An Unexpected Guest

On a lovely spring day in Paris–post-9/11 and several months after the London Underground bombings–Clare Moorhouse, the Irish-American wife of a high-ranking British diplomat, is arranging an official dinner crucial to her husband’s career. As she shops for fresh stalks of asparagus and works out the menu and seating arrangements, her day is complicated by the abrupt arrival of her son from boarding school in England and a disquieting encounter with a  man on the street. More unnerving still is a recurring face in the crowd, one that belonged to another, darker era of her life, long buried.

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.