Following the death of her worthy liberal parents, Corlis McCrea moves back into her family’s grand Reconstruction mansion in North Carolina, willed to all three siblings. Her timid younger brother has never left home. When her bullying black-sheep older brother moves into ‘his’ house as well, it’s war. Each heir wants the house. Yet to buy the other out, two siblings must team against one. Just as in girlhood, Corlis is torn between allying with the decent but fearful youngest and the iconoclastic eldest, who covets his legacy to destroy it. ‘A Perfectly Good Family’ is an examination of inheritance, literal and psychological: what we take from our parents, what we discard, and what we are stuck with, like it or not.
Following the success of ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ and ‘The Post-Birthday World’, Lionel Shriver’s ‘A Perfectly Good Family’ finally came back into print earlier this year after being unavailable for years. So, why did it fall from favour and was it worth the wait? Well, it’s really up to you. What’s very clear is that Shriver’s other works have been beloved by critics and her most famous work, We Need to Talk About Kevin, won the coveted Orange Prize in 2005 and subsequent novel, The Post Birthday World, was praised for Shriver’s razor-sharp prose and unflinching dissection of relationships of all kinds. Whether A Perfectly Good Family lives up to such hype is a matter for you….
We’re reading this book for our club on Thursday night. I’ve still a hundred pages to go. Will let you know what we think. Laois ,Southern Ireland.
That would be fantastic! I love the idea of loads of bookgroