Dinner Party: A Tragedy by Sarah Gilmartin – #20BooksofSummer2025 no 1

I read Irish author Gilmartin’s second novel, Service, a couple of years ago, which featured a three part #MeToo storyline involving a chef/patron of a top-end Dublin restaurant, his wife and one of the waiting staff, taking narration duties in turn. I enjoyed it a lot, planning to return to her first novel, which I’ve now done as my first pick in #20BooksofSummer2025.

Dinner Party begins with a dinner party. It’s Halloween 2018, and in Dublin, thirtysomething Kate is preparing to host some of her family for a meal on the sixteenth anniversary of her twin sister Elaine’s death as a teenager. Coming are her brothers Peter and Ray, and Ray’s wife Liz; but not the siblings’ Mammy…

She could have stayed in and drunk a bottle of wine. Three bottles of wine. She could have taken the Luas [tram] to Ray’s house in Ranelagh and gone trick-or-treating with Liz and the girls. She could have gone home to Cranavon and sat up with Peter and Mammy until the early hours, like she’d done for other anniversaries. Instead Kate had invited them all for dinner, though if you pressed her, she couldn’t say exactly when this had happened, Things had been strange for a while now. Life was blurry, each morning the sun rose in a muslin veil. The small stuff was more to the centre, somehow, taking up all the space, blunting her capabilities.

Kate is placing great importance on the food she’s preparing, scallops, beef Wellington and baked Alaska. It really matters to her that it’s as perfect as it can be. Whether she’ll be able to eat it is another matter though. As we’ll discover in subsequent chapters, Kate suffered from anorexia very badly in her last year at university, and although much better, it’s still there lurking in the background. Gilmartin handles her anorexia well.

The actual dinner party is a tense affair, as the talk turns slightly combative. Peter takes Kate’s side, she is getting more and more irritable, Ray and Liz are less than supportive, and when Liz knocks some of the meringue peaks off Kate’s meticulously sculpted hedgehog of a pudding, Kate just put the whole thing in the bin and the dinner party is over. Everyone goes home early.

This is our cue to go back in time, to explore these family dynamics further with episodes from Kate and Elaine’s childhood in more rural Carlow. They were fraternal twins, chalk and cheese, Elaine being the outgoing one, Kate quieter. Guess which one Mammy favoured, although you wouldn’t know it from her domineering and sometimes abusive manner that drove Elaine to want escape, and dying in a tragic accident before she had the chance to move on. A few years on from Elaine’s death and Kate is struggling at home.

Now, she was just a lone twin, a twinless twin, a reminder to the world of who had been lost. […]
Her mother resented her being alive, and resented her claim on Elaine too. A child’s mother misses them most of all. She had said that to Kate, one Sunday in first year as she was going back to college. Her mother had told her to stop monopolizing the pain.
But a twin can never get over a twin. It was like someone asking you to forget yourself.

A year after that first dinner party, Kate and Ray will return to the family farm which is run by Peter, and confrontation with Mammy will lead to a kind of acceptance that they can all live with.

It’s funny, but this is the second novel in a row that I’ve read, in which a fraternal twin dies, although the circumstances in Red Water by Croatian author Jurica Pavičić were rather different. What remains though are the effects of a tragic death or disappearance on a family; the remaining twin and mother in particular. Both novels handled this very well. Gilmartin focuses primarily on Kate, seeing events unfold from her third person perspective, although all the family members are realised fully. The text is crisp and sharply observed and the situations felt very true, which made for an involving read. I shall await her third novel with great anticipation.

I should note that I received the blue cover version of this book, ordered used. It appears to be rarer than the black, and turned out to be a signed edition too – which was a nice bonus!

See what Susan and Cathy also thought about this novel too.

Source: Own copy. Pushkin One hardback, 2021, 275 pages. BUY in paperback from Blackwell’s via my affiliate link. (Free UK P&P)