By: Herman Koch

Paperback

• READING GROUP NOTES for this book.

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Paul Lohman and his wife Claire are going out to dinner with Paul's brother Serge, a charismatic and ambitious politician, and his wife Babette. Paul knows the evening will not be fun. The restaurant will be over-priced and pretentious, the head waiter will bore on about the organically certified free-range this and artisan-fed that, and almost everything about Serge, especially his success, will infuriate Paul.

But as the evening wears on it becomes clear that tonight's dinner will be even more difficult than usual. There is something the two couples have to discuss. It's about their teenage sons and the very bad thing they have been doing.

And it's about how far two sets of parents will go to save their children from the consequences of their actions.

Praise for The Dinner:

‘Funny, provocative and exceedingly dark, this is a brilliantly addictive novel tat wraps its hands around your throat on page one and doesn’t let go.’
S.J Watson

‘What a tremendous book. I loved every single gripping and strange thing about it.’
M.J Hyland

‘Are family values good? The Dinner will have you wondering. At first it seems like A Year In Provence or Under the Tuscan Sun with a bit of an edge, the good life meets the examined life. But by the end, when all has become truly chilling, you’ll have to rethink everything, including who you are and what you believe. This is a book you won’t forget.’
David Vann

‘Herman Koch’s The Dinner is a riveting, compelling and a deliciously uncomfortable read. Like all great satire it is both lacerating and so very funny. The Dinner got under my skin and punctured all my safe liberal smugness and pieties. Intelligent and complex, this novel is both a punch to the guts and also a tonic. It clears the air. A wonderful book.’
Christos Tsiolkas

‘The novel develops into a breathtaking thriller in which no-one is innocent. Koch holds the reader is his grip.’
Niccolò Ammaniti

‘In this exploration of how two families deal with an explosive event, The Dinner is reminiscent of Christos Tsiolkas’s blockbuster The Slap.’
Stephen Romei

About the Author

Herman Koch was born in 1953. He is a successful actor, screenwriter and columnist in the Netherlands, and has written a number of satirical novels including The Dinner and Summerhouse with Swimming Pool.

'Funny, provocative and exceedingly dark, this is a brilliantly addictive novel that wraps its hands around your throat on page one and doesn't let go.' - S.J Watson. 'What a tremendous book. I loved every single gripping and strange thing about it.' - M.J Hyland

As the restaurant is only a few streets from our house, we walked. That led us past the bar where I hadn't wanted to meet Serge. I had wrapped my arm around my wife's waist, her hand was somewhere under my coat. Shining on the façade of the bar was the warm, red-and-white neon sign advertising the brand of beer they served inside. 'We're too early,' I said. 'Or more precisely, if we go now, we're going to be right on time.'

My wife – I should stop saying that. She's called Claire. Her parents had named her Marie Claire, but later Claire didn't like having exactly the same name as a magazine. Sometimes I call her Marie to tease her. But I hardly ever call her my wife – now and then when speaking officially, in sentences like 'My wife can't come to the telephone at the moment,' or 'My wife really was sure that she had booked a room with a sea view.'

On evenings like this Claire and I cherish the moments in which we are alone together. They make us feel as if nothing is fixed, as if even the dinner appointment is a mistake and we're just out with the two of us. If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness is sufficient to itself, it doesn't need any witnesses. 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,' according to the first sentence of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The only thing I feel compelled to add is that the unhappy families – and within those families, the unhappy couples most of all – can never manage alone. The more witnesses, the better. Unhappiness is always in search of company.

ISBN: 9781921758522
ISBN-10: 192175852X
Audience: General
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 304
Published: 25th July 2012
Dimensions (cm): 23.4 x 15.3