We Need to Talk About Kevin

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a novel by the American writer Lionel Shriver, published in 2003 and her seventh.

The book is made of Eva's letters, and the form does the work: she is trying to explain herself to a man who was there, so she keeps returning to the same events with more detail, testing explanations she does not believe and admitting things she would not say out loud. Eva is a travel writer with her own money and no particular interest in children, and the novel refuses to let her be a sympathetic innocent or a monster, which is the reason it has been argued about since it was published. Shriver was writing at a low point in her career; her manuscript went out just after the attacks of 11 September 2001, and she expected that a book about a difficult boy and his mother would be thought irrelevant. It was not, and it won the Orange Prize in 2005 and was filmed in 2011. The novel's other achievement is its handling of time, since Eva's account of the years before the killings keeps producing information that changes what the reader thinks of her.