We Need to Talk About Kevin

Author: Lionel Shriver

New York

Published on 27 August 2026 by HarperCollins Publishers (The Borough Press) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 496 pages
198 x 129 | 340g

Sunday Times bestselling author Lionel Shriver's gripping, startling and urgent international bestseller about motherhood gone awry, winner of The Women's Prize for Fiction

‘Stunningly powerful’DAILY MAIL

‘Startling’ GUARDIAN

‘Urgent’ SUNDAY TIMES

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AND WOMEN'S PRIZE WINNER

‘Few novels are considered classics. This, though, is one of them’ Kate Mosse

Eva never really wanted to be a mother—certainly not the mother of the boy who murdered seven of his classmates, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher, two days before his sixteenth birthday.

Now, two years later, Eva must come to terms with the trauma of Kevin’s violent actions, in a series of painfully honest letters to her estranged husband, Franklin.

Above all, she must confront her fear that she raised a monster. And everything he has done is entirely her fault.

‘A powerful, gripping and original meditation on evil” NEW STATESMAN