“Impossible to put down.”
— Boston Globe
“In crisply crafted sentences that cut to the bone of her feelings about motherhood, career, family, and what it is about American culture that produces child killers, Shriver yanks the reader back and forth between blame and empathy, retribution and forgiveness.”
— Booklist (starred review)
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GAME CONTROL
Do-gooding American family-planning worker Eleanor Merritt was drawn to Kenya to improve the lot of the poor. To her dismay, she falls in love with Calvin Piper, a beguiling misanthropic demographer with chilling theories about population control. Surely, Calvin whispers in Eleanor’s ear, if the poor are a responsibility, they are also an imposition.
Set against the vivid backdrop of shambolic modern-day Africa, Lionel Shriver’s Game Control is a wry, grimly comic tale of bad ideas and good intentions. With a deft, droll touch, Shriver highlights the hypo-crisy of lofty intellectuals who would “save” humanity but who don’t like people.
“[O]ne of the best works of fiction about Africa.”
— The New Statesman
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About the Author
LIONEL SHRIVER's books include The Post-Birthday World, Game Control, and the Orange Prize-winning We Need to Talk About Kevin.
She writes frequently for the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The Independent. She lives in London.
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PRAISE FOR LIONEL SHRIVER
A Perfectly Good Family
“[ A Perfectly Good Family] is refreshingly free of the confining narcissism that marks so many contemporary ‘domestic’ novels.
Moreover, Shriver evinces a far sharper sense of irony than, say, Anne Tyler, but much greater subtlety than, say, Jane Smiley. There is no contrived warmth…but there is no incest, either. The end result is a novel with a plausibly familiar moral center, perfectly balanced between satire and melodrama—in short, the literary ideal.”
— The Scotsman
“Shriver’s style is as comfortable as that of Anne Tyler, that other great chronicler of the American family.”
— Dublin Sunday Tribune
“Often funny and always intelligent, this is a sharply observed history of the redoubtable McCrea family, shot through with sardonic wit and black comedy.”
— Independent on Sunday
“Choice is the driving force behind this eloquent and painstaking novel by Lionel Shriver, author of the much praised Ordinary Decent Criminals and Game Control…. Shriver sets up and controls a tense triumvirate with admirable precision and a keen understanding of the hastily formed alliances and subtly accorded trade-offs involved in family exchanges…. Choice, Shriver underlines, is enslavement as well as liberation, and A Perfectly Good Family is a fine illustration of that point.”
— The Guardian
We Need to Talk About Kevin
“Powerful…harrowing.”
— Entertainment Weekly
“Sometimes searing…impossible to put down…brutally honest….
The novel holds a mirror up to the whole culture. Who, in the end, needs to talk about Kevin? Maybe we all do.”
— Boston Globe
“It is Desperate Housewives as written by Euripides…. A powerful, gripping, and original meditation on evil.”
— New Statesman
“Impressive…. It’s always a challenge for a novelist to take on front-page events. A guilt-stricken Eva Khatchadourian digs into her own history, her son’s, and the nation’s in her search for the responsible party, and her fierceness and honesty sustain the narrative.”
— New York Times
Game Control
“Game Control mixes dark comedy, intellectual sparring, doomsday thrills, and psychological scrutiny in a bold and bracing cocktail….
Shriver skirts the edge of tragedy with superb aplomb. Her speculations chill the blood; her language glistens with a diamond-hard wit.”
— New Statesman and Society
“Every now and then a modern novel about Africa comes along that neither trades on the continent as ‘exotica’ nor piously makes literary capital out of human misery—that doesn’t go woozy at the sight of a wildebeest, that might be more cruel than caring, but in fact isn’t.
John Updike’s Coup was one such, as was Paul Theroux’s Jungle Lovers; Lionel Shriver, an American woman already praised for Ordinary Decent Criminals, has produced another.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“Her work is all the more valuable for its flagrant defiance of political correctness.”
— London Times
“This is allegory on an urgent, nonmythical level, expressed in contemporary terms and speaking in a fresh and intelligent way to the reader…. Game Control moves towards an enjoyable and deft conclusion with the same tact and wit that makes Shriver an able and human commentator on our poor muddled white guilt.”
— Dublin Sunday Tribune
“Impossible to put down.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
“An awesomely smart, stylish, and pitiless achievement.”
— Independent (London)
“Terribly honest. Ms. Shriver takes a calculated risk…but the gamble pays off as she strikes a tone of compelling intimacy.”
— Wall Street Journal
“Furiously imagined…. A pleasure to read.”
— Seattle Times
“A slow, magnetic descent into hell that is as fascinating as it is disturbing.”
— Cleveland Plain Dealer
Also by Lionel Shriver
The Post-Birthday World
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Double Fault
A Perfectly Good Family
Game Control
The Bleeding Heart
Checker and the Derailleurs
The Female of the Species
Copyright
A PERFECTLY GOOD FAMILY. Copyright © 2007 by Lionel Shriver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader August 2007
ISBN 978-0-06-146152-1
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Document Outline
Title Page
Dedication Page
Epigraph Page
Contents Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…
About the Author
Praise
Also by Lionel Shriver
Copyright Notice
About the Publisher
A Perfectly Good Family Page 35