The Dinner Party: A Novel

The Dinner Party is literary fiction that unfolds as a letter about the past, punctuated by the present. As Franca writes, her letter slowly reveals relationships built on uneven ground and a night that changed everything. We get to follow Franca as she untangles the truth of what happened during a dinner party, but it’s deeper than that – it’s also about untangling the truth of her trauma.

What made me happy:

The writing style. The writing is visceral, intelligent, and sensitive. Van de Sandt has an absolute gift for physical descriptions that capture recognisable human truths. The way trauma sits in your body, the weight of grief, the specific ache of trying to make yourself smaller. I felt so much of this in my bones.

The exploration of memory and trauma is brilliantly handled. Van de Sandt shows how trauma fractures memory by using shifts and changes in Franca's recollections, with details appearing and disappearing. It's deeply authentic and unsettling in exactly the right way!

The themes are handled with impressive nuance. This isn't just about violence against women and girls (though it tackles that unflinchingly); it's about class, privilege, representation in literature, gendered expectations, and the insidious ways relationships can erode your sense of self. The discussions about which voices get heard, who gets to tell stories, whose ‘labels’ and interpretations of situations are ‘valid’ are all so powerful!

The character work is strong, particularly Franca's voice. Her sardonic humour, self-awareness, and the way she simultaneously judges and mourns her younger self feels painfully real. The Dinner Party challenges lazy tropes about strong female characters and gives us something far more honest and human. A female character created by an insightful woman.

What made me grumpy:

This would've been a hearty five stars for me; however, unfortunately it's four because the formatting and proofreading issues were impossible for me to ignore (inconsistencies with spacing, lack of paragraphing in dialogue so that I was sometimes unsure of who was speaking, missing punctuation, and some open compound words and hyphenated words written as closed compounds). I found it distracting and it pulled me out of the narrative.

There’s a particular phrase I found repeated throughout that didn’t quite fit the context. Having said that, it feels like a translation issue, since translation can never be an exact representation of the intended meaning and it may well have been the English phrase that most closely represented the language in Dutch, but this is an assumption on my part.

The verdict:

The concept is brilliant, the thematic exploration is thoughtful and important, and van de Sandt clearly has talent for capturing the messy reality of trauma and relationships. The writing shines in moments of visceral, physical description and emotional truth.

As for the technical issues, if you can look past the formatting and proofing problems, there's a powerful story here about survival and the ongoing journey of recovery. Although I found this distracting, this was one of the very few books that kept me thoroughly engaged despite the technical issues (most of which could be easily fixed with a good round of proofing!)

Would I recommend it? A resounding yes. Some stories are worth the rough patches. Despite its wobbles, this one's earned a spot on my shelf. Just don't blame me when you find yourself side-eyeing your own dinner guests afterwards.