Literature has long found inspiration in the dinner party, and Viola van de Sandt's debut novel joins that tradition with a visceral twist. The story centres on Franca, a shy Dutch woman who is preparing a meal for her English fiancé Andrew and his two male colleagues on the hottest day of the year. The menu includes rabbit, despite Franca's vegetarianism, and her only kitchen help is the couple's often violent pet cat.
The novel opens with Franca writing a letter at the suggestion of her therapist, Stella, to an enigmatic figure named Harry. Through this correspondence and her therapy sessions, the reader learns of Franca's grief-stricken childhood and lonely student days in Utrecht, where she met both Harry and later Andrew. Convinced that her problems would vanish if she became part of Andrew's privileged world, she drops out of university and moves to London, where she spends her days in his Kensington flat, drinking wine and watching The Crown.
Van de Sandt's prose is at its most powerful when describing the dinner party itself. The food turns repellent in the heat: cannellini beans resemble "fat maggots", the rabbit's flesh seems to crawl, and the fridge stops working, leaving the butter swimming in its dish. Franca's own body begins to break down as the evening progresses, from the cat's scratches to a dropped cigarette burn, building towards a terrible act involving a knife.
The novel has drawn comparisons to Natasha Brown's Assembly and Olivia Sudjic's Asylum Road, though the class politics and Franca's sense of otherness are less sharply examined. The present-day sections show Franca slowly finding calm in Berlin, refurbishing her one-bedroom flat, but the tension of the earlier narrative remains. This is a formidable debut that offers a queasy, compelling exploration of unease and expectation.
