We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver from Serpent's Tail (£1.49) is the Amazon UK
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That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child's character is self-evident. But generalizations about genes are likely to provide cold comfort if it's your own child who just opened fire on his feellow algebra students and whose class photograph—with its unseemly grin—is shown on the evening news coast-to-coast.
If the question of who's to blame for teenage atrocity intrigues news-watching voyeurs, it tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years before the opening of the novel, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and the much-beloved teacher who had tried to befriend him. Because his sixteenth birthday arrived two days after the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is currently in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York.
In relating the story of Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses her estranged husband, Frank, through a series of startingly direct letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son became, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general—and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault?
We Need To Talk About Kevin offers no at explanations for why so many white, well-to-do adolescents—whether in Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, or Littleton—have gone nihilistically off the rails while growing up in the most prosperous country in history. Instead, Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story with an explosive, haunting ending. She considers motherhood, marriage, family, career—while framing these horrifying tableaus of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.
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Where Dreams Come True: A Year in the Arcade by Kitty Charles from Amazon (£0.99) is the Amazon UK
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WHERE DREAMS COME TRUE: A YEAR IN THE ARCADE is as addictive as chocolate truffles from the Chocwaves boutique; as sexy as honeymoon lingerie from The Garden of Eden, and as scandalous as a night in Ernesto’s tango studio. And over the course of the first year in the Arcade you’ll soon find that it's a place where dreams really do come true.
Previously released once a month, all twelve episodes are compiled here to create the bubbliest of soap-opera style stories.
Written by six best-selling novelists under the name of Kitty Charles, WHERE DREAMS COME TRUE is a sexy, sassy tribute to the serials that kept readers turning the pages in Dickens’ times – with all the passion, the intrigue and the larger than life characters you could hope for.
So what are you waiting for? Time to sample the delights of Angell’s Arcade!
Step inside…
And if you want more drama, dilemmas and double-dealing, the great news is you can enjoy a bite-sized fix of sex and shopping every month in 2014, as your favourite shopkeepers open their doors for another year of business.
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The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan, Pierre Rigoulot from Atlantic Books (£1.29) is the Amazon UK
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North Korea is today one of the last bastions of hard-line Communism. Its leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party regime, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for "re-education." Kang Chol-hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in North Korea. Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, this record of one man's suffering gives eyewitness proof to an ongoing sorrowful chapter of modern history. New edition with a new preface by the author.
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