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More from Lionel Shriver
BIG BROTHER
When Pandora picks up her older brother Edison at the Iowa airport, she doesn’t recognize him. In the four years since she last saw him, the once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened? And it’s not just the weight. Edison breaks her husband Fletcher’s handcrafted furniture, makes overkill breakfasts for the family, and entices her stepson not only to forgo college but to drop out of high school. After Edison has more than overstayed his welcome, Fletcher delivers his wife an ultimatum: it’s him or me. But which loyalty is paramount, that of a wife or a sister? For without Pandora’s support, surely Edison will eat himself into an early grave.
Rich with Shriver’s distinctive wit and ferocious energy, Big Brother is about fat—an issue both social and excruciatingly personal. It asks just how much we are obligated to help members of our families, and whether it’s ever possible to save loved ones from themselves.
“(A) delicious, highly readable novel . . . (which) raises challenging questions about how much a loving person can give to another without sacrificing his or her own well-being.”
—People, People Pick (4 stars)
“Shriver’s talents are many: She’s especially skilled at playing with readers’s reflexes for sympathy and revulsion, never letting us get too comfortable with whatever firm understanding we think we have of a character.”
—Washington Post
THE NEW REPUBLIC
Ostracized as a kid, Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. A disgruntled New York corporate lawyer, he’s more than ready to leave his lucrative career for the excitement and uncertainty of journalism. When he’s offered the post of foreign correspondent in a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a homegrown terrorist movement, Edgar recognizes the disappeared larger-than-life reporter he’s been sent to replace, Barrington Saddler, as exactly the outsize character he longs to emulate. Infuriatingly, all his fellow journalists cannot stop talking about their beloved “Bear,” who is no longer lighting up their work lives.
Yet all is not as it appears. Os Soldados Ousados de Barba—“The Daring Soldiers of Barba”—have been blowing up the rest of the world for years in order to win independence for a province so dismal, backward, and windblown that you couldn’t give the rat hole away. So why, with Barrington vanished, do terrorist incidents claimed by the “SOB” suddenly dry up?
A droll, playful novel, The New Republic addresses weighty issues like terrorism with the deft, tongue-in-cheek touch that is vintage Shriver. It also presses the more intimate question: What makes particular people so magnetic, while the rest of us inspire a shrug? What’s their secret? And in the end, who has the better life—the admired, or the admirer?
“It takes guts to write a satire about terrorism—and Lionel Shriver has guts. . . . Shriver is an incisive social satirist with a clear grip on the ironies of our contemporary age . . . [Her] take on journalism and international politics is wry, insightful, and just over the top enough to be fun.” —Los Angeles Times
SO MUCH FOR THAT
Shep Knacker has long saved for “the Afterlife,” an idyllic retreat in the Third World where his nest egg can last forever. Exasperated that his wife, Glynis, has concocted endless excuses why it’s never the right time to go, Shep finally announces he’s leaving for a Tanzanian island, with or without her. Yet Glynis has some news of her own: she’s deathly ill. Shep numbly puts his dream aside, while his nest egg is steadily devastated by staggering bills that their health insurance only partially covers. Astonishingly, illness not only strains their marriage but saves it.
From acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Lionel Shriver comes a searing, ruthlessly honest novel. Brimming with unexpected tenderness and dry humor, it presses the question: How much is one life worth?
“Powerful. . . . Wrenching. . . . Once again Lionel Shriver has stomped into the middle of a pressing national debate with a great ordeal of a novel that’s impossible to ignore. . . . If Jodi Picoult has her finger on the zeitgeist, Shriver has her hands around its throat.”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“A visceral and deeply affecting story, a story about how illness affects people’s relationships and how their efforts to grapple with mortality reshape the arcs of their lives. . . . [Shriver’s] understanding of her people is so intimate, so unsentimental . . . it lofts these characters permanently into the reader’s imagination.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
THE POST-BIRTHDAY WORLD
American children’s book illustrator Irina McGovern enjoys a secure, settled life in London with her smart, loyal, disciplined partner, Lawrence—until the night she finds herself inexplicably drawn to kissing another man, a passionate, extravagant, top-ranked snooker player. Two competing alternate futures hinge on this single kiss, as Irina’s decision—to surrender to temptation or to preserve her seemingly safe partnership with Lawrence—will have momentous consequences for her career, her friendships and familial relationships, and the texture of her daily life.
“A layered and unflinching portrait of infidelity. . . . Shriver pulls off a tremendous feat of characterization. . . . Better yet, the author is more interested in raising questions about love and fidelity than in pat moralizing. Readers will wonder which choice was best for Irina, but Shriver masterfully confounds any attempt to arrive at a sure answer.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN
Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the malicious boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who had 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.
“Sometimes searing . . . impossible to put down . . . brutally honest. . . . Who, in the end, needs to talk about Kevin? Maybe we all do.” —Boston Globe
DOUBLE FAULT
Tennis has been Willy Novinsky’s one love ever since she first picked up a racquet at the age of four. A middle-ranked pro at twenty-three, she’s met her match in Eric Oberdorf, a low-ranked, untested Princeton grad who also intends to make his mark on the international tennis circuit. Eric becomes Willy’s first passion off the court, and eventually they marry. But while wedded life begins well, full-tilt competition soon puts a strain on their relationship—and an unexpected accident sends driven and gifted Willy sliding irrevocably toward resentment, tragedy, and despair.
From acclaimed author Lionel Shriver comes a brilliant and unflinching novel about the devastating cost of prizing achievement over love.
“Shriver shows in a masterstroke why character is fate and how sport reveals it.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A brilliant tale of doomed love. . . . This is not a novel about tennis or rivalry; it’s about love, marriage, and the balance of power in relationships. . . . Double Fault is a compelling and playfully ironic take on the sex wars, blistering with . . . brilliant writing and caustic language.”
—The Observer (London)
A PERFECTLY GOOD FAMILY
Following the death of her worthy liberal parents, Corlis McCrea moves back into her family’s grand Reconstruction mansion in North Carolina, willed to all three siblings. Her timid younger brother has never left home. When her bullying black-sheep older brother moves into “his” house as well, it’s war.
Each heir wants the house. Yet to buy the other out, two siblings must team against one. Just as in girlhood, Corlis is torn between allying with the decent but fearful youngest and the iconoclastic eldest, who covets his legacy to destroy it. A Perfectly Good Family is a stunning examination of inheritance, literal and psychological: what we take from our parents, what we discard, and what we are stuck with, like it or not.
“Often funny and always intelligent, this is a sharply observed history of the redoubtable McCrea family, shot through with sardonic wit and black comedy.”
—The Independent
GAME CONTROL
Eleanor Merritt, a do-gooding American family-planning worker, was drawn to Kenya to improve the lot of the poor. Unnervingly, she finds herself falling in love with the beguiling Calvin Piper, despite (or perhaps because of) his misanthropic theories about population control and the future of the human race. Surely, Calvin whispers seductively in Eleanor’s ear, if the poor are a responsibility, they are also an imposition.
Set against the vivid backdrop of shambolic modern-day Africa—a continent now primarily populated with wildlife of the two-legged sort—Lionel Shriver’s Game Control is a wry, grimly comic tale of bad ideas and good intentions. With a deft, droll touch, Shriver highlights the hypocrisy of lofty intellectuals who would “save” humanity but who don’t like people.
“One of the best works of fiction about Africa I’ve ever read.”
—Amanda Craig, New Statesman (London)
CHECKER AND THE DERAILLEURS
Beautiful and charismatic, nineteen-year-old Checker Secretti is the most gifted drummer that the club-goers of Astoria, Queens, have ever heard. When he plays, conundrums seem to solve themselves, brilliant thoughts spring to mind, and couples fall in love. The members of his band, The Derailleurs, are passionately devoted to their guiding spirit, as are all who fall under Checker’s spell. But when another drummer, Eaton Striker, hears the prodigy play, he is pulled inexorably into Checker’s orbit by a powerful combination of admiration and envy. Soon The Derailleurs, too, are torn apart by latent jealousies that Eaton does his utmost to bring alive.
“Nothing if not lyrical, both in the internal assonances of its sentences . . . and in sentiment. It is fairy tale as well as theology, a domestic adventure story featuring wisdom.”
—The New Yorker
THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES
Gray Kaiser, at fifty-nine a world-renowned anthropologist, seemingly invincible—and untouchable—returns to the site of her first great triumph in Kenya to make a documentary. She is accompanied by her faithful assistant, Errol McEchern, who has loved her from afar for years. When Raphael Sarasola, a sexy young graduate assistant assigned to Gray’s project, arrives on the scene, Gray is captivated and, before Errol’s amazed and injured eyes, falls head over heels in love. As Errol watches the progress of their affair with jealous fascination, Raphael’s true nature is revealed—but only after his subtle, cruel, and calculating manipulations of Gray reduce this proud and fierce woman to miserable dependence.
“Stunning . . . wide in its horizons, interesting in its insights, and satisfying in its conclusions.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
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