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

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If you want to learn about how you can create a calm and relaxing environment during childbirth, we’ve compiled a list of the best hypnobirthing books, courses, apps and podcasts, as recommended by mums. She doesn't like the publicity, but loves her "big, lobotomised" house in Iowa, her craftsman husband and his two teenage children. Many times while reading Big Brother I wanted to shake Lionel, who, I feel, has not revisited her Kevin hayday with any of her subsequent (certainly not her previous) works, and say to her, I get it! But I just about abandoned the book early on because an editor failed to slice out a huge boring and pointless discussion about a TV series that the main characters’ father starred in. But it's not the only reason why, pages from the end, you catch yourself with a big uneasy lump in your throat, unable to guess where – and how far – she's prepared to go with this.

Similar to Lisa Genova, this book doesn't so much delve into characters and conflicts as it info dumps treatise after treatise with the occasional plot movement. But yeah, supposedly, this guy will eat powdered sugar straight from the bag, but in the process just gets powdered sugar everywhere because of course he's a slob; takes a first serving at a first meal that is more than half of a casserole so that others are left hungry because of course he's hungry, stupid, and selfish; insists on making the rest of the skinny family inordinate amounts of terribly unhealthy food because he's inconsiderate, pushy, and stupid; etc. When her older jazz musician brother, Edison, moves in with them for a couple of months, her family life deteriorates further. Would Pandora really have risked her marriage and her relationship with her step children to help her brother lose weight? Then 'What's for dinner' MUST become, "Yo, what's a hungry cat gotta do around here to score some eats, ya dig, man?So she has to decide between her husband and her brother, which is essentially what the book is about--that choice and the repercussions thereof. Shriver first came to my attention years ago with the publication of the uber-intense We Need to Talk about Kevin. Shriver's novel 'is about sibling and familial responsibility and the extent to which it's possible, ethical, realistic or even desirable to intervene'.

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. However, Shriver deftly throws in a heart-wrenching twist towards the end of the book that literally puts everything into perspective for you the reader, but for the narrator as well. As Pandora rushes to sort him – and the mess – out, he confesses everything: there are no gigs, no career, nothing.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.

It is stunningly well-paced, starting with "a great bellow from upstairs – a cry of despondency so deep that it sounded less a response to a single calamity than like grief over a whole life".

Back then, I hadn't the wisdom to welcome such minor discord, since Fletcher's alarm-clock setting would soon be the least of our problems. Curiously, the marriage itself never troubles the protagonist, beyond some spousal kvetching followed swiftly by classic, Shriverian foreboding. The plot is that she is going to leave her two teenage children and her husband, get an apartment nearby, live with her brother for a year to help him lose his weight.

I’d recently read another very opinionated article from her regarding political correctness, and seeing the blurb for this book made me feel like it could only go south.Pandora, a middle aged woman, has a husband Fletcher, a stepson Tanner (17 years old) and a stepdaughter Cody (13 years old).