We Need To Talk About Kevin

WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE read more Interactive online message board now live - visit here Reading group questions here (but don?t spoil the plot!) Read an extract --------------------- Two years ago, Eva Khatchadourian?s son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a popular algebra teacher. Because he was only fifteen at the time of the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is now in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York. Telling the story of Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses herself to her estranged husband through a series of letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault? Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story while framing these horrifying tableaux of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy - the tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.

About the Author :
Lionel Shriver's seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, won the 2005 Orange Prize. Her other novels are: A Perfectly Good Family, Game Control, Ordinary Decent Criminals, Checker and the Derailleurs and The Female of the Species. She has also written for the Guardian, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Economist. She lives in London.

Review :
An awesomely smart, stylish and pitiless achievement. Franz Kafka wrote that a book should be the ice-pick that breaks open the frozen seas inside us, because the books that make us happy we could have written ourselves. With We Need to Talk About Kevin, Shriver has wielded Kafka's axe with devastating force Few novels leave you gasping at the final paragraph as if the breath had been knocked out from your body. Yet such is the impact of We Need to Talk About Kevin ... by American writer Lionel Shriver. It is a provocative, hard-hitting book that carries an extremely powerful charge, but which is certain to polarize its readers In crisply crafted sentences that cut to the bone of her feelings about motherhood, career, family, and what it is about American culture that produces child killers, Shriver yanks the reader back and forth between blame and empathy, retribution and forgiveness. Never letting up on the tension, Shriver ensures that, like Eva, the reader grapples with unhealed wounds ...Shriver's fascinating, painful meditation on motherhood-as-regret We Need to Talk About Kevin is not a treatise on crime prevention but a meditation on motherhood, and a terribly honest at that Just as Eva wrestles with her own conscience, we as readers must grapple with our simultaneous revulsion and attraction to such crimes. There are no answers here, no pat explanations. Shriver doesn't take an easy way out by blaming the parents. Instead, the novel holds a mirror up to a whole culture. Who, in the end, needs to talk about Kevin? Maybe we all do Shriver has skilfully hit the bulls-eye on two best-selling targets in the American market: the fear of rampage killings by teenagers at school, and the guilt of working mothers... The novel explores but gives no simplistic solutions to the horrors of copycat killings, the choices before women combining careers with rearing children, or whether evil can be innate My beach novel of choice is Lionel Shriver's book We Need to Talk About Kevin - a tense account of a mother who gives birth to a child she unapologetically dislikes from the start, and who grows up to be a teenage mass murderer - although the book serves only to reinforce what I already knew: that it is unreasonable, not to say unnatural, for adults to be expected to like all children just because they are small A superb book, challenging and thought-provoking, with a shocking twist at the end and degree of redemption that leaves you literally stunned One of the most striking works of fiction to be published this year. It is Desperate Housewives as written by Euripides... A powerful, gripping and original meditation on evil A great read with horrifying twists and turns Shriver's graceful and detailed prose is reminiscent of Don DeLillo, while the story is perversely gripping A chilling yet compulsive book that'll keep you hooked until the very end This powerful novel uncovers the disturbing truth behind a mass killing at an American high school... There are true, terrible things said here about family life that most of us would leave unspoken Shriver's novel is a timely one... Nature or nurture? Shriver leaves it to the reader to decide in this powerful cautionary tale This book deservedly won this year's Orange Prize. It has the page-turning compulsion of a thriller and the fascination of a psychological study. But its main strength lies in its ordinariness. Far from feeling that nothing like this could happen to families like ours, the author makes it all entriely believable and possible. There but for the grace of God we could all be harbouring a Kevin A macabre thriller, with a heart-stopping, heartbreaking ending, Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin is an entrancingly written novel that understandably won the 2005 Orange prize for fiction ...taps into unspoken fears of maternal ambivalence that are not easily acknowledged and do not fit neatly into glossy magazine notions of female empowerment Hugely engrossing Powerful novel...shocking and insightful This startling shocker strips bare motherhood... the most remarkable Orange prize victor so far A study of childhood psychosis that should come with a health warning Most wanted Pitch-perfect, devastating and utterly convincing At a time when fiction by women has been criticized for its dull domesticity, here us a fierce challenge of a novel by a woman that forces the reader to confront assumptions about love and parenting, about how and why we apportion blame, about crime and punishment, forgiveness and redemption and, perhaps most significantly, about how we can manage when the answer to the question why? is either too complex for human comprehension, or simply non-existent It is a book about the dangerous distance that exists between what we feel and what we are actually prepared to admit when it comes to family life. (...) It is a book about what we need to talk about, but can't. (...) Shriver's satire on child-centered families captained by adult buffoons whose intellectual, not to mention erotic, life is in pieces, could not be more timely. Motherhood, even in our liberated world, is still a process of requisition, of appropriation that feels more painful perhaps because there is more to appropriate Harrowing, tense and thought-provoking, this is a vocal challenge to every accepted parenting manual you've ever read '[An] intelligent ending and such important themes' Highly original and beautifully crafted novel [A] powerful, painful novel... The ending Shriver chooses will shock many readers in these policitcally correct times that take for granted the innocence of children and the corrupting culpability of adults. There are true, terrible things said here about family life that most of us would leave unspoken I think it is one of the bravest books I've ever read... We Need to Talk About Kevin is an original, powerful, resonant, witty, fascinating and deeply intelligent work A shocking, sometimes funny and unputdownable novel Shriver's surprise bestseller has been hailed for exploding unspoken taboos, such as non-maternal feelings towards "nine-month freeloaders". More interestingly, she exposes the pantomime of family life in which kids are just a desirable consumer product Lionel Shriver grabbed the Orange Prize, a raft of headlines and a well-merited name for taboo-busting provocation in her fictional bad mother's handbook Compelling account of parental feelings in extremis