the past three months.  As I write this, my current book is The Water Dancer, of which I am halfway through.  I took a trip to Poundland the other day and found them selling more than kid's books. Apparently, this is nothing new.  I picked up The Nix (wanted it for ages) and a book by a Punjabi author I had never heard of.   *updates to this*: I have finished The Water Dancer an...
Read more

Book 75 - One of Them by Musa Okwonga

Image
Reading date  - April 2021 I will begin this review by copying the following from the description of the book:  "Woven throughout this deeply personal and unflinching memoir of Musa’s five years at Eton in the 1990s is a present-day narrative which engages with much wider questions about pressing social and political issues: privilege, the distribution of wealth, the rise of the far right in the UK, systemic racism, the ‘boys’ club’ of government and the power of the few to control the fate of the many. One of Them is both an intimate account and a timely exploration of race and class in modern Britain." What I expected from this book is not what I got from it.  For some reason, I thought this would be a biography of Musa's life, from birth to modern day.  I should have paid more attention to what the description said. This book is brilliant, Musa has a skill where he writes about the everyday and mundane (to him) in a way which makes reading about it an absolute joy...
Read more

Book 12 - De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

Image
Reading date - May 2020 It is no secret that I am a massive Oscar Wilde fan girl.  I fell in love with him the first time I read The Picture of Dorian Gray and to this day, it remains my favourite of all his work.  There are so many phrases in that book that resonate with me... Oscar Wilde was a homosexual..and when things turned sour, his boyfriend got his dad involved which resulted in Oscar being put on trial for (and convicted of) gross indecency. De Profundis is a love letter which I read over and over again because it is beautiful and heartbreaking in equal measure.  It was written by Oscar to the aforementioned boyfriend Lord Alfred Douglas, who he called Bosie.  Bosie's dad came up with the Queensberry Rules, the rules that govern modern day boxing, in case you wanted to know.  The letter was one of those letters you write to get your feelings out but you never intend to send.  One of the prison guards decided that it would be better for Oscar to wr...
Read more