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

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The basics: Big Brother is the story of Pandora, who grew up in Los Angeles with a father who starred on a popular 1970's family sitcom with parallels to her life. A few years ago, I first became acquainted with Lionel Shriver’s writing after reading We Need To Talk About Kevin. Part of the fascination of this horridly gripping tale lies not only in its upmarket rendition of Stephen King's tropes, but in its portrayal of fragile family dynamics. Shriver commits this rather bizarre seppuku in the final twenty pages of the novel, erasing all the characters and what little enjoyment I did derive from the book.

Once a handsome jazz musician, Pandora does not recognize her brother when he disembarks from the plane.As the years have passed, more of her titles have joined the ranks in my To-Be-Read stacks, but this is this novel’s intriguing premise made me unable to resist immediately reading it. so she moves into a separate apartment with her brother to go on a crazy crash diet with him for a year. Lionel Shriver makes some profound observations about food in our lives and all the ways it can distort us. So, the points of view that Shriver expresses through her characters may not be perfectly in sync with everyone's; however, I think she does an amazing job at capturing some of the more common opinions on the topic.

You have to work to read this one—Shriver’s eloquent and brilliant prose hurt my head plus had me scurrying for a dictionary. I had a feeling about it going in- I knew it was going to likely be sketchy, but I didn’t know how bad. It is no accident that I read Lionel Shriver’s Big Brother almost directly after Michael Moss’s excellent non-fiction book Salt Sugar Fat: how the Food Giants Hooked Us. Honestly, I’m not sure how to describe it as far as tone or genre, other than to say it’s a family drama, not merely about these adult siblings (and their relationship with their father), but also very much about the relationship between each sibling and Pandora’s husband and teenage stepchildren. Equally, this novel is about the love between siblings; a bond which goes much deeper than many children without siblings can understand.I don't know if it was boredom, desperation, or irritation, but I found myself slipping into this awful persona, using every big word I knew, giving intense answers to small talk questions, until he interrupted me mid sentence and said drolly, "So are you, like, really smart? After Edison has more than overstayed his welcome, Fletcher delivers his wife an ultimatum: It’s him or me. An explanation offered after a calamity – "you make my wife cry, and I don't like it" – sounds tinny and baseless, since he gives no outward sign of caring whether his wife cries or not. Dropping the subjects of sentences does not make your characters seem more laid-back and casual; it just chops up the prose and ruins its rhythm.

Pandora's marriage is already strained by her husband's fanatical obsession with healthy eating and exercise. Next, in a scene that may be one of the most unbearably and unsparingly visceral I've encountered in a work of fiction, he evacuates his bowels for the first time in too long. Replete with discussions of the unfortunate "association of physique with vice and virtue" and the ludicrous plethora of gimmicky weight-loss diets, Shriver's novel champions not fat pride but compassion for the corpulent. Well, what ensues is an admittedly interesting and insightful examination (though if it could have been a less direct one this would have been a much better book) of how both gaining and losing weight cuts both ways, and how we associate food with oh so many things. Only if you were so repelled by obesity that you were already averting your eyes could this picture work.

Few subjects can be as topical as this one, and enjoyable as her novel about cancer ( So Much for That) was, Shriver has written her best novel yet in Big Brother, inspired by her own brother's death from obesity. Both narrator and author were working through a rescue fantasy and attempting to convince themselves that it would never have worked anyway as a way of dealing with the guilt of never going all-out to try the rescue in real life.

For those who are interested, the others were The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg, Bed by David Whitehouse, and Heft by Liz Moore, all of which are different, and all of which are recommended. Pandora is shocked to discover that in the four years that she has not seen Edison he has in fact expanded to nearly 400 pounds.Pandora, the 40-year-old stepmother of two teenagers, runs an "offbeat" novelty doll business that has gone "viral" and made her rich and a bit famous.