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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 Culinary Adventures

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Clive Mantle does an excellent job of bringing the characters to life in this audiobook - his reading is lively and he manages to give voice to the female characters without adopting an annoying falsetto.

The book mixes a funny take-down of the pretentions of snooty restaurants with the drama of parents confronted by the dilemma of how to respond to the crimes of their children.

Enjoyable book, great narrator

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previous reviews almost stopped me from purchasing .but I loved it and narration was excellent

I immediately bought another book by Herman koch

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What made the experience of listening to The Dinner the most enjoyable?

The narrator's reading is so lively and naturally that I have read the book twice while listening to the narrator, Clive Mantle. Great compliment to them both: the writer as well as the narrator.

EXCELLENT

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This was a really good read (listen, I guess!). It took a bit of time to grow on me, but I became completey wrapped up in it.
There's some uncomfortable subject matter and the characters are tricksy... The main narrator character I waxed and waned over- going from irritation to appreciation to disgust to... not exactly approval, but an acknowledgement that this is a man rendered by the author very much in three dimensions. Very believable.

surprising

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I really enjoyed this book.

It kept on surprising me right to the end.

I liked the way he started the book and then gave small pieces of information about the characters so that your perceptions were always changing.

Superb

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