The Dinner

THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER THAT'S GOT EVERYONE TALKING... A summer's evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the delicate scraping of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of politeness - the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened... Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera, and their grainy images have been beamed into living rooms across the nation; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified - by everyone except their parents. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children and, as civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love. SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS - INTERNATIONAL AUTHOR OF THE YEAR LONGLISTED FOR THE IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARDS 'A brilliantly addictive novel that wraps its hands around your throat on page one and doesn't let go' -- SJ Watson

Herman Koch, born in 1953, is a Dutch writer. He was a renowned television actor on the series Jiskefet and a former columnist for the newspaper Volkskrant. The Dinner is his sixth novel and has already won the prestigious Publieksprijs Prize in 2009. Herman Koch currently lives in Amsterdam. Sam Garrett has translated some 30 novels and works of non-fiction, for which he has won prizes and appeared on shortlists for some of the world's most prestigious literary awards.