We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

To say Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin is a compelling, shocking, thought-provoking novel sounds like the recitation of one of the trite quotes adorning a bestseller's front cover. However, this is fair praise for the 2005 Orange Prize winner, which spins a powerful tale from a difficult subject. I say difficult; in a sense, it should be easy to create a novel based around the events with which WNTTAK deals, so inherently full of emotion and shock value as it is. To relate the story well, however - to take the chilling, powerful premise and turn it into a story with such depth and resonance as that here - that is something entirely more ...  Read the complete review

“We Need To Talk About Kevin” Lionel Shriver £9.99 Serpent’s Tail paperback, 400 pages “We need to talk about Kevin” by Lionel Shriver, winner of the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction, has to be one of the best – and most provocative – books I have read in years. It is both a literary feat and an excoriating account of American society, modern parenting, and the phenomenon of Columbine-style school shootings. “Kevin” is shocking in two ways; firstly in its controversial perspective on parenting, and motherhood in particular, and secondly in that this book has as its subject Eva Khatchadourian, a woman who is coming to terms with the murderous ...  Read the complete review

I purchased this book a few years ago as it was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, as a general rule of thumb, books which make the shortlist tend to tick all my boxes for a good read... this was no different. Here in the UK, thankfully (without sounding too flippant) we have experienced few massacres; two most notorious and memorable from my life time are the Hungerford Massacre, 19th August 1987, in which a gunman, armed with semi-automatic rifles and a handgun shot and killed 16 people. And of course most notorious, and clear in my head, the Dunblane Massacre, in which Thomas Hamilton, an unemployed former Scout Leader, walked in to Dunblane ...  Read the complete review

Originally published in the US in 2003, Lionel Shriver's novel "We Need to Talk About Kevin" received huge critical acclaim and was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005. My copy of the book was published in 2006 here in the UK. Somehow I missed most of the fuss over the novel and picked it up largely at random from the 3 for 2 section at Waterstones a couple of years ago. As a member of the Columbine generation, having been in high school in Canada when the shootings there occurred, the subject matter of the novel touches a nerve, still raw a decade later. I have since read several books along the same lines but Shriver's stands out as the most ...  Read the complete review

We need to talk about Kevin is one of those books that sticks with you, and everytime I read something similar (such as 19 Minutes by Jodi Picoult) I find it hard not to compare them - this is so well written and is now one of my favourite books of all time. ** Premise ** We Need To Talk About Kevin is narrated by Kevins mother in letter form to her husband telling of her difficulty of getting along with her son since his birth. The story begins before Kevins birth where we learn that his mother Eva wasnt overly keen on having children in the first place, and upon finding herself pregnant, is still a little wary. This is an ...  Read the complete review