We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2005

'This startling shocker strips bare motherhood... the most remarkable Orange prize victor so far' Polly Toynbee, Guardian

'One of the most striking works of fiction to be published this year... A powerful, gripping and original meditation on evil' New Statesman

What sort of a mother hates her own son? Eva Khatchadourian does. What she'd hoped for was someone to bear witness to her life and to give her and her husband Franklin something else to talk about. Perhaps she had Kevin for the wrong reasons, she reflects, because he is not at all what she wanted. There's something strange about the boy who wears nappies till the age of six, yet who is otherwise frighteningly precocious.

Kevin's behaviour progresses from destructive to malicious to murderous. His greatest skill is the ability to absent himself from the scene of a crime, but Franklin plays down Eva's suspicions and insists that they go on playing happy families. In some ways, Franklin's continued optimism in the face of the obvious is more sinister than Kevin's devious destructiveness. It is Franklin's deliberate blindness that prevents Kevin's sociopathic traits from being taken seriously - or was it, Eva wonders, her fault that one morning Kevin lures seven fellow students, a teacher and a cafeteria worker into his school gymnasium and picks them off one by one with the crossbow his father bought him for Christmas?

We Need to Talk About Kevin takes the form of a series of letters to Franklin after the murders and asks: were they such bad parents? Is the way that Kevin turned out their fault? Could things have been different? The novel is an elegant psychological and philosophical investigation of culpability with a brilliant denouement.

About the Author

At age seven, Lionel Shriver decided she would be a writer. In 1987, she made good on her promise with The Female of the Species, a debut novel that received admiring reviews. Shriver's five subsequent novels were also well-received; but it was her seventh, 2003's We Need to Talk About Kevin, that turned her into a household name.

A graduate of Columbia University, Shriver is also a respected journalist whose features, op-eds, and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Guardian, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Economist. Since her breakthrough book, she has continued to produce bestselling fiction and gimlet-eyed journalism in equal measure.

Lionel Shriver talks about Kevin - How does it feel to have your widely rejected manuscript become a best-selling, prize-winning novel, then a book-club favourite and now the toast of the Cannes film festival? The author of We Need to Talk About Kevin explains here...

To read interviews with Lionel Shriver about this difficult and confrontational book, click on the links below

http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum118.php

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2003/oct/04/weekend7.weekend2