In the two or so years it took me to write A Death at the Party, the world was all but locked up in a pandemic. I needed to conjure up a party setting, but I couldn’t leave my house! So, I turned to fiction. I spent a lot of time reading novels centered around parties, studying how my fellow writers handled the intricacies and logistics that come with throwing groups of characters together on the page. Here are some of my most beloved books with a party or two in the mix.
In my mind, Woolf’s 1925 classic Mrs. Dalloway is the ultimate novel about a party. It also happens to be the inspiration behind my own novel.
Set over the course of a single day, Mrs. Dalloway follows Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a garden party that evening, letting her mind get the best of her along the way. Dreamy, dark, and stream of consciousness, it’s considered Woolf's best work for good reason!
The working title of Mrs. Dalloway was The Hours. The novel began as two short stories, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister". It describes Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host in the evening, and the ensuing party. With an interior perspective, the story travels forward and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.
In October 2005, Mrs. Dalloway was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since Time debuted in 1923.
Agatha Christie will forever be queen of the murder mystery. She has more than one novel set at parties, but And Then There Were None is the best of the best in my mind.
The premise – ten strangers summoned to an island for a party by an eccentric millionaire – almost feels like a trope now, it’s been done and redone so many times. That’s because Christie did such a magnificent job of it, writers and storytellers will forever pay homage to her by plucking this setup and reworking it in wonderful ways.
Agatha Christie's world-famous mystery thriller, reissued with a striking new cover designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers.
Ten strangers, apparently with little in common, are lured to an island mansion off the coast of Devon by the mysterious U.N.Owen. Over dinner, a record begins to play, and the voice of an unseen host accuses each person of hiding a guilty secret. That evening, former reckless driver Tony Marston is found murdered by a deadly dose of cyanide.
The tension escalates as the survivors realise the killer is not only among them but…
I’ll never forget the searing humour with which Helen Fielding depicts the party where Bridget Jones first encounters Mark Darcy and his horrible Christmas sweater.
Some of us remember the movie scene, but the book set the hilariously awkward tone. This novel is such a fast and silly read with tons of heart, zero darkness or mystery, and lots of fun. I needed that back in 2020, so I re-read this book twenty-five years after first picking it up.
A dazzlingly urban satire on modern relationships? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something?
As Bridget documents her struggles through the social minefield of her thirties and tries to weigh up the eternal question (Daniel Cleaver or Mark Darcy?), she turns for support to four indispensable friends: Shazzer, Jude, Tom and a bottle of chardonnay.
Welcome to Bridget's first diary: mercilessly funny, endlessly touching and utterly addictive.
Helen Fielding's first Bridget Jones novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, sparked a phenomenon that has seen…
Agatha Christie may have laid the groundwork for the ‘strangers stuck together’ premise, but in The Guest List, Lucey Foley absolutely runs with it.
Picture a remote island off the coast of Ireland and a wedding full of guests with grudges and secrets and plenty of bones to pick. Then, a dead body shows up. Lucy Foley has established herself as a true master of the fun, modern whodunit, and this is my favourite of hers. I couldn’t put it book down!
*The brand new thriller from Lucy Foley - THE PARIS APARTMENT - is available to pre-order now*
The No.1 Sunday Times bestseller
*Over 1 million copies sold worldwide*
*One of The Times and Sunday Times Crime Books of the Year*
*Goodreads Choice Awards winner for Crime & Mystery 2020*
A gripping, twisty murder mystery thriller from the No.1 bestselling author of The Hunting Party.
'Lucy Foley is really very clever' Anthony Horowitz 'Thrilling' The Times 'A classic whodunnit' Kate Mosse 'Sharp and atmospheric and addictive' Louise Candlish 'A furiously twisty thriller' Clare Mackintosh
You know those books where you remember not just the plot or storyline, but the actual experience of reading it? Atonement is of those for me.
A sweeping wartime novel, the fate of its characters is determined by the events of a summer party. This was one of the first novels I read where I was repeatedly struck by the writer’s gift of prose and storytelling, so I often come back to it for inspiration.
In Atonement, McEwan got everything right, both at the sentence level and with the story and characters – except, in my writerly opinion, for the way the book ends. No spoilers here – read it first and see how you feel about the ending!
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a…
In this tense, spellbinding thriller set over the course of a single day, a woman prepares for a party that goes dreadfully wrong—for fans of Ashley Audrain and Lisa Jewell.
Nadine Walsh’s summer garden party is in full swing. The neighbors all have cocktails, the catered food is exquisite—everything’s going according to plan. But Nadine—devoted wife, loving mother, and doting daughter—finds herself standing over a dead body in her basement while her guests clink glasses upstairs. What happened? How did it come to this?
Growing up in New England, my mother had a set of books that she kept in the living room, more for display than anything else. It was The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read them and instantly became hooked on horror. In the seventh grade, I entertained my friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. And I’ve been enjoying scaring people ever since.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunged off a waterfall to her death, leaving behind a legacy shrouded in secrets. Her great-niece Julia, a struggling journalist recovering from a divorce, seeks answers decades later.
Tasked with retrieving Dr. Greer’s discovery–a flower that could have world-changing properties–Julia unearths a story rife with hidden agendas and a missionary community unwilling to share the truth. As she confronts the eerie legends and a fellow traveler with his own motives, Julia finds that the longer she stays, the thinner the line between reality and the fantastical becomes until she…
From the award-winning author of Dead Souls and Poe comes an all-new bone-chilling novel where a mysterious island holds the terrifying answers to a woman's past and future.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunges off a waterfall to her death, convinced the spirits of her dead husband and daughter had joined the nightmarchers-ghosts of ancient warriors that rise from their burial sites on moonless nights. But was it suicide, or did a strange young missionary girl, Agnes, play a role in Irene's deteriorating state of mind?
