WINNER 2005 ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION.
Kevin is serving a minor's sentence for having cold-bloodedly killed seven of his fellow high-school students, 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 the story of Kevin's upbringing.
When Kevin commits the act of atrocity, Eva fears that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become. But how much is she to blame?
'We Need To Talk About Kevin' offers no pat explanations for why so many white, well-to-do adolescents have gone horribly off the rails. Parts darkly humorous, the novel frames the horrifying tableau of high-school massacres metaphor for the larger tragedy - that of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought except a sense of purpose.
