Top 10 dinner parties in fiction

Life is full of stresses: death; divorce; disasters, natural and otherwise. But another stress under D in the dictionary of stresses is the Dinner Party. It’s a bit like opening a restaurant, it’s a bit like putting on a play, and it’s all for the benefit of people who are our friends or colleagues but also our audience, our guinea pigs, our judges.

There’s so much that can go wrong: the food can be undercooked or overcooked – or perfectly cooked but not very good. The conversation can stall or it can turn into a competition or an argument or a shouting match.

Related: The best recent thrillers roundup – review

Our new book, The Lying Room, is our version of what might be called domestic noir. It’s a thriller about a married woman who finds her lover murdered and, instead of calling the police, cleans up the scene to remove any trace of her presence. It proves to be a disastrous decision and sets off a chain of complications that take place in bedrooms and gardens and kitchens and, at the centre of the story, a catastrophic dinner party at which secrets are revealed, resentments unmasked and blood spilt.

Here are 10 of the best dinner parties in literature; the good, the bad and the horrendous.

1. The Symposium by Plato
A group of Athenians meet to eat, drink and talk about the meaning of love. The dialogue includes the beautiful myth that we are born torn in two and spend our lives searching for our our other half. It has Socrates. It isn’t much bothered about whether the love is gay or straight. It’s a profound philosophical discussion interrupted by a drunk man staggering in with a prostitute. (In fact the only women at this dinner party are slaves or courtesans or both.) It is an evening that has haunted western culture ever since.

2. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
A dinner party is a kind of display and a kind of theatre, it’s conspicuous consumption and it’s entertainment. We eat and we tell stories. King Arthur is feeding his court (in Simon Armitage’s wonderful translation of the early-15th-century poem): “Each guest received his share / of bread or meat or broth; a dozen plates per pair – / plus beer or wine, or both!” As they eat, a knight enters on a horse. He’s huge, well-armed, handsome – and green. He issues a challenge, accepted on Arthur’s behalf by Sir Gawain, who gets more than he bargained for. It’s both an epic adventure and a dinner-party yarn.

3. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
This play begins with a witches’ sabbath followed by the murder of a king, unleashing many more killings. But for some of us, the most horrifying scene is its dinner party going terribly wrong. The appearance of murdered Banquo at the feast is a shock but it’s also a scene of skin-crawling embarrassment. The focus of the scene is not really on Macbeth but on his desperate wife, first trying to pretend nothing is happening, hissing at her husband to hold things together, placating the guests, and in the end cutting her losses and hustling them out of the door before things get any worse: “Stand not upon the order of your going but go at once.” Haven’t we all been to that sort of evening?

4. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Is there a funnier or more adorable dinner party in literature than the one young David, newly independent in London, throws for his friends? Eager and anxious, he gets in too much food (oysters, roast fowls, stewed beef with vegetables, a slab of “mock turtle” enough for 15, a tart and a jelly) and so many bottles of wine that seeing them lined up he is “absolutely frightened of them”. He begins the evening shy and ardent and full of pleasure in his friends. He ends it helplessly inebriated, leaning out of windows to talk to himself, unsteadily contemplating himself in a glass and seeing that even his hair looks drunk, falling down stairs. At last he finds himself in his bed, which is like a rocking sea, his tongue like the bottom of an empty kettle. (And haven’t most of us been there, too?)

5. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Boeuf en daube is a beef stew – but in the wonderful drawn-out dinner party in this novel it is also a sacrament. Three days in the marinading, infused with bay leaves and wine, olives and oil, its “soft mass” served in the “great brown dish”, it gathers Mr and Mrs Ramsay’s guests in, so the disappointments and separations of the day die away and the unknown future is pushed outside the warm circle of talk and appetite. The bowl of fruit, the lighted candles, a couple arriving to announce their engagement. Mrs Ramsay bringing them all together, saying: “Life, stand still here.”

6. Animal Farm by George Orwell
A dinner party can be an occasion for celebration and reconciliation. Never has that notion been turned on its head with such savage irony as at the climax of this allegory. The pigs are entertaining a “deputation of neighbouring farmers”. The other animals peer in through the dining room window and they witness the friendly speeches and mutual toasts: “‘The creatures looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

7. Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson
There’s an enticing supper in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (fried trout and “gloriously sticky marmalade roll, steaming hot”), but no dinner party in children’s literature can beat the magical autumn feast at the end of this book, when the inhabitants of Moomin valley gather at the end of their adventures to eat and drink and celebrate before they face their long winter hibernations. Even the hobgoblin is placated with plum jam pancakes and agrees to grant everyone’s wish. Moomintroll wishes that the laden table be taken to his much-missed friend Snufkin. (This is our family mantra when one of us is missing from a feast: “May this table go to them wherever they are… ”)

8. Atonement by Ian McEwan
A sweltering summer day in 1935 with war on the horizon. A grand house. A clandestine affair just begun, a rape about to happen, a world about to unravel – and a very English dinner party in progress: roast meat and roast potatoes, wine not water, the windows won’t open and an aroma of “warm dust from the Persian carpet” Everything important is not being said. A tour de force in which desire, violence and encroaching disaster are accompanied by conversation about the weather and the implacable march of unwanted dishes to the table.

9. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Set in 1960s Nigeria before and during the Biafran war, hunger and starvation are at the heart of this novel. So too is eating. In the capacious, hospitable house of Olanna and Odenigbo, dinner parties are frequent in the years before conflict erupts. In the first of these, the template for the ones to follow, academics and radicals gather to discuss revolution, secession, colonialism – and they eat the food prepared by their houseboy Ugwu: pepper soup, spicy jollof rice, chicken boiled in herbs. He listens, though only half understands, their excited conversation. This inclusive, generous, culturally diverse hospitality becomes a repeating bright memory of better times as the story travels into betrayal and despair.

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10. The Dinner by Herman Koch
Someone had to do it. Koch’s 2012 bestseller is nothing but a dinner party, an epic of submerged hatred, buried secrets beneath the thinnest veneer of elegant fine dining in an Amsterdam restaurant. Two brothers and their wives meet to discuss a terrible family event. As one meticulously described dish follows after the other, terrible truths emerge. It’s been filmed twice but accept no substitutes. It’s not nice, it’s not subtle, but it’s grimly effective and will make you grateful for a meal alone in front of the TV.

• The Lying Room by Nicci French is published by Simon & Schuster. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on orders over £15.