Kate lives in Dublin, is in her mid-30s, and is single. All pretty bog-standard, right? Not so much.

Having just come out the other side of an affair with a married man, Kate is planning a dinner party to mark the death of her twin sister. All the while, she is battling with an eating disorder that saw her hospitalised as a teenager.

What follows is a haunting unravelling of a troubled family, their past, and their secrets.

‘Dinner Party’ is a tragedy told through food – through the food shared, the food ruined, the food not eaten – and war is waged on a well-established battlefield: the dinner table.

Here, Gilmartin deftly dances with the myriad ways that grief manifests itself and shows how it kicks up the dust of family dysfunction. Moments here feel breathtakingly play-like, as though the sheer theatrics of family life are being enacted before you.

That’s not to say Gilmartin’s writing on family dynamics is theatrical or overdone. There’s subtlety here — moments of quiet horror that take you by surprise but at the same time make complete sense. The reader is invited in on the private pain of toxic relationships that we, doubtless, have all felt at times.

At times, the ‘dangling carrot’ mystery of the sister’s death is a little clumsy — as readers, we know it’s there to keep us reading. But still, it does. There’s an urgency in Gilmartin’s writing about slow, old wounds, and the non-linear journey through time that drip-feeds hungry readers is done with skill.

Sure, novels about dysfunctional families and dinner parties are in no short supply. But ‘Dinner Party’ is no one-note, Netflix horror about mounting tension at the table. With push, there’s pull. Gilmartin explores the deepest reaches of the family psyche — from each individuals’ suffering and pain, to the things that inexplicably draw them together and, ultimately, make them family.

Who is Sarah Gilmartin?

Sarah Gilmartin, a book critic herself, exploded onto the scene with her ‘Dinner Party’ debut novel in 2021. Prior to that, she focused primarily on plays and short stories — all of which have received great reviews, with her story ‘The Wife’ winning the 2020 Máirtín Crawford Award at Belfast Book Festival.

Gilmartin also won Best Playwright at the Short+Sweet Dublin Festival — which sheds some light on why so much of her fiction feels straight out of a play.

Other books by Sarah Gilmartin

If you like the sounds of ‘Dinner Party’ (or you’ve read it and loved it as much as we did), check out her 2023 novel ‘Service’. 

‘Service’ has been dubbed a ‘scorching, engrossing novel’ and follows the story of a high-end restaurant and its celebrated chef striving to keep his Michelin stars. Of course, nothing is straightforward… as for what goes wrong, well, that’s for you to find out!

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