We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of those novels that stays with you forever.  For instance, I read Nineteen Minutes at around the same time, which is also based on a high school killing spree, but I can scarcely remember any details from Jodi Picoult’s formulaic tone.  We Need to Talk About Kevin haunts you in comparison… I won’t go on about the particular scenes that really stay in the mind, as I don’t want to give any spoilers away for anyone who hasn’t read the novel (although there must be very few of them around, as the front cover of this Serpent’s Tail reissue very much points out that more than a million copies have sold).  Following the publication of We Need to Talk About Kevin, I very foolishly asked Lionel Shriver, during a talk that she was giving for the Society of Young Publishers (SYP), why she had chosen a masculine nom de plume (well, I hadn’t been able to find any reason for this during my online research on Shriver).  Despite the negative reaction to my question, I was very much up for reading Shriver’s novel when the SYP book group decided to cover it.  At first, I found Eva’s voice to be quite distant, since she was almost too articulate, with an over-developed and dry vocabulary.  However, it wasn’t long before Shriver’s prose began to really captivate me.  Everyone at the SYP reading group had a great deal to say about this complex and stimulating novel, with a multitude of contrasting opinions about various aspects of the book.  It was, we concluded, a very worthy winner of the Orange Prize, and everyone loved the book.  This Serpent’s Tail reissue comes with a very good introduction by Kate Mosse, one of the founders of the Orange Prize.  Although We Need to Talk About Kevin isn’t that old, it very justly forms part of the Serpent’s Tail Classics series, as it became a masterpiece from the moment it was first published.