We need to talk about Kevin - Lionel Shriver

WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2005
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.

Lionel Shriver's books include Orange Prize-winner We Need to Talk About Kevin [9781846688065], So Much for That, The Post-Birthday World, A Perfectly Good Family and Ordinary Decent Criminals. She is widely published as a journalist, writing features, columns, op-eds, and book reviews for many publications. She is frequently interviewed on television, radio, and in print media. She lives in London and Brooklyn, NY.

In fact everybody needs to talk about Kevin. Once in a while, a stunningly powerful novel comes along, knocks you sideways and takes your breath away: this is it... a horrifying, original, witty, brave and deliberately provocative investigation into all the casual assumptions we make about family life, and motherhood in particular
Daily Mail

This superb, many-layered novel intelligently weighs the culpability of parental nurture against the nightmarish possibilities of an innately evil child
Daily Telegraph

Urgent, unblinking and articulate fiction
Sunday Times

Cleverly balances the grand guignol and the mundane
Guardian

Shriver keeps up an almost unbearable suspense It's hard to imagine a more striking demolition job on the American myth of the perfect suburban family
The Sunday Telegraph

A study of despair, a book of ideas and a deconstruction of modern American morality
The Times - David Baddiel

One of my favourite novels... the best thing I've read in years
London Magazine - Jeremy Vine