We Need To Talk About Kevin

One of the things I really like about London is the amount of advertising for books and learning. Each time I've been on a tube over the last couple of months I've seen ads for a book by Lionel Shriver called We Need To Talk About Kevin.

Recently, with the threat of a two hour wait for a train in Oxford, we finally succumbed to the pressure and Vaughn bought a copy. From start to finish and even now several days after finishing it I'm struck by the strength of the book. It's a fictional series of letters from a woman to her estranged husband following their son's killing spree at his high school. It relives her life to that point, relating stories of their lives together, 'telling incidents' of Kevin's childhood along the way.

It's not a nice book by any stretch of the imagination, and in many ways it's quite shocking - without giving away the story line it's difficult to describe it too much - but more than many other books I've read I found, perhaps because it's written in the first person, that I felt that I was the person all this was happening to. By the end of the book I felt shellshocked, emotionally drained and lost. None of that sounds very nice, I know, but it isn't often I read a book that affects me so much. Well worth reading if you haven't already.