Jane and Dan at the End of the World

The library's newest arrival gets its introduction while the paint is still wet, and the desk is pleased to report the premise survives contact with the book. Jane and Dan at the End of the World is Colleen Oakley's hostage-crisis marriage comedy, in which a couple's anniversary dinner at a clifftop destination restaurant is interrupted by armed radicals, whereupon the wife realises, with mounting professional horror, that the takeover is following the plot of her own failed novel, beat for beat. The desk has read a great many high-concept pitches. This one is armed, catered, and very funny about both.

Jane is a novelist in the way that stings — one book published years ago, sales in the dozens, a family that has stopped asking. Dan is her husband of nineteen years, and the marriage has gone quietly translucent — which is why Jane has decided, before the amuse-bouche, that tonight is the night she asks for a divorce. The restaurant is La Fin du Monde, molecular gastronomy at land's-end prices, and the desk savours Oakley's send-up of tasting-menu theatre almost as much as what interrupts it: masked intruders, zip ties, demands, and Jane's dawning recognition that she has read this scene because she wrote it, which makes her the one person in the room who already knows what happens next, including the parts the intruders have not performed yet. The engine this hands the book is delicious. Here is a woman whose life's disappointment becomes the room's only map, a husband discovering his wife authored the evening's terror, and a hostage crisis in which the couple's whispered arguments about their marriage proceed between demands, because nineteen years does not pause for balaclavas.

What the desk admires is the calibration. Oakley keeps the caper end buoyant — the eco-radical plot resolves with satire rather than gore, and the ensemble of fellow hostages earns its laughs — while running a quietly tender question underneath: whether being known by heart, the very thing that made the marriage translucent, is the thing that saves everyone in it. The answer arrives via the novel-within-the-novel, and the desk keeps its mechanics folded.

Honest notices: peril is real but the register is comic; content guidance is light for the premise, with violence mostly offstage. Readers should not attempt the tasting menu at home.

Who is this for? Long-married readers who argue in shorthand, writers nursing an underperforming book with unsuspected prophetic value, and any couple who ever brought a grievance to a nice dinner. Book the corner table, and order the escape.