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

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Still, what follows is one of the most suspenseful and engaging accounts of a diet that I can imagine reading. I recognized an ancient Christmas present that had slid to the back of the pantry: pecans and hazelnuts candied in a thick brown goo. this is no more spoiler than what appears on the back cover) Main character (Pandora) picks up her brother (Edison) from the airport after not having seen him for several years and doesn't even recognize him at first because he's gained so much weight. Pandora puts her marriage on hold and moves into an apartment with her brother and becomes his weight-loss coach. But she would have felt a lot of sadness and regret about the situation, so the fantasy was like a tribute to him and a wish that things could have been different.

With honesty, precision and humour, she conveys all the boredom and exhilaration of weight loss, along with its tendency to threaten the people around you. After raving about So Much For That ( I gave it 5 stars), I also enjoyed We Need to Talk About Kevin ( I gave it 4. I thought she took this issue and heightened it to be dramatic and funny and sympathetic and challenging. The narration is full of these puzzles – ruminations that seem precise but are actually sloppy, explanations that are carefully elaborated but make no sense at all. It opens with a short treatise on the meaning of eating: "I have to wonder whether any of the true highlights of my fortysome years have had to do with food.Shriver's writing and observations are often profound and challenging, but I can't quite shake the feelings of being somewhat manipulated as I read. The book opens with Pandora’s older brother, Edison, and his impending and prolonged stay at her Iowa home. Most importantly, she moves out of her family’s home and into this apartment with her brother (much to the disappointment and anger of her husband), because she believes this is the only way he will actually stick to the plan and diet.

It doesn't sound good now that I'm typing it, but I tend to favor books with complex or unexpected protagonists. even if it meant that her husband and stepchildren didn't understand or support her in what she was doing. Life so many Shriver narrators, she is somewhat brash, refreshingly honest and insightful, and beautifully formed. Moss painstakingly revealed how companies use salt, sugar and fat to addict us and linked his findings to the emerging obesity epidemic.What is wonderful about kinship is also what is horrible about it: there is … no natural limit to what these people may reasonably expect of you. Edison has ballooned into the kind of fat person who overspills airline seats, gets shoved into alcoves in restaurants, eats obsessively and has opted (in one of many choice phrases) for "suicide by pie".