We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel [Paperback]

Now a major motion picture by Lynne Ramsay, starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly,Lionel Shriver’s resonant story of a mother’s unsettling quest to understandher teenage son’s deadly violence, her own ambivalence toward motherhood, andthe explosive link between them reverberates with the haunting power of highhopes shattered by dark realities. Like Shriver’s charged and incisive laternovels, includingSo Much for ThatandThe Post-Birthday World,We Need to Talk About Kevinisa piercing, unforgettable, and penetrating exploration of violence, familyties, and responsibility, a book that theBoston Globedescribes as“sometimes searing . . . [and] impossible to put down.”

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, Franklin. 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.

Ms. Shriver takes a calculated risk . . . but the gamble pays off as she strikes a tone of compelling intimacy.Furiously imagined.An underground feminist hit.A slow, magnetic descent into hell that is as fascinating as it is disturbing.Shriver handles this material, with its potential for cheap sentiment and soap opera plot, with rare skill and sense.Powerful [and] harrowing.Impossible to put down.