The Party

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The Party is a captivating and suspenseful tale from its very opening, and revolves around married couple Martin and Lucy and the fortieth birthday of Ben, Martin’s oldest and closest friend. I also hated all the characters, which I assume was intentional on the author's behalf but it meant I just didn't care about the ending (and the ending was pretty unsatisfactory anyway). The cut-glass characters of this novel reflect more on the author than the people or social class she is trying to portray.

The Party by Elizabeth Day review – a study in anxiety

Another secondary character, Vicky, is given three hopeful words – “I liked Vicky” – but straight away Martin tells us “I was surprised by that” and the rest of the paragraph is immediately engulfed with counterexamples of people he “couldn’t bear”.Martin Gilmour proviene de un entorno desfavorecido, pero gracias a su amistad con Ben Fitzmaurice tiene un pie dentro de un mundo donde el dinero y el poder ancestrales fluyen entre familias con apellidos sonoros.

The Party by Elizabeth Day - review - Evening Standard

Fans of Herman Koch's The Dinner will be tempted to check out Day's fourth novel - both follow two couples with simmering emotional histories as they spend an upscale evening together, during which old resentments are revealed and something tragic occurs - but in this novel, the plot plays out predictably and is beset by obvious foreshadowing. I have not read a novel which has as little understanding of the human condition as this one in a long time. This was certainly my experience when, at one of the lowest points of my life, I made one of my closest friends. There was a sense of enormous good fortune that we were all there, that we had made it through a difficult year and that there was now something to celebrate. His background doesn't match up to the other boys', and he struggles to understand boundaries and codes of behaviour, which stops him from making his mark by way of charm or humour.Max escaped the Holocaust and his son married a 9/11 widow so, in Joan’s words, “he has seen it all”. There was no clear course of action, but the male consultant thought we “might as well give IVF a go”. I love stories like this and I love protagonists like Martin, but I've been burned by bad pastiches many times, so it's exhilarating to find a novel in which plot and character are pulled off with such breathtaking skill. Her third, Paradise City was named one of the best novels of 2015 in the Observer, Paste Magazine and the Evening Standard, and was People magazine’s Book of the Week. The sort of book you want to savour, but equally one whose captivating nature makes it impossible to put down, The Party’s unlikeable cast of characters, pacy plot and a clever climax at the its finale, has found itself a firm place in my favourite reads of 2018.

The Party by Elizabeth Day review – well-paced literary

I started listening to a lot of podcasts during that time, because music seemed too resonant with my heartbreak. As the novel opens, on May 26, 2015, Martin Gilmour, a conceited 40-year-old art critic for London’s evening paper (“The Bugle”), is being interviewed at a police station in the Cotswolds about events at a posh party he attended nearby.She said, when I asked her about it, that Max was who she turned to whenever she was “deeply troubled”. Soon Martin is enjoying tennis parties and Easter egg hunts at the Fitzmaurice family's estate, as Ben becomes the brother he never had. Seeing babies being pushed along the street in buggies caused me a stab of psychic pain,’ Elizabeth Day.