Lionel Shriver
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Table of Contents
- Lionel Shriver Biography - Lionel Shriver Bio
- We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver - Audio Book
- Lionel Shriver Books - Lionel Shriver Novels
- Quick, what do you think of Lionel Shriver?
- The Latest News on Lionel Shriver
- Lionel Shriver Novels
- Lionel Shriver Videos
- Lionel Shriver Bibliography - Lionel Shriver Works
- Lionel Shriver Photos - Lionel Shriver Pictures
- Vote for your favorite Lionel Shriver books
Lionel Shriver Biography - Lionel Shriver Bio
Lionel Shriver Timeline - Lionel Shriver Life
Lionel Shriver (born Margaret Ann Shriver, May 18, 1957) is an American journalist and author. She was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, into a deeply religious family - her father is a Presbyterian minister. She changed her name at the age of 15 from Margaret Ann to Lionel because she didn't like the name she had been given, and as a tomboy she felt that a conventionally male name fit her better. She was educated at Barnard College, Columbia University (BA, MFA). She has lived in Nairobi, Bangkok and Belfast, and currently lives in London.
Her journalistic experience included a spell working for The Economist.
She won the 2005 Orange Prize for her eighth published novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, a thriller and close study of maternal ambivalence, and the role it might have played in the title character's decision to murder seven of his classmates with a bow and arrows. The book created a lot of controversy, and achieved success through word of mouth.
Her previous novels include The Female of the Species (1986), Checker and the Derailleurs (1987), Ordinary Decent Criminals (1990), Game Control (1994), A Perfectly Good Family (1996) and Double Fault (1997). Her ninth novel, The Post-Birthday World, was released in March 2007 by HarperCollins.
In July 2005, Shriver began writing a column [http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Archive/0,5673,-1942,00.html] for The Guardian, in which she has shared her opinions on maternal disposition within Western society, the pettiness of British government authorities, and the importance of libraries (she plans to will whatever assets remain at her death to the Belfast Library Board, out of whose libraries she checked so many books when she lived in Northern Ireland).
In 2009, she donated the short story Long Time, No See to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the 'Fire' collection.Oxfam: Ox-Tales
Shriver's newest book, So Much for That, will be released March 2, 2010.
She is married to jazz drummer Jeff Williams.
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver - Audio Book
Shortly before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin Khatchadourian kills seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher. 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. For this powerful, shocking novel, Lionel Shriver was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction.Listen to a sound sample of this captivating audio book here:
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver - Audio Book
Lionel Shriver Books - Lionel Shriver Novels
Quick, what do you think of Lionel Shriver?
The Latest News on Lionel Shriver
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A Perfectly Good Family: A Novel (P.S.)
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.
Siblings, Siblings, oh, those Siblings
If anyone has ever captured the total ambivalence most siblings (who are honest) experience, it's Lionel Shriver. I did not find this book to be nearly as compelling as her astounding masterpiece "We Need To Talk About Kevin" but it has its great paragraphs, certainly. A very good friend of mine (going through adult sibling madness, as I did--I no longer speak to my two siblings) read this book after I did, and we both agreed: WE DO NOT LIKE THESE PEOPLE. We don't like them at all. This caused me to put the book down at one point in an irritated way and debate whether to continue. Almost exactly at that point, however, it got pretty absorbing--Shriver picked up her always amazing thread and I must say, the ending truly stunned me. Be warned: these people as individuals are not endearing and their various behaviors border on repugnant sometimes, but Shriver always constructs completely believeable people, and in this context, she has not failed. I'm still so struck by "Kevin" that maybe I could not do justice to this book, but it does have its own merit. I mean, when three adult siblings fight over their dead parents' house, it can't be boring. -- Ruby Wilcox, San Diego, CA, USA
Release Date: 07/03/2007
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Amazon Price: $11.96 (as of 12/27/2009) 
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The Post-Birthday World: A Novel (P.S.)
Lionel Shriver's wonderful new novel, her latest since the prize-winning We Need to Talk About Kevin, creates parallel universes that indulge all our what-if speculations. Spared any fork-in-the-road choices, Irina McGovern, a children's book illustrator, can have her beefcake and eat it too. A professional, independent woman not enamored of feminist bumper stickers, Irina admits, "The only thing I can't live without is a man." In this case, Shriver grants her two.
The first, Lawrence Trainer, a sweetly geeky terrorism expert, offers tranquil domesticity; Irina fixes nightly bowls of popcorn while they watch BBC snooker tournaments, cooks voluptuous if economical meals and enjoys reliable same-side-of-the-bed, same-position sex. Though not officially married, so entrenched are the pair they might as well be. "Some friends regarded Irina-and-Lawrence as a factual matter," Shriver writes, "like the existence of France."
For more than nine years, "monogamy had been effortless" -- until the second man turns up. He's Ramsey Acton, dazzling celebrity snooker champion and husband of Irina's collaborator, Jude. Every year on Ramsey's birthday, Irina and Lawrence dine out with Ramsey and Jude. One July, Lawrence, away on business, encourages Irina to meet Ramsey, newly divorced, for the traditional birthday ritual. After four sakes, a deluxe platter of sashimi, cognac and a joint, Irina watches Ramsey play snooker and thinks, "If Ramsey didn't kiss her, she was going to die."
