We Need to Talk About Kevin
By Lionel Shriver
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780061124297, 432pp.)
Publication Date: June 14, 2006
Categories: Literary
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The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry
Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklyn. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.
Lionel Shriver's novels include The Post-Birthday World, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and A Perfectly Good Family. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. She lives in London.
"Impossible to put down."
-Boston Globe
"Powerful [and] harrowing."
-Entertainment Weekly
"A slow, magnetic descent into hell that is as fascinating as it is disturbing."
-Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Ms. Shriver takes a calculated risk...but the gamble pays off as she strikes a tone of compelling intimacy."
-Wall Street Journal
"Furiously imagined."
-Seattle Times
"Shriver handles this material, with its potential for cheap sentiment and soap opera plot, with rare skill and sense."
-Newark Star Ledger
"An underground feminist hit."
-New York Observer











