Product Description

Kevin Khatchadourian killed several of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher, shortly before his sixteenth birthday. He is visited in prison by his mother, Eva, who narrates in a series of letters to her estranged husband, Franklin, the story of Kevin's upbringing. A successsful career woman, Eva is reluctant to forgo her independence and the life she shares with Franklin to become a mother. Once Kevin is born, she experiences extreme alienation and dislike of Kevin as he grows up to become a spiteful and cruel child. When Kevin commits his murderous act, Eva fears that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become. But how much is she to blame?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #436 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-09
• Binding: Paperback
• 500 pages

Daily Telegraph, May 6, 2006
`Massive and gripping'

The Sunday Times (Culture), May 7, 2006
`Urgent, unblinking and articulate fiction'

The Guardian, 6th May, 2006
`Cleverly balances the grand guignol and the mundane'

Customer Reviews

amazing, intelligent and thought-provoking
This is just about the best book I have read and as a result I recommend it to everyone. Even if you don't like it you will talk about it and think about for a long time after you finish reading it. It is the only book I have read twice and I would recommend that you do that.

On initial reading the first fifty or so pages were quite difficult to get past but once I did I was completely gripped. The second time I read it the importance of those first fifty pages became much more apparent.

It raises questions about nurture and nature, how good a job we as parents do and does it make a difference, and it looks at the high school massacre 'thing' in America and what some of the reasoning is behind those incidents.

Amazing book! Well-written, gripping, frightening and stays IN your head for ages. Loved it.

A soul - searching, get under-your skin read...
'We need to talk about...' is often as ambivalent in tone and message as the feeling you get after reading it. That's not to say it's not a superb read in many aspects. Shriver writes a novel that never waivers in its ability to intrigue despite being somewhat of a tome. Balancing plot and character development expertly, no words are wasted. Shriver is particularly audacious in her brave often brutally honest deconstruction of the American dream and the infinite fallibilities in this conceit. She takes to task the vanity and futility of the upper-middle class lifestyle. Contradictions lie throughout the book...in the different parental styles of Eva and Franklin towards Kevin, one cold and detached the other foolishly indulgent and deluded as to the true character of their son. Contradictions also lie in Eva herself. She is well travelled - and therefore you would think, too aware of the fallacies of stereotyping- yet capable of making the most ludicrous generalisations about ethnicity and faith (bordering on the outright bigoted & I couldn't help but wonder if the author herself was using the character as a platform for some of her views, as is often done). At times Eva in hindsight seems to be advocating a free, no boundaries approach to parenting in a world where children should be exposed to as much of the adult world as possible. Then in another instance she berates in her subtle way, Kevin's primary school for letting children get up to their own devices believing nothing good can come of it. Shriver also leaves the reader bewildered as to with whom we should side. Is Kevin just a misunderstood, melancholic character starved of motherly love early on eventually going completely off the rails? Is Eva merely a woman burdened with a child who is evil incarnate? 1 of the most important questions also dealt with is why society always blames mothers when often fathers are just as culpable if not more so - by commission or omission- as we see in Franklin -Kevin's father. Yet at the core of the novel is the whole nature v nurture chestnut. Shriver doesn't really come down off the fence one way or the other but perhaps it's in this neutrality we get an answer. Essentially we are a combination of our upbringing and environment, our natural disposition and most importantly of all, the choices we ourselves make. Eva herself sees her own cynicism and nihilism, more extreme& amplified in Kevin. Her international frolics as the MD of a very successful travel guide company, you would think her outlook would be more, well, outward. Instead she can be surprisingly self-involved. But Shriver excels the most in making Eva, with all her flaws, a character with which the reader can so easily sympathise. The Good Book says Love covers a multitude of sins. By the end of 'We need to talk...' with its numerous twists and turns some harder to predict than others, I was reminded that real love is choosing to love someone even when they have given you no reason to. As cheesy as that sounds it's very convincingly conveyed in this novel. A morbidly splendid book.

Tough starter, pays dividends later on!!!
As mentioned by others, you need to stick with this one.
I feel that I needed to be able to commit time and effort to this book, but in return I was able to reap the rewards of this hugely dark and bewildering insight into this so called "phenomenon" of teen mass murders in US High schools.
I found myself strangely drawn to the central character, the murdering teenage boy, whom we learn about from the narrator, his mother.
I went through stages of admiration (!) and then revulsion. A true emotional roller-coaster.
This is not an easy read, pretentious, some may even say. But I actually enjoyed using my dictionary periodically. Haven't done that with a book in a while!
I urge you to give it a go - you can only really talk about this book with others who have read it - as the haunting plot unfurls, you will be dragged further in!