Pandora is happily married, kind of, to controlling Fletcher, who designs and makes artisan furniture. And the flashier stars of her family are all in some kind of decline. However, though she lacked the charisma of her other siblings, later in life she has achieved a fame she never sought, as an entrepreneur, and has a highly successful, on the button business which has brought her wealth and status. Pandora was the more phlegmatic, ordinary, shunning the limelight child. The last born, Solstice, was highly intelligent, precocious and pretty. The first born child, Edison, became a successful, charismatic jazz musician. Father Travis, now a faded television star of a successful comedy series, Joint Custody, had three children, and the series, to some extent, used his own life as fodder, examining the family dynamics. Pandora Halfdanarson is the adult, less gifted, middle child of a family. In Big Brother, she is as challenging, though I must admit to not being as wholly engaged as I was by `Kevin’, perhaps because in some ways her central family is less ordinary. Other writers of course have tackled similar subject matter – I think of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, equally uncomfortable, but Shriver is a writer of more popular appeal and accessibility, so she rather brought this into wider consciousness – and it was later made into a film. Her challenge is the discomfort evoked for the reader, the push-pull the reader is put through, and a book which is thought, heart and gut challenging, pushing us cerebrally and at an instinctive level. Her own personal challenge is of course in one book We Need To Talk About Kevin, the story of a family whose son turns out to be one of those lone teenagers who go into their school one day and turn a gun on their classmates, she tackled a searingly difficult subject matter – maternal love, and its absence, the unlovable child, the unloving mother, and examines the fault lines.

And she does have some perfectly well-utilised suspenseful authorly surprises up her sleeve to jiggle the reader still further Lionel Shriver is always an author worth reading, not least because although she may not be challenging anything about the form of the novel – she writes clear, taut narrative, strongly drawn character, coherent and accessible prose – she does challenge with her subject matter, and goes into areas which might be uncomfortable for the reader to consider, making us consider the things we gloss over, and avoid, preferring not to go there. Body Politics Family Dynamics Food For Thought

Lionel shriver brother