I just finished reading this book again, it's been a while. I forgot how good this book can make me feel. It reveals simple truths about life and human nature that should be obvious, but never are. Pain is as much a part of life as pleasure, and you must keep the two together. To quote the book, "You eat your pain. It is like cake, it is like butter. It is life as much as good times by river. You go to bed with your pain like woman. You laugh with your pain like old friend."

What other book ever taught me so much about noticing the beauty in the small, normal things; to recognize and be in awe of colors, sounds and sensations? I was hooked from the first few pages, when Shriver likens the band's music to a lava flow; a shock of recognition went through me. And what other book could so perfectly capture the necessary mixture of emotions that a group of 19 year olds feel, yet make it relate to anyone, of any age? This book makes me feel more alive every time I read it, it is my therapy. I notice that this book is out of print, it doesn't matter. SOMEONE has a copy, somewhere. FIND IT. READ IT.

I was given this book years ago, and now that I have a chance to review it, I feel I must. Wonderful story, detailed characters. I read this book at least once a month, and still can't get enough of it. I have found a new literary goddess. READ THIS BOOK!!

Shriver's CHECKERS was the best novel I have ever read. Filled with amazing dialogue, true-to-life characters, and a realistic plot, I must say that Shriver ranks up their with the best of 'em!

Furthermore, if you do not forsake the time to DEVOUR this book, then you don't know WHAT you are missing. Do you want to live to rest of your life in REGRET for not reading such brilliant prose? NO! Shriver is second only to GOD if she is not The Divine Being already!

PS - Second to God not counting Michael Jordan and Warren Buffett, that is.

READ THIS BOOK!

Sincerely,

Tim Turner

I read this book when it first came out and I loved it. I lent my copy to a friend, and for years it remained absent from my bookshelf. I came across it again in a second-hand shop and bought it to reread. It is as good the second time around. The characters are so real, and you can easily imagine how each one came to the exact point in their lives where paths cross in the story. I can't believe this book hasn't gotten more attention over the years. A classic in my library. Don't miss it!

A woman discovers love and the subsequent loss for the first time in her life, a heart-wrenching journey. I can't wait to read more of Ms. Shriver's work.

Lionel Shriver's first published book (that I know of and I've been looking) that is not as tightly written as her later "The Bleeding Heart", about an older woman with power falling in love with a younger man and the reaction of her longtime assistant, friend, admirer, Errol. Explores the subtle power play in personal relationships. As with all her books the characters are well developed, the prose tight and flowing. Definitely worth reading

Late 20th-century narcissism encounters late 17th-century sectarianism in Northern Ireland. The 17th century wins (it generally does in Ireland) but not before we have been taken on a grand tour of the 'Troubles'--as they stood circa 1988--and of some fascinating and meticulously-imagined human psyches.

Ms Shriver is blessedly free of illusions about Ireland and its conflicts--as well she might be, after living ten years in Belfast. She looks with a cold eye on all the various factions and their addiction to self-destructive mayhem; and casts the same withering glance on the inner lives of her principals--rootless souls lost in a place where rootedness excuses absolutely anything

One of the best books ever written about the little "explosions" in life. The prose flows, the characters are well developed and each description of the inner emotional life of the characters just ring true. One of those books where I read it and said, "THAT is how I felt but could never describe!" Definitely worth reading especially if you are interested in Northern Ireland and the political situation there. Still worth reading even if you aren't interested in Ireland at all

Shriver's brilliant novel explores the depth of a couple's journey into parenthood through letters written by Eva Khatchadourian to her husband. Such a limited form could prove tiresome in lesser hands, but Shriver excells by giving life to Eva in uncompromisingly full dimension, revealing her faults and virtues in full measure.
While the themes of reluctant motherhood and high school mass murder and their possible relationship are central to the plot and handled masterfully, the author has a rare gift of understanding of the inner self that literally puts the reader inside Eva's mind.
This level of insight extends to illuminate the dark side in the person of Eva's son Kevin while at the same time offering no easy explanation of what may have contributed decisively to the creation of his utterly evil persona.
There are many layers in Shriver's writing and each sentence is packed tightly with content and resonant truth. So compelling are the moment to moment revelations that one is temporarily suspended from the story. But when things really heat up in the last third of the book it becomes impossible to put it down.
One of the finest writers I've come across.

I cadged an advance reader's copy of this novel and read it in two sittings. It's terrific--a tour de force that constitutes, to my knowledge, the first full literary treatment of the American teenage mass-murder phenomenon that culminated in the Columbine massacre in 1999. Shriver's effort will be difficult to surpass. As with a Columbo mystery, the reader is made aware of the central violent act from the outset. The intrigue, drive and substance of the novel reside in the how and why. The plot unfolds in a series of letters from the culprit's mother, Eva Khatchadourian, to her estranged husband Franklin, yet the book has none of the shortcomings--remoteness, dearth of dialogue and characters, lack of "granularity"--that tend to afflict epistolary novels. The letter format simply allows the narrator to focus her agonized reflections about what she may have done wrong as a parent directly onto her main accomplice in child-rearing. That question does not admit of a clean answer, and Shriver does not indulge in writing a ruminating novel-of-ideas on the artificially stark nature/nurture question. This book is about particular people rather than archetypes, and the way their irreducible peculiarities--Eva's sardonic remove from both family and country, Franklin's infuriating guilelessness, Kevin's willful intelligence and perhaps an inborn kernel of evil--combine with a society that is alternately too pitiless and too forgiving to produce a terrible outcome that is hell to predict. The excellence of the novel derives from the author's refusal to burden the reader with vacuous homilies or "lessons," from her illumination of the possibility of reason in apparent randomness, and from her pervasive conviction that even the horrid has the virtue of poignancy. Kevin is a dark and unsettling fellow, and We Need to Talk About Kevin is a dark and unsettling book. Yet it rewards the reader with one of the most hard-earned--and soberly redemptive--endings I've yet encountered in fiction.

Nature or nurture is the problem Shriver is attempting to answer in her absolutely stunning novel. She really doesn't succeed in answering what is probably an unanswerable question, but her book is must reading.

I bought the book after reading an article on it in the NY Observer a couple of weeks ago which described the book as an underground hit among NYC feminists. I am still shaking somewhat as a result of reading this book and I'm not stinting in my recommendations to friends to read this book. For a mother (or father, too) this book should be required reading!

Boy, I thought this was a bitter work. I liked some of her reviews in the Inquirer so I picked this up. Writing was almost callow. The author tries to marry the tennis world with a relationship tale and does not quite get the ball in the court, instead serving up a plodding story where her anger is manifest in her writing. I was disappointed.

Admittedly, I checked this book out of the library b/c I really like to play tennis and I was curious about the book's use of the sport as metphor to explore (as the bkcover says)"marriage the ultimate sport." Only apparently, I wasn't fully prepared for the never-ending, morose, despiseable jealousies contained herein. I think Lionel Shriver is a talented writer, but that this book is abymally bitter, relentlessly bitter at every turn - to the point where I was ready to pitch the characters' marriage (&almost this book) long before the characters do. The main character, Willy Novinsky, is very unlikeable throughout (though I kept waiting in vain to find some redeeming quality), and I'm not sure she ultimately serves the rhetorical purpose of exploring the book's two-career marriage theme. Like being hammered over the head, the message here is suffocatingly clear. And though I might not agree with the author that modern marriage is inherently corrupt, I do believe no one in their right mind would want to spend another moment with these two. Like them, I found myself surely "beaten" by the end of this game's match.

Lionel Shriver has confronted the demons from her own divorce several years before and written about her life with a power and a brave intimacy that is all too rare in modern fiction these days. I am not aware of the details of her divorce, but suspect that her husband was more interested in a help mate than an equal partner, and that when it became clear that she was not about to give fulfilling his needs priority over her career the relationship imploded. This was devastating to Ms. Shriver, who has finally taken the vital step of facing and vanquishing her demons in Double Fault. She changed many outward facts but it seems clear that the psychological structure she develops, crystallizes and shatters in Double Fault must bear close resemblance to her own experience, as the final fifty pages deliver a tone and depth of language that must be genuine. We shall see more honest, stalwart, hard hitting fiction from Ms. Shriver in the future as she continues to grow and gain confidence in her considerable literary talent.