The rest of the story pivots on this will-they-or-won't-they as the novel splits into alternating chapters; in one, they kiss; in another, she turns away. Who is Irina's Mr. Right? In excessive, often obsessive, detail, Shriver explores Irina's life with each candidate through the quotidian and across a larger political and social landscape that includes Bosnia, the death of Princess Diana and 9/11. One chapter shows Irina as too cocooned in her love nest to notice outside events; its alternate has her relate the fall of the Twin Towers to her own predicament: "Today of all days it should have been possible to weep the whole day through, but it wasn't. The fact that she had sobbed for whole evenings at a go over the loss of one boyfriend yet now found it too demanding to whimper over the loss of multitudes for more than two or three minutes was just one of those ugly facts about herself that Irina would have to live with."
Shriver is a crackerjack chronicler of the lives of the self-absorbed; she understands the ties that bind and the ones that sunder. Studying Ramsey's depleted rooms after his divorce, Irina notes, "For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep the past itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it."
Shriver is equally clever at shifting around polar opposites and mirror images. Irina's book is a success; Irina's book is a failure. Ramsey's career takes off; it hits the skids. Lawrence is always loyal -- or is he? Though Ramsey can be difficult, earthmoving sex more than compensates. Soon enough, even that changes. No choice is perfect; no soulmate seizes center stage.
While the focus stays on Irina and her two men, the author serves up side dishes of politics, snooker lore and menu plans. Culinary metaphors abound: Ramsey's skin is "like one of those complex reduction sauces you get in upscale restaurants . . . and you can never quite figure out what's in it." Sentences sparkle with such mouth-watering descriptions of food that you'll want to run to the refrigerator. Lovely small portraits of Irina's larger-than-life Russian mother, her sister Tatyana and Ramsey's idiosyncratic competitors charm and enlighten.
As Irina learns that no matter what kind of man a woman picks, "she'll wonder if she wouldn't rather have the other," the accretion of details, the parsing of characters' angst, the little moments blown into big can seem like so much navel-gazing. However fascinating, the microscopic analysis of the two objects of Irina's affection can also be wearying. Nevertheless, the rewards for sticking with these 500-plus pages are as delicious as one of Irina's feasts. -- Mameve Medwed
Unique Narrative - And It Works!
Lionel Shriver's new novel, "The Post-Birthday World" can be compared to the film "Sliding Doors" in that it follows protagonist Irina McGovern down two possible life's paths. Irina is a children's illustrator happily living in London with her long-time partner, Lawrence. On night, after too many drinks and a few tokes, she has an overwhelming urge to kiss an acquaintance, Ramsey, who happens to be a famous snooker player. For the rest of the novel, we are treated to alternate realities; one chapter where she has given in to her desire to kiss Ramsey and the resulting impact on her life and her relationship, and the next chapter where she has resisted temptation and those results on her life.
The alternate realities/story lines are well written, and cunningly related to each other and often over-lapping. Most interesting is the way Shriver builds the character of Lawrence and how differently he is meant to be perceived by the reader in each scenario; the Lawrence that Irina is faithful to is much less likeable that poor cuckolded Lawrence.
I am a huge fan of "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and Shriver's pitch-perfect use of the unreliable narrator. In "The Post-Birthday World" Shriver's prose is a real treat, reminiscent of the days when gifted writers took the time and effort to set a scene and to lay out a plot that gently urged the reader to turn "just one more page". -- Mary Lins, Houston, TX, USA
Release Date: 02/26/2008
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Amazon Price: $11.69 (as of 12/27/2009)
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Game Control: A Novel (P.S.)
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.
Good for Shriver fans, but not as satisfying as her other work
Lionel Shriver specializes in writing wildly funny, gripping and touching stories about painful, hard-to-discuss feelings. Her other novels have touched upon resentment and conflict between parents and children, spouses and siblings. All of these are wince-inducing situations because they highlight problems in relationships that are supposed to be loving, but are often more complicated in private.
This book's characters are aid workers in Africa with compassion fatigue. They wonder in private what cannot be ackowleged in public: Would the world be better if all the poor people just disappeared?
Game Control was provocative, but lacked the humor and wit of her other novels. If you're a Shriver collecter, then you should read it. If you are looking for an entry point to the Shriver canon, start with Kevin. -- Joe Stern, Wynnewood, PA, USA
Release Date: 07/03/2007
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Amazon Price: $11.92 (as of 12/27/2009)
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Double Fault: A Novel
Tennis is Willy Novinsky's one love. Ever since she picked up a racket at age four, she's been determined to become a star. But her family has been unsupportive, and Willy's fierce determination to play has left her with no friends and no other interests. Now 23, she's still only ranked 392 in the world and is reeling from the effects of a disastrous love affair with her longtime coach. Then Willy meets Eric Oberdorf, gangly, ambitious, attractive--and a promising tennis player. Attraction turns to love, and Eric and Willy marry. But the marriage has a calamitous effect on Willy's game. As her game goes bad, however, Eric's improves. When he overtakes Willy in the world rankings, the marriage slides from joyous to miserable. Shriver's novel provides an eye-opening and authentic look at the cutthroat world of pro tennis, but it's more than just a sports expose. It's the melancholy and tempestuous story of two people whose love couldn't survive their own selfishness. - Emily Melton
Release Date: 03/31/2009
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Amazon Price: $11.89 (as of 12/27/2009)
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Lionel Shriver Bibliography - Lionel Shriver Works
Books written by Lionel Shriver - Lionel Shriver Book List
* The Female of the Species (1986)
* Checker and the Derailleurs (1987)
* The Bleeding Heart (1990)
* Ordinary Decent Criminals (1992)
* Game Control (1994)
* A Perfectly Good Family (1996)
* Double Fault (1997)
* We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003)
* The Post-Birthday World (2007)
Lionel Shriver Photos - Lionel Shriver Pictures
Lionel Shriver Pics - Lionel Shriver Images
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