Hostages, opera, a party

The premise should not work. A birthday party, a botched kidnapping, and then months of everyone stuck in one enormous house together, and somehow it turns into the most sociable novel I've read in years.

What I loved is that it's a book about appetite. People are hungry in it constantly — for the singing, for each other, for something to do with their hands. The vice president starts cleaning the house because nobody else will. The boys learn chess. Somebody starts cooking properly and the kitchen becomes the centre of the book, which is where the centre of a house always ends up anyway.

It took two weekends in the armchair by the window with the lamp on and a very ordinary bottle of Sicilian red that I have now bought four more times, purely because I associate it with this. That isn't a review. I know that isn't a review.

The ending. I'll say only that I understand why people are furious about it, that I wasn't, and that the epilogue is the wrong length — either two pages shorter or twenty longer, and she has picked the gap in between.

Eight. Overwritten in places and I didn't care even slightly. It's a rich book and like anything rich you want it on the right evening rather than on a Tuesday when you're tired.