by Lionel Shriver (Author), Lionel Shriver (Author), Kate Mosse (Introduction), Lionel Shriver (Author)
This title is winner of the orange prize for fiction 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.
Format: Import
Pages: 500
Edition: Main
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Published: 09 May 2006
ISBN 10: 1852424672
ISBN 13: 9781852424671
Prizes: Winner of Orange Prize for Fiction 2005. Runner-up for Reading Group Book of the Year 2007. Shortlisted for British Book Awards: Crime Thriller of the Year 2006.