Violet van de Sandt has a delectable debut on the way.
PEOPLE has an exclusive first look at the author's forthcoming novel The Dinner Party, out this fall from Little, Brown and Company.
The novel centers on Franca, an aspiring writer who left the Netherlands for England to embark on a new start with her partner, Andrew. When Andrew suggests the couple throw a dinner party — one that Franca must organize herself — she finds her worldview upended over the course of one increasingly tense night.
“I got the idea for The Dinner Party back in 2017, on the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Voyager spacecraft,” van de Sandt says. “NASA placed a Golden Record on board — a selection of music, images and natural sounds — and this kind of canon fascinated me.”
“It inspired me to write a novel that delves deeper into themes like inclusion and exclusion, and questions who gets heard and who doesn't, who speaks and who is silenced.”
The PEOPLE App is now available in the Apple App Store! Download it now for the most binge-worthy celeb content, exclusive video clips, astrology updates and more!
The novel, described as perfect for fans of Coco Mellors’ Cleopatra and Frankenstein and Natasha Brown’s Assembly, also marks the first acquisition by Little, Brown publisher Sally Kim.
“It’s the delicious unfolding of events, almost in real time, that’s the tension of the story,” Kim says of the novel. “But it’s also the story of female rage, bodily autonomy and all the little (and big) concessions women make all their lives, until they decide one day — maybe during a dinner party — that they’ll make them no longer.”
Read on for an exclusive excerpt from The Dinner Party.
Stella says I should write a letter. It can be addressed to her, or to no one in particular, or perhaps to a friend. Someone I trust. Do I have anyone like that? I don’t have to post it. I can write this letter to myself. It doesn’t have to be read. These words are mine, she says. She says it will help. Acknowledging what happened, describing it in as much detail as I can, trying to remember instead of pushing it all away. Stella thinks it will guide me in my recovery. I say I have nothing to recover from. She disagrees, and lists the facts as she knows them, written down in the file she brings out every time we meet. Everything that happened that night, in black and white, read out dispassionately, things I remember and things I don’t. They’re not at all a reflection of how it felt, what went on before it, why I did what I did. Facts don’t come into it. Her request takes me by surprise. I didn’t think she’d get into all this after just three weeks. She’d said we’d spend our first few sessions getting to know each other. I still hardly know anything about her.
I don’t know how to begin, I admit. She says begin at the beginning, but I tell her that’s stupid. There’s never any real beginning, unless I’m to go back to my birth, or better yet, the birth of my parents, their lives and families, their jobs and childhood injuries, but that’s just so boring. A biography that starts with the lives of the grandparents? Skip the first chapters. Besides, it’s facile, seeking explanations in family histories. I was an adult when it happened. My choices, like my words, are mine. Begin at the climax then, Stella says. I cock an eyebrow. I didn’t come. She says that’s not what she meant. She means the culmination, the denouement, this thing I did that brought me here. That business with the knife. She says write it down, what happened, to yourself or to a friend. I don’t care where you begin. So, Harry: here goes. Excerpted from the book THE DINNER PARTY by Viola van de Sandt. Copyright © 2025 by Viola van de Sandt. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
The Dinner Party will be published on Nov. 4 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.