Novelist and journalist Lionel Shriver won the coveted Orange Prize in 2005 for
We Need to Talk about Kevin, a gripping literary page-turner that delves into the tragic possibilities of motherhood gone awry. Her features, op-eds, and reviews have appeared in such publications as
The Guardian,
The New York Times, the
Wall Street Journal, the
Financial Times, and the
Economist.
Her latest novel is
The New Republic.
One of
Shriver’s four favorite novels on terrorism, as told to
The Daily Beast:
Windows on the World
by Frédéric Beigbeder
Still one of the best 9/11 novels. The author breaks two rules with panache: that you have to be American, optimally a New Yorker, to write with authority about the World Trade Center (Beigbeder is from France, where this novel was first published in 2004); and that books published too closely on the heels of any such tragedy are bound to suffer from a lack of perspective and come out rubbish. To the contrary, the story of a father taking his son to breakfast at just the wrong restaurant on just the wrong day is dramatic and stunningly vivid. The narrator’s intervening commentary is dry, smart, aptly sheepish, and, gloriously, sometimes even funny.
Read about
another novel on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
Novelist and journalist Lionel Shriver won the coveted Orange Prize in 2005 for We Need to Talk about Kevin, a gripping literary page-turner that delves into the tragic possibilities of motherhood gone awry. Her features, op-eds, and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Guardian, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Economist.
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