“This startling shocker strips bare motherhood... the most remarkable Orange prize victor so far,” says Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. Shriver herself calls it a dark book, and describes her protagonist Eva as "unattractive": a woman uneasy about pregnancy, who feels alarmingly blank after childbirth, and fails to form the bond with her boy that we like to imagine is as instinctive as closing the epiglottis when we swallow.

Her impulsive marriage to the more conventional Franklin leads to baby Kevin, which amplifies her doubt and confusion. She is not sure if she really wanted a child and, from the start, is ambivalent about him. The novel breaks one of the last taboos: a mother disliking her son.

However, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so “nihilistically off the rails”, compelling him to murder seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him – all of this two days before his sixteenth birthday. There have been several books, both fiction and non-fiction, that tried to portray what might make a teenager go on a shooting rampage, but Shriver's is the most impactful by far.

We Need To Talk About Kevin uses this extreme case to breach a dirty little secret about family life: “Much as parents are expected to love their children unconditionally, sometimes the kids don't turn out well – or, more shamefully, their parents don't really like them. Only after closing the book with a shocking and masterful succession of revelations does Shriver quietly emerge from the darkness, allowing the true bond between mother and son to come finally into view,” notes Scott Tobias in his short but insightful review.

The novel, Shriver's seventh, won the 2005 Orange Prize. In 2011 it was adapted into a film.

Published in 2003.