A Curious Invitation

Since ancient times human beings have gathered together for social purposes. And since not very long after that writers have written about these occasions. The party is a useful literary device, not only for social comment and satire, but as an occasion where characters can meet, fall in love, fall out or even get murdered. A Curious Invitation features forty of the greatest fictional festivities. Some of these parties are depictions of real events, like the Duchess of Richmond s Ball on the eve of battle with Napoleon in Thackeray s Vanity Fair; others draw on the author s experience of the society they lived in, such as Lady Metroland s party in Evelyn Waugh s Vile Bodies; while yet others come straight from the writer s bizarre imagination, like Douglas Adams flying party above an unknown planet from The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy. Suzette Field offers you the chance to gatecrash these parties, spanning most of the history of human civilization, seen through the eyes of the world s greatest writers.