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We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lionel Shriver
€ 14.99
€ 11.34
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for We Need to Talk About Kevin
Paperback. Series: Serpent's Tail Classics. Num Pages: 496 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 198 x 129. .
WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD Eva never really wanted to be a mother; certainly not the mother of a boy named Kevin who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher who had tried to befriend him. Now, two years after her son's horrific rampage, Eva comes to terms with her role as Kevin's mother in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her absent husband Franklyn about their son's upbringing. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about motherhood. How much is her fault? In Lionel Shriver's hands this sensational, chilling and memorable story of a woman who raised a monster becomes a metaphor for the larger tragedy - the tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.
Product Details
Publisher
Profile Books Ltd
Number of pages
496
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2016
Series
Serpent's Tail Classics
Condition
New
Number of Pages
496
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781781255674
SKU
V9781781255674
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
Ref
99-99
About Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver is a novelist whose previous books include The Post-Birthday World, A Perfectly Good Family, Game Control, Double Fault, The Female of the Species, Checker and the Derailleurs, and Ordinary Decent Criminals. She is widely published as a journalist, writing features, columns, op-eds, and book reviews for the Guardian, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Economist, Marie Claire, and many others. She is frequently interviewed on television, radio and in print media. She lives in London and Brooklyn, NY.
Reviews for We Need 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 startling shocker strips bare motherhood... the most remarkable Orange prize victor so far
Polly Toynbee
Guardian
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
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
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
Sunday Telegraph
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
Sunday Business Post
A study of despair, a book of ideas and a deconstruction of modern American morality
David Baddiel
The Times
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
Sunday Times
[A] powerful, painful novel... There are true, terrible things said here about family life
Saga Magazine
A fierce challenge of a novel 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
Independent
Pitch-perfect, devastating and utterly convincing
Geoff Dyer One of my favourite novels... the best thing I've read in years
Jeremy Vine We Need to Talk About Kevin is not a treatise on crime prevention but a meditation on motherhood, and a terribly honest one
Wall Street Journal
What an amazing piece of storytelling. I could not put the book down.
Shirley Henderson (Bridget Jones & Harry Potter actress)
Daily Express
One of the most powerful books I've read... brilliant
Boy George
Elle
An original and startling story of family life. A brilliant and thought-provoking read.
Jackie Brown
Woman's Own
Daily Mail
This startling shocker strips bare motherhood... the most remarkable Orange prize victor so far
Polly Toynbee
Guardian
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
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
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
Sunday Telegraph
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
Sunday Business Post
A study of despair, a book of ideas and a deconstruction of modern American morality
David Baddiel
The Times
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
Sunday Times
[A] powerful, painful novel... There are true, terrible things said here about family life
Saga Magazine
A fierce challenge of a novel 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
Independent
Pitch-perfect, devastating and utterly convincing
Geoff Dyer One of my favourite novels... the best thing I've read in years
Jeremy Vine We Need to Talk About Kevin is not a treatise on crime prevention but a meditation on motherhood, and a terribly honest one
Wall Street Journal
What an amazing piece of storytelling. I could not put the book down.
Shirley Henderson (Bridget Jones & Harry Potter actress)
Daily Express
One of the most powerful books I've read... brilliant
Boy George
Elle
An original and startling story of family life. A brilliant and thought-provoking read.
Jackie Brown
Woman's Own