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The Dinner

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The Dinner

By: Herman Koch
Narrated by: Clive Mantle
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About this listen

Shortlisted for: International Author of the Year – Specsavers National Book Awards 2012

A summer's evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse - the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened. Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son.

The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children, and as civility and friendship disintegrates, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

©2009 Herman Koch (P)2014 Audible, Inc. Family Life Genre Fiction
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Be warned: this book is slow moving and obsessed with detail. I'm still not sure if it was worth pushing through, but once I started I found myself compelled to go on because of the mystery element.
I found the structure (around the courses of a meal) innovative and the characterisation was effective. The whole time the narrator positions you to detest a particular character but he ends up being the only decent person in the story - a clever, subtle twist.

A slow burner

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I really enjoyed the voice performance!
The story kept me interested and character building was great.
Quick listen too!

It was great

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Not sure I would have gotten through this book as a physical read - I’ve never before hated all the characters in a book! - but the narration was absolutely perfect and had me engrossed before I knew it. Brilliant story

Wow, what a thought-provoking ride

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so whingy and whiny and no real story. the way the narrator says Serge Lowman will also do your head in.

terrible

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I constantly found myself zoning out during this one, though it wasn't any fault of the narrator. I just couldn't connect with any of the characters, and it was just too slow going for my tastes. I stuck it out to the end in the hopes it would pick up, but sadly it didn't. The "horrific act" that the children did just didn't have any sort of wow factor, leaving it a really underwhelming twist.

Dull story with an underwhelming twist

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