We Need to Talk About Kevin

After her son Kevin murdered seven fellow students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher at his high school, Eva Khatchadourian spends two years trying to make sense of it, and Lionel Shriver's novel is made of the letters Eva writes to her estranged husband, Franklin. Motherhood was never something Eva truly wanted, and she was uneasy from the start with the sacrifices and loss of social standing it brought. Writing to Franklin, she looks back over her marriage, her career and her son, and asks whether her own dislike of Kevin helped push him toward violence. The book deals with blame, parenting and a mother's ambivalence. Shriver's seventh novel, it won the 2005 Orange Prize.

A reader of The CEO Library named it, through an anonymous form, as one of the three best books they read in 2019.