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 … 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
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Odd.
Our book club read this month was Herman Koch’s The Dinner. I had seen Goodreads friends who had read it and enjoyed it. I didn’t realize it was a dark ‘thriller’.
The novel begins slow, and well, is actually boring, the narrative voice telling how he and his wife are getting ready to meet another couple at an upscale restaurant. They are not …
The Dinner by Herman Koch
Rating: 4/5
Psychological thriller, fiction
Translated from Dutch by Sam Garrett
Hogarth Publishing
Original pub: Jan 2009 Netherlands
February 2013
What can I say that hasn’t already been said about this book?! I read the audio version and totally agree with those who state the narrator truly made the story easier …
I need to stop getting suckered in by books that promise to be the next Gone Girl.
Well-written
3.5 Stars
The Dinner is a tense story of the lengths parents will go to in order to protect their kids. The narration drew me in and it was immediately easy to see that Paul was a biased narrator. At times I even questioned if he was even a reliable narrator. Paul was not the only flawed character in this story. Practically every character was …
yhis book was ok but not my favorite. Read it for book club
I found the idea for the book really interesting and liked the story overall but the constant digressions and jumping from one topic to another in the first half of the book were exhausting. The second half gets better when we finally find out what the “problem” is and the digressions become more interesting and more relevant. Unfortunately, at …
Edgy story of a family in crisis.
So much to talk about left me thinking about it for days.