With Regrets from debut author Lee Kelly, is equal parts Big Little Lies and Bird Box, a suburban drama wrapped in a 24-hour survival story at the end of the world.
Seven courses, seven guests, twenty-four hours that will obliterate everything.
When recent NYC-transplant Liz Brinkley and her husband are invited to an exclusive soiree by her neighbor, "lifestyle guru" Britta Harris-Che, Liz's immediate thought is hell no—Britta is insufferable, and Liz is petrified to leave her young children with a barely-teenage babysitter. And yet she RSVPs anyway, trying to extend an olive branch to her withdrawing husband, who seems desperate to get in with these cliquey people. They're joined at the dinner party by the rest of the town's elite, like Padma Khare, new mom and wife to the CMO of a lifestyle brand who Britta is unabashedly angling to win over; and Mabel Young, the perfectly composed but secretive "Patron Saint of the PTA."
They've barely made it through their first round of champagne when a "red alert" comes through their phones, and every channel on the television tells the same story: glittering atmospheric masses, reported to look like "pixelated static clouds," have been spreading through major U.S. cities and killing anyone it touches. Authorities have just one clear directive: Find shelter. Immediately.
A collective panic seizes the dinner party; all the guests have children at home. In the mad dash to their cars, they see it: a shimmering net that floats over the town. The street is littered with wrecked cars and dead bodies. Leaving now is not an option. Instead, the group launches into survival mode, grabbing supplies to take shelter in the hosts' wine cellar. But everyone has very different opinions about the best plan from there.
Liz becomes increasingly willing to do anything it takes to get back to her children. As the static clouds outside continue to kill anyone who steps outside, the tensions and suspicions among the party guests near a boiling point. Certain death and certain social suicide stand between Liz and her children—but she begins to realize that there may be others in that cellar even more desperate than her.
