We Need To Talk About Kevin - Softcover

Lionel Shriver

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852428899 ISBN 13: 9781852428891

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2005

Synopsis

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 this title

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 (Independent)

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 (Book News)

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 (Deborah Donovan Booklist)

...Shriver's fascinating, painful meditation on motherhood-as-regret (Time Out New York)

We Need to Talk About Kevin is not a treatise on crime prevention but a meditation on motherhood, and a terribly honest at that (Wall Street Journal)

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 (Boston Globe)

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 (TLS)

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 (Judy Rumbold Guardian)

A superb book, challenging and thought-provoking, with a shocking twist at the end and degree of redemption that leaves you literally stunned (New Books Mag)

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 (New Statesman 2005-06-06)

Book Description:

Exclusive author interview with Paul Blezard.
'Elegant investigation...with a brilliant denouement' Observer

About this edition

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1852428899
• ISBN 13: 9781852428891
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416