A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (37 page)

‘Heavily symbolic and bleakly realistic,
The Piano Teacher
turns its female heroin, Erika Kobut, into an extended metaphor for a doomed society… compelling fiction, ensnaring the reader with the intensity of the author’s vision and the bitter irony she uses to present her view of the city… Passionately political under its dense mantle of sexual imagery, the novel shares the dark world view long common to Eastern European literature and now increasingly evident in books from ostensibly more fortunate countries, insistently calling our attention to the discrepancy between the Vienna of our fantasies and the one in which Jelinek lives’
Los Angeles Times

The Piano Teacher
(2001) was directed by Michael Haneke, and starred Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel. It won the Grand Prize of the Jury and Huppert and Magimel were awarded the Grand Prix as Best Actress and Best Actor in 2001. Available on DVD from all good retailers & online.

Horace McCoy

‘Sordid, pathetic, senselessly exciting… has the immediacy and the significance of a nerve-shattering explosion’
New Republic

‘Were it not in its physical details so carefully documented, it would be lurid beyond itself’
Nation

‘Language is not minced in this short novel which presents life in its most brutal aspect’
Saturday Review of Literature

They Shoot Horses. Don’t They?
(1969) was directed by Sydney Pollack, and starred Jane Fonda, Gig Young. Susannah York, and Red Buttons. Available on DVD from all good retailers & online.

Lionel Shriver

‘This startling shocker strips bare motherhood… the most remarkable Orange prize victor so far’ Polly Toynbee,
Guardian

‘Once in a while, a stunningly powerful novel comes along, knocks you sideways and takes your breath away: this is it… a horrifying, original, witty, brave and deliberately provocative investigation into all the casual assumptions we make about family life, and motherhood in particular’
Daily Mail

‘An awesomely smart, stylish and pitiless achievement. Franz Kafka wrote that a book should be the ice-pick that breaks open the frozen seas inside us, because the books that make us happy we could have written ourselves. With
We Need to Talk About Kevin
, Shriver has wielded Kafka’s axe with devastating force’
Independent

‘One of the most striking works of fiction to be published this year. It is
Desperate Housewives
as written by Euripides… A powerful, gripping and original meditation on evil’
New Statesman

‘Shriver keeps up an almost unbearable suspense. It’s hard to imagine a more striking demolition job on the American myth of the perfect suburban family’
Sunday Telegraph

‘A study of despair, a book of ideas and a deconstruction of modern American morality’ David Baddiel,
The Times

‘This superb, many-layered novel intelligently weighs the culpability of parental nurture against the nightmarish possibilities of an innately evil child’
Daily Telegraph

‘Urgent, unblinking and articulate’
Sunday Times

The film of
We Need to Talk About Kevin
is in production, for release in 2011, directed by Lynne Ramsay, and starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly.

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