Tonight, Magnus and Meredith are going to a fortieth birthday party.

It will be an evening like many others: people will talk too much, drink too much, and confide things they shouldn’t – about the price of the wine on the table, their obsessive marathon training, their dark pasts, marital regrets and secret aspirations. There will be indecent behavior, shifting alliances, late-night dancing and the faint, persistent sense that something larger is at stake.

Because beneath all the conversations happening around the table is the one that Magnus and Meredith are not having: knowing what they do about each other and about the world, should this be the night they start trying to have a baby?

For readers of Patricia Lockwood, Dolly Alderton, and Miranda July, Small Talk is a sharp, tender and very funny novel about one couple, one night, and the moment a life might begin to change.

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