Big Brother: Brilliant family fiction from the award-winning author of We Need To Talk About Kevin

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But when he invites himself to stay for a couple of months, she fails to recognise him at the airport. Only Shriver could manage to do the "Oh, this was all a lie" ending, yet still have me liking the novel. Here’s what’s awesome about the novel: with a premise like that, there were only a few outcomes to the tale that I could readily envisage.

having to act as if it isn't hurtful to have people stare and make rude remarks; and in Pandora's case, dealing with the disapproval of her husband and yes, even fighting her own feelings of revulsion. Pandora's brother Edison shows up on her doorstep, broke, down and out and to her utter amazement, overweight, not by just a few pounds, but hundreds. The novel is a play on these terms: on how important it is to be gifted (or not), all-giving (or not). This was one of the least convincing attempts at "understanding" fat people that I've ever been confronted with. I thought she took this issue and heightened it to be dramatic and funny and sympathetic and challenging.Shriver is brilliant on the novel shock that is hunger, on how it feels to lose the crucial sense of punctuation (and motivation) that mealtimes give you. Then and only then could Edison be granted full character status, including a sense of humor (paraphrasing: "Boy sis, at my highest weight I could have been a sandbag! Lionel Shriver is famous for two things: her prize-winning novel about motherhood, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and her personal obsession with diet and exercise.

Lionel Shriver tackles a whopper of an issue in her new novel, Big Brother: obesity and the emotional connection between weight, consumption, guilt and control. But suddenly Pandora feels a stab of guilt and proposes that Edison and she take up an apartment and go on a liquid, 580 calorie a day diet for a year and see if they can both lose their weight.In time, this may become my most favorite Shriver novel; she is not assailing me with politic vitriol nor disturbing me with harrowing parenting stories. This is a real roller coaster of a book; about how society judges us, how we judge ourself and the difficult relationship so many people have with food. Lionel Shriver's novels include the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the 2005 Orange Prize and has now sold over a million copies worldwide. It was the first Lionel Shriver novel I've read, having given up on We Need to Talk About Kevin (couldn't get into it). But despite the unpromising theme, this one, like the rest, is really about love, loss, family – ordinary human beings struggling to do the right thing by one another.