Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2013
384 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
For Pandora, cooking is a form of love. Alas, her husband, Fletcher, a self-employed high-end cabinetmaker, now spurns the "toxic" dishes that he'd savored through their courtship, and spends hours each day manic cycling. Then, when Pandora picks up her older brother Edison at the airport, she doesn't recognize him. In the years since they've seen one another, the once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened? After Edison has more than overstayed his welcome, Fletcher delivers his wife an ultimatum: It's him or me.
Rich with Shriver's distinctive wit and ferocious energy, Big Brother is about fat: an issue both social and excruciatingly personal. It asks just how much sacrifice we'll make to save single members of our families, and whether it's ever possible to save loved ones from themselves.
"Starred Review. A masterful, page-turning study of complex relationships
among our bodies, our minds and our families." - Kirkus
"[Shriver] returns to the family in this intelligent meditation on food, guilt, and the real (and imagined) debts we owe the ones we love" - Publishers Weekly
"Shriver brilliantly explores the strength of sibling bonds versus the often more fragile ties of marriage." - Booklist
"What would you do for love of a brother? For love of a husband? For love of food? In Big Brother, Shriver's new and wonderfully timely novel, her heroine wrestles with these vexing questions. Only the scales don't lie." - Margot Livesey
"A searing, addictive novel about the power and limitations of food, family, success, and desire. Shriver examines America's weight obsession with both razor-sharp insight and compassion." - J. Courtney Sullivan
"The fellowship of Lionel Shriver fanatics is about to grow larger, so to speak. Big Brother, a tragicomic meditation on family and food, may be her best book yet." - Gary Shteyngart
This information about Big Brother was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jerry Bauer
Journalist and author Lionel Shriver was born Margaret Ann Shriver in 1957 in
North Carolina, USA. She changed her name to Lionel at the age of 15 because she
wanted to distance herself from the "girl with the pink ribbons in her hair, who
married her high-school sweetheart and became an apple-cheeked housewife" that
she felt was implied by the name Margaret Ann and the expectations of her
family.
She received a BA and MFA from Columbia University and, since then, has lived
in Nairobi, Bangkok, Belfast (where she reported on the Troubles for 12 years)
and London.
Her first novel, The Female of the Species, was published when she was
29 (1986), and was followed by Checker and the Derailleurs (1987),
Ordinary Decent Criminals (1990), Game Control (1994), A ...
Name Pronunciation
Lionel Shriver: LIE-uh-nuhl SHRIVE-er
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