—Boston Globe
“It is Desperate Housewives as written by Euripides…. A powerful, gripping, and original meditation on evil.”
—New Statesman
“Impressive…. It’s always a challenge for a novelist to take on front-page events. A guilt-stricken Eva Khatchadourian digs into her own history, her son’s, and the nation’s in her search for the responsible party, and her fierceness and honesty sustain the narrative.”
—New York Times
“Impossible to put down.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“An awesomely smart, stylish, and pitiless achievement.”
—The Independent (London)
“Terribly honest. Ms. Shriver takes a calculated risk…but the gamble pays off as she strikes a tone of compelling intimacy.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Furiously imagined…. A pleasure to read.”
—Seattle Times
“A slow, magnetic descent into hell that is as fascinating as it is disturbing.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel, with a clear-eyed, hard-won ending and a tough-minded sense of the difficult, often painful human enterprise.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Scathingly honest and often witty.”
—Salon
The Post-Birthday World
—Vogue
“The Post-Birthday World is a brilliant ‘what if?’ novel. But that barely scrapes the surface in describing Shriver’s imaginative feat…. It’s mad genius…. A tour de force.”
—USA Today
“A playful, psychologically acute, and luxuriously textured meditation on the nature of love.”
—The New Yorker
“Outstanding…. Shriver, a brilliant and versatile writer, allows these competing stories to unfold organically, each a fully rounded drama, rich with irony, ambiguity, and unforeseeable human complications.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A wonderful new novel…. The rewards for sticking with these five-hundred-plus pages are as delicious as one of Irina’s feasts.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Complex and nervy, Shriver’s clever meditation will intrigue anyone who has ever wondered how things might have turned out had they followed, or ignored, a life-changing impulse.”
—People (Critic’s Choice)
“Provocative…stunningly intense.”
—New York Daily News
ALSO BY LIONEL SHRIVER
The Post-Birthday World
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Double Fault
A Perfectly Good Family
Game Control
Checker and The Derailleurs
Credits
Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover photographs © Anup Shah/Getty Images and Mitch Reardon/Getty Images
Copyright
THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES. Copyright © 1987 by Lionel Shriver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition August 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-189949-2
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