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Title: Big Brother

Author: Lionel Shriver

Narrator: Alice Rosengard

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 1 min

Language: English

Release date: 05-16-13

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 8 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

The new novel from the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin.

When Pandora picks up her older brother, Edison, at her local Iowa airport, she literally doesnt recognize him. The once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened? Soon Edisons slovenly habits, appalling diet, and know-it-all monologues are driving Pandora and her fitness-freak husband Fletcher insane. After the brother-in-law has more than overstayed his welcome, Fletcher delivers his wife an ultimatum: Its him or me.

Rich with Shrivers distinctive wit and ferocious energy, Big Brother is about fat: why we overeat and whether extreme diets ever really work. It asks just how much sacrifice well make to save single members of our families, and whether its ever possible to save loved ones from themselves.

Critic Reviews:

"Shriver proves she is not afraid of anything." (Observer)

"If Jodi Picoult has her finger on the zeitgeist, Shriver has her hands around its throat." (Washington Post)

"Shriver has the kind of cojones few English-language novelists possess, male or female." (Globe & Mail)

"Her work is all the more valuable for its flagrant defiance of political correctness." (The Times)

Members Reviews:

interesting, timely, insightful

I loved her We Need to Talk about Kevin for its sharpness and laconic cynicism. Now I can't say I exactly loved Big Brother, but I did like it a lot. It's just as sharp and diamond-clear in its sparse style, and ** minor spoiler alert ** there is a twist at the end. It does explain away a lot of the stuff that seemed off-key along the way. And it is, again, a book of and for the times.

The foundations of obesity dissected

The author's motivation for writing this book was the premature death of her grossly obese brother. She has constructed a story of a sister's herculean efforts to slim down a brother who had grown massively obese. The book is a mixture of lots of details about crash diets and thoughts about what makes people eat to such excess that they gain a massive amount of weight and as a consequence lose mobility, suffer from all sorts of unpleasant ailments that endanger life. Although this sounds a grim listen the author does manage to create characters that capture the attention, even those whom I didn't like. I was infuriated by the self-centredness of the brother and found it hard to believe the degree of the sister's dedication to help her brother lose weight. I felt sympathy for her husband and step-children Lionel Shriver is adept at dissecting family interactions and human emotions that ring true, even though, in this story, they are exaggerated for dramatic effect.

I'm interested in the subject of obesity, but think that the ruminations about food and diets, that dominate the book, some may find this tedious.

A though-provoking book about people's relationship to food in an environment of plenty.

The reader is excellent.

A surprising read

What did you like most about Big Brother?

Had it not been for an article I read about the author, I would not have bought this book. Nevertheless, I thought it would make for a change in my weekly diet of biographies. Whilst the start is a bit slow and I was unsure where the book was going, I surprised myself being completely hooked one the first third of the book was completed.