Like Virginia Woolf did in MRS DALLOWAY, Anne Korkeakivi brilliantly weaves the complexities of an age into an act as deceptively simple as hosting a dinner party in this alluring and timely debut.
tonight a dinner could change the future - if a terrible secret doesn’t destroy it first. Clare Moorhouse is an American in Paris who has been leading a graceful life abroad. there are pleasures to being married to a high-ranking diplomat, but there are also appearances to be upheld and responsibilities to be executed - like tonight’s unexpected dinner party, one crucial to her husband’s career. As Clare navigates the spring-green streets of Paris, shopping for fresh stalks of asparagus, the right cheeses, and flowers for the table, she is haunted by a brief period of violence in her past that threatens to resurface and crack the immaculate veneer she’s worked so hard to achieve. At tonight’s dinner, her husband hopes to receive a new posting. But to Clare, the potential move means wrestling with a secret that has been deeply and carefully buried for twenty-five years - or so she thought. the myriad preparations for dinner are only the beginning of her day’s complications. Clare’s son appears on her doorstep, absent without permission from his boarding school. But much more unsettling is a face in the crowd that she glimpses again and again. A face that belongs to that other, darker era of her life, and one she never expected to see again. Like Virginia Woolf did in MRS DALLOWAY, Anne Korkeakivi brilliantly weaves the complexities of an age into an act as deceptively simple as hosting a dinner party in this alluring and timely debut. Anne Korkeakivi writes wonderfully about embassy manners, food, and Paris, and she writes even better about the darker world that threatens to disrupt not just Clare’s seating plan for dinner but her entire life. AN UNEXPECtED GUESt is a novel that, like its heroine, possesses great elegance, enormous surprises, and unexpected depth. Margot Livesey, author of tHE HOUSE ON FORtUNE StREEt