Dinner List

Sabrina turns thirty and goes to her birthday dinner expecting a quiet evening with her best friend. Instead, the table holds four other guests: three significant people from her past, and Audrey Hepburn, who is annoyed that everyone has been kept waiting for an hour.

The guest list is the kind many people have imagined when asked to name five people, living or dead, they would most like to eat with. Here the dinner actually happens. As the appetizers arrive and the wine is poured, the conversation begins, and it becomes clear that the six of them have been brought together for a reason.

The book is a romance with a touch of magical realism, told in the present as a single evening at one table. The premise carries a question about why we choose the people we do, and what we would say to them if they were really there.

The tone is warm and wry, with sweetness and some bitterness in balance. Expect a contained setting, plenty of talk, and a past that comes to sit across from the narrator while she works out why she has been given this night.