At the Table: a Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year

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Painfully realistic, this frank but tender portrayal of people at their lowest is a book everyone can relate to. This is the story Linda and Gerry Maguire who separate and the effect it has on their adult children who are really old enough to be able to deal with it without all the histrionics which follow. The events felt, on occasion, as if they were washing over me but I found myself touched by the attempts of the author to show the characters shifting and developing. Próbowałam uczepić się Jamiego, ale tu również ciężko mi było zobaczyć cały obraz sytuacji i zrozumieć powody jego kłopotów.

Though major life events take place, this novel focuses primarily on the little moments that make up the mosaic of our lives. Nicole is a successful commercial director for a technology company but also a functioning alcoholic. I initially wondered if any of the members of this family even actually liked each other - and if I was gonna be able to like any of them.And although there are funny sections in the book, the emotional grounding far surpasses what I expected. The encounters between the family combinations are, as the title professes, around mealtime meetings. The four characters are all so flawed and yet charming and I really enjoyed the structure of the book which takes place at meals over the course of a year following each member of the family in turn.

We start with a meal where the parents reveal they’re getting divorced and we end with a meal shared with mother and daughter who are, due to the events they’ve been through, forging a new relationship. She’s on a permanent quest to find the right man, remaining furiously unsuccessful while her friends settle down around her. When Linda and Gerry announce their separation after decades of marriage, Nicole and Jamie are stunned.An unsentimental exploration of love and disillusionment, At the Table is about what it means to grow up - both as an individual, and as a family. Story was OK, if a little miserable - but reflective of what a normal life can be like, characters not really very likeable, and just as you thought that it was going to get a bit happier, the book abruptly stopped. Though there are some funny moments in the book, the emotional and mental issues the characters go through far outweighs anything humorous. Filled with razor-sharp dialogue and psychological acuity, At the Table is an astute debut novel about dysfunctional family life.

Each chapter is told from a different member of the family’s point of view, and helps to create these wonderful fleshed out characters. By the end of the book I was just skimming the last few chapters wanting to be done with these tedious people and their dysfunction. We also use them to help detect unauthorized access or activity that violate our terms of service, as well as to analyze site traffic and performance for our own site improvement efforts.Gerry's character is also from the same town in Northern Ireland as me, which I was so excited to see represented, that may have played a little part in my overall enjoyment of this novel! I really enjoyed this novel, with a good storyline that keeps a good pace throughout so I stayed easily engaged with it. The food and drink theme as an ongoing connection starts strongly but weakens quickly as you realise that virtually every social interaction has the same link - from a cup of tea to a full restaurant meal and everything in between. In the interactions between the family members, Claire Powell has a way of showing how adults revert to childhood behaviour - acting out a role with other family members that they may have been performing for years (perhaps lacking the ability and self belief to move on? With rare exceptions such as bank holidays, the book group meets on the first Wednesday of every month at 7.

This is a beautifully written, well paced story of a family, trying their best to cope after a life changing event. Armed with a key and new knowledge about his parents' past, Nik sets out to unlock the secrets that his mother has been holding onto his whole life. A character explicitly tells one of the protagonists that he’s about to show her a video of his kid. This one really tickled me when I saw it, but the subject matter is a lot less humorous than it might appear.W autorce zobaczyłam potencjał (to jej debiut), a jednocześnie niekoniecznie potrafiłam odpowiednio podejść do jej tekstu.