num_pages: 416
description: 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.
language: English
title: We Need to Talk About Kevin
titlecomplete: We Need to Talk About Kevin
characters: Eva Khatchadourian, Franklin Plaskett, Celia Khatchadourian, Kevin Khatchadourian
genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Thriller, Book Club, Drama, Psychology, Horror, Adult, Contemporary, Crime
ratings_count: 190671
awards: awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction
publisher: Serpent's Tail