Wednesday, April 04, 2012

Lionel Shriver’s 4 favorite novels about terrorism

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