We Need to Talk About Kevin
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.
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Two years after her son Kevin killed nine people at his Hudson Valley high school three days before his sixteenth birthday, Eva Khatchadourian writes letters to her absent husband Franklin from a small commuter rental near the prison.
It is fiction, but Lionel Shriver researched real school shootings extensively and the novel was published just years before Sandy Hook. The questions it raises remain painfully current.
It won the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction and was adapted into a 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton.
Yes. The book deals with a school massacre and a mother's complicated grief, and it does not soften any of the difficult material.
We Need to Talk About Kevin was written by Lionel Shriver, published in 2003 by Harper Perennial.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is 432 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, We Need to Talk About Kevin takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is a standalone novel by Lionel Shriver, not part of a series.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.