Currently reading
Alex
The Glass Room
Peter the Great: His Life and World
If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children
Skin Deep
The Good Daughter
A Boy in Winter
The Tie That Binds
The Idiot (Everyman's Library, #254)
The Velvet Hours
The Party
Elizabeth Day’s first novel, Scissors, Paper, Stone which I really enjoyed won a Betty Trask award So I was really looking forward to her latest book and when I saw it compared to The Dinner by Herman Koch I was really excited about the read.The Party starts at the end of a story that began in public school some 30 years previously when we meet Martin Gilmour an outsider who wins a scholarship to Burtonbury School, he doesn’t wear the right attire or speak with the right kind of accent but then he meets the dazzling and wealthy Ben Fitzmaurice, and gets a taste of his exclusive world. Soon Martin is enjoying the high life at the Fitzmaurice family’s estate and becomes an extended family member. Ben's 40th birthday party full of glitz and glamour is the venue to be seen at but things take a nasty turn.
I felt like I had read this novel before as all the characters seemed familiar and similar plot lines have been hashed out many times before in other novels so nothing really new here. The story is told in flashbacks to two different time periods and while this works well but the book just plods along and not a lot happens. I found myself becoming a little distracted and losing interest in the characters as they were a dislikeable bunch apart from Lucy.
An ok read but not a book that I will remember in a year’s time.
