Lionel Shriver

The mother of an incarcerated teenager who murdered seven of his fellow high school students tells of his upbringing and her own shortcomings in a series of letters to her estranged husband.

Allergic to group activities of any kind, all her life Serenata has run, swum, and cycled on her lonesome. But now that she's hit 60, all that physical activity has destroyed her knees. As she contemplates surgery with dread, her previously sedentary husband Remington, recently and ignominiously redundant, chooses this precise moment to discover exercise. Which should be good for his health, right? Yet as he joins the cult of fitness that seems increasingly...

When her father dies, Kay Wilkinson can't cry. Over ten years, Alzheimer's had steadily eroded this erudite man into a paranoid lunatic. Surely one's own father passing should never come as such a relief. Both medical professionals, Kay and her husband Cyril have seen too many elderly patients in similar states of decay. Although healthy and vital in their early fifties, the couple fears what may lie ahead. Determined to die with dignity, Cyril makes...

"In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is 'the last great civil rights fight.' Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word ("stupid") and encouraged to report parents who...

"A novel about a crumbling marriage resurrected in the face of illness, and a family's struggle to come to terms with disease, dying, and the cost of medical care in modern America"--Provided by publisher.

The rise and fall of a tennis romance. She is Willie, he is Eric and both are rising tennis stars, although she is the more famous of the two. But after they marry he overtakes her in fame, beating her on their first wedding anniversary, and after that the marriage goes downhill.

Still unattached and childless at fifty-nine, world-renowned anthropologist Gray Kaiser is seemingly invincible-and untouchable. Returning to make a documentary at the site of her first great triumph in Kenya, she is accompanied by her faithful middle-aged assistant, Errol McEchern, who has loved her for years in silence. When sexy young graduate assistant Raphael Sarasola arrives on the scene, Gray is captivated and falls hopelessly in love-before...

Kevin's mother struggles to love her strange child, despite the increasingly vicious things he says and does as he grows up. But Kevin is just getting started, and his final act will be beyond anything anyone imagined.

Chapter 38 of Charlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre, opens with the line "Reader, I married him." Now twenty women authors have spun original stories using that line as inspiration for this collection of unique, inventive, and poignant stories. This collection of original stories by today's finest women writers--including Tracy Chevalier, Francine Prose, Elizabeth McCracken, Tessa Hadley, Audrey Niffenegger, and more--takes inspiration from the opening...