We Need to Talk About Kevin - Softcover

Shriver, Lionel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852428899 ISBN 13: 9781852428891

Publisher: Serpents Tail, 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.

From the Back Cover:

Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of a boy who ends up murdering 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.

About the Author:

Lionel Shriver's seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, won the 2005 Orange Prize. Her other novels are: A Perfectly Good Family, Game Control, Ordinary Decent Criminals, Checker and the Derailleurs and The Female of the Species. She has also written for the Guardian, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Economist. She lives in London.

• Publisher: Serpents Tail
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1852428899
• ISBN 13: 9781852428891
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416