Small Talk

A smart, funny debut novel about one pivotal evening in a couple's life, about a disastrous fortieth birthday dinner and the decision whether or not to have children

Two years into their relationship, Magnus knows many things about Meredith.

She is a woman of perpetually high spirits. All-American, she possesses the air of someone who has both funnelled beer from a plastic pitcher down her open throat and tasted caviar straight from the fish. She never manufactures conflict to get his attention, never stiffens in anger for no good reason. And she has shown Magnus, for the first time in his romantic life, that it is possible to love someone without also despising them, even slightly.

But this blissful adoration brings with it a quieter anxiety. Might she grow tired of him, of their life in his native Sweden? What does she want from him: everything or nothing at all?

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 behaviour, 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?

For readers of Katherine Heiny, Meg Mason and Miranda July, Small Talk is a sharp, tender and very funny novel about one couple, one night, and the moment a life might begin to change.

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