A Curious Invitation: The Forty Greatest Parties in Fiction
&#8220;Holiday hostesses will find much to inspire in London impresario Suzette Field&#8217;sA Curious Invitation, from the fancy dress ball at Manderley to Jay Gatsby&#8217;s Prohibition-era decadence.&#8221; (Vogue.com)&#8220;In &#8216;A Curious Invitation,&#8217; Suzette Field collects 40 and dissects them with great wit and insight. . . . Re-living the festivities in well-loved books is part of the charm of this one; even more exhilarating, perhaps, is meeting intriguing new writers.&#8221; (Boston Globe)&#8220;With panache, attention to arresting details, and a flair for mixing literary classics with pop-culture hits, prominent London event planner Field invites readers to forty fictional parties . . . She quotes lavishly from her sources to splendid effect.&#8221; (Publishers Weekly)&#8220;Suzette Field is a genuinely talented story teller. Her book possess a playful lightness of touch, but is pregnant with fact and meaning. It is both amusing and informative. Never has education been such a pleasure, never reading a learned exposition so delightful.&#8221; (Dan Cruickshank Art historian, BBC television presenter and author)&#8220;London event planner Field takes us across time and continents to 40 of the best parties in fiction. Like the social pages of a newspaper - but way more entertaining . . . Armchair party-crashing at its finest.&#8221; (Cleveland Plain Dealer)&#8220;It takes a book like Suzette Field&#8217;sA Curious Invitationto remind us of the absolute centrality of social entertainment to the way in which a literary classic works its spell.&#8221; (Daily Telegraph(London))&#8220;Need a bit of entertaining inspiration? Take a page from a new book on the greatest gatherings that never were.&#8221; (Wall Street Journal)