As the train pressed on, I realised that my life was in the process of taking a different direction, plotted according to a new constellation. 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. I found myself becoming a little distracted and losing interest in the characters as they were a dislikeable bunch apart from Lucy. The male consultant told me in the follow-up appointment that doing another round would be “like trying to stick the tail on the donkey”. As Martin says, his “mother’s obsessive love coexisted with contempt for her own vulnerability”; for much of his childhood she had been “unhappy or resentful or angry”.

Sin embargo, la trama me ha resultado algo previsible y algunos de los personajes, por ejemplo la familia Fitzmaurice, un poco tópicos. We imagine our bond will be forged through a shared interest – a hobby, maybe, like a book club or finding each other in the local yoga class every Saturday. That’s not to say forward planning is pointless, but unless you can actively contribute something practical towards your future growth right now, there’s no point worrying about the things you can’t yet control. Readers who might have read - and enjoyed “Seating Arrangements”,by Maggie Shipstead, or any of Herman Koch books -should feel at home with Elizabeth Day’s “The Party”. Martin went out of his way to ‘get’ Ben to notice him when they were in school - doing everything in his power to win him over as his best friend.She does it well, not merely as satire either, for she is fascinated by their lingo, their boundless confidence and sense of entitlement — and the impossibility of outsiders ever acquiring that sheen. Yo no lo calificaría de thriller, aunque hay elementos de intriga y muerte, sino que es más bien un retrato de la sociedad de clases actual en Inglaterra y de cómo los ‘ridiculously rich’ siguen constituyendo una oligarquía poderosa y que ejerce su fascinación sobre el resto. BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Sin embargo, desde el momento en que conoce y se convierte en amigo de Ben Fitzmaurice que es justo lo contrario a él, encantador, sofisticado, rico y seductor, se le abren las puertas de la élite social e incluso se convierte en parte de la familia Fitzmaurice. La novela es breve, está bien escrita (aunque muy mal traducida) y se lee bien; ofrece una buena descripción de ambientes y personajes sociales y un protagonista interesante, que es el atormentado Martin Gilmour.

Lucy is a devoted wife to Martin, even as she knows she'll always be second best to his sacred friendship. Viscerali, e forse pure un po’ morbose, tanto da pensare che l’altro sia il nostro unico faro nella nebbia. Janet hosts a party to celebrate her new promotion, but once the guests arrive, it becomes clear that not everything will be going down as smoothly as the red wine. This is her fourth and the press release offers comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Twenty-five years later – a time during which the pair have remained firm friends – Ben’s fortieth sees the rich and the famous gather to celebrate his birthday in his newly acquired Cotswold manor house.

So when a violent bust up occurs at a posh party, we the readers are given a panopticon view of the occurrence and all that lead up to it, the slow simmer that eventually came to a boil, the inevitability of it, like a car crash in slow motion, terrible, impossible to look away. A cleverly built tour of intrigue, THE PARTY reads like a novelistic board game of Clue, taking us through the various half-truths and lies its characters weave, as the past and present collide in a way that its protagonists could never have anticipated. S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows.

I always know she will think the best of me, and there’s a beauty to that when so many friendships become dulled by a sense of misplaced duty. The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Martin's invited, but he's chagrined that he and his wife, Lucy, have had to make do with a Premier Inn hotel room rather than being asked to stay at the Fitzmaurices' sprawling manor. It's teased out early on in the story that someone from the party, Ben's 40th birthday party, is either dead or seriously injured and the police want to know how that came to happen. But this feels wrong: not true, not really germane or illustrative of his point and too trite an objet d’art for such a character to deploy.And for so long we have been encouraged to do this by a misogynistic culture that realises female anger is dangerous not because it is the product of mental imbalance but because it is fuel.