Small Talk
Tonight, Magnus and Meredith are going to a fortieth birthday party.
It will be an evening like many others: people will talk too much, drink too much, and confide things they shouldn’t—about the price of the wine on the table, their obsessive marathon training, their dark pasts, marital regrets, and secret aspirations. There will be indecent behavior, shifting alliances, late-night dancing, and the faint, persistent sense that something larger is at stake.
Because beneath all the conversations happening around the table is the one that Magnus and Meredith are not having: Should this be the night they start trying for a baby—and in a relationship this happy, what the hell is going to happen next?
Rory Squire’s sparkling debut is a sharp, tender, and very funny novel about one couple, one night, and the moment a life might begin to change.
Reviews
“Get ready for the social horror of Rory Squire’s marvelous frenzy of a debut. Like a great Pinter play, Small Talk withholds its absurdity at the outset for a lot of—yes—talk, but as the night goes on, there is nothing small about it. In such a world as this, the question is not how can we go on, but should we?”—Jessica Anthony, author of The Most and Enter the Aardvark