The Dinner

Two couples sit down to dinner at an upscale restaurant in Amsterdam on a summer evening. The setting is all polish and good manners: carefully described courses, attentive waiters, small talk that stays pleasantly empty. Yet the meal exists for one reason, and as the plates come and go, it becomes clear that something very ugly has to be discussed before the evening ends.

Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son, and the two boys are bound together by a single terrible act. That act has drawn in the police and torn apart the sheltered, comfortable lives their families have built. The parents have gathered to decide what to do about it, and the decision is far harder than any of them is willing to admit at the start.

Herman Koch structures the novel around the courses of the meal, letting the tension rise with each one. As the evening moves toward its climax, politeness frays and old loyalties give way. Each side is forced to show how far it will go to shield its own child, and what the reader learns about these people is by turns unsettling, darkly funny and hard to forgive. It is a novel that invites you to question your own judgments as much as theirs.