Recommendations
Books Like We Need to Talk About Kevin
Best books to read after We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin is the Orange Prize-winning epistolary novel about a mother whose teenage son became a killer. These recommendations continue the Shriver canon, explore the dark psychological fiction tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel that takes the question of moral culpability — and the failure of love — completely seriously.
- 1Buy
So Much for That
by Lionel Shriver
The companion Shriver novel — a man whose retirement savings are consumed by his wife's cancer treatment, Shriver's Orange Prize finalist and the companion for readers who want more of her willingness to look hard at the worst things that can happen inside a family.
- 2Buy
The Post-Birthday World
by Lionel Shriver
The parallel-lives Shriver companion — Irina McGovern and the two lives she might have lived from a single moment of choice; Shriver's most technically inventive novel and the other strong companion to Kevin.
- 3Buy
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
The British literary companion in guilt and consequence — Briony Tallis's false accusation and the life she spent trying to atone for it; the other major British novel of the 2000s about a person who did something that cannot be undone.
- 4Buy
A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
The American companion in extreme damage — four friends in New York over decades, and Jude St. Francis and the childhood abuse that has never let him go; shares Kevin's refusal to soften what terrible things do to people.
- 5Buy
The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
The domestic unhappiness companion — three women across different decades and the specific ways that conventional life presses on women who cannot make themselves fit; shares Kevin's interest in a mother's ambivalence about the life she has built.
- 6Buy
Big Little Lies
by Liane Moriarty
The thriller companion in suburban female experience — three women, a school, a death, and the question of whose story is true; where Kevin is literary and unsparing, Big Little Lies is a page-turner, but both are interested in violence in domestic spaces and the secrets that communities keep.
- 7Buy
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
The literary companion narrated in retrospect — Richard Papen describing the murder he and his friends committed, Tartt's novel sharing Kevin's interest in what it feels like to be in close relationship with someone capable of terrible violence.
- 8Buy
Room
by Emma Donoghue
The confined-space trauma companion — Jack narrating his and his mother's captivity in a single room; Donoghue's novel sharing Kevin's interest in a mother-child relationship formed under catastrophic circumstances and the question of what damage such circumstances produce.
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