The Female of the Species (44 page)

Authors: Lionel Shriver

P
RAISE
FOR
L
IONEL
S
HRIVER

The Female of the Species

“Deeply troubling, infuriating, and filled with the humor of resignation, this terrific first novel uses an engrossing story—it would keep a soap opera busy for weeks—to explore some profound questions. Shriver’s tale is about emotional neediness, about masochism, and it all too often seems all too true.”

—People

“Unlike so many of the ‘writers’ of her generation—those known as the literary brat pack—who spend their time describing in thinly disguised detail their own lives or the lives of people they know, or lives that they once led or hope to lead, Shriver creates a text, a true fiction, wholly from imagination…. A novel of depth and breadth, of scope beyond ordinary experience.”

—Roanoke Times & World News

“The quality and vividness of Errol’s imagination is a tribute to Shriver’s own; the pieces fall neatly and compellingly into place. This is a confident first novel, and a consuming one.”

—Publishers Weekly

“From beginning to end,
The Female of the Species
is intelligent, sensual, absolutely fascinating, and thoroughly extraordinary. And that’s not half the praise it deserves.”

—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Lionel Shriver is a remarkable new storyteller. These almost mythic characters and their exotic background are drawn with compelling imagination and verve…. A daring beginning for a young novelist, bold in its choices and sometimes technically brilliant. Its sheer invention makes it a heady debut.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Shriver’s debut is a ‘literary’ novel without an iota of pretentiousness. It reads with the grace of a well-written spy story but conveys some of its author’s early wisdom about what our humanity both demands of and grants us.”

—Washington Post

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

“Impossible to put down.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“An awesomely smart, stylish, and pitiless achievement.”

—The 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

“A harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel, with a clear-eyed, hard-won ending and a tough-minded sense of the difficult, often painful human enterprise.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Scathingly honest and often witty.”

—Salon

The Post-Birthday World

“Hugely entertaining…. Tackles the dueling human needs for passion and security with fierce, witty honesty.”

—Vogue

“
The Post-Birthday World
is a brilliant ‘what if?’ novel. But that barely scrapes the surface in describing Shriver’s imaginative feat…. It’s mad genius…. A tour de force.”

—USA Today

“A playful, psychologically acute, and luxuriously textured meditation on the nature of love.”

—The New Yorker

“Outstanding…. Shriver, a brilliant and versatile writer, allows these competing stories to unfold organically, each a fully rounded drama, rich with irony, ambiguity, and unforeseeable human complications.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“A wonderful new novel…. The rewards for sticking with these five-hundred-plus pages are as delicious as one of Irina’s feasts.”

—Washington Post Book World

“Complex and nervy, Shriver’s clever meditation will intrigue anyone who has ever wondered how things might have turned out had they followed, or ignored, a life-changing impulse.”

—People
(Critic’s Choice)

“Provocative…stunningly intense.”

—New York Daily News

A
LSO BY
L
IONEL
S
HRIVER

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

Credits

Cover design by Milan Bozic

Cover photographs © Anup Shah/Getty Images and Mitch Reardon/Getty Images

Copyright

THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES
. Copyright © 1987 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 Digital Edition August 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-189949-2

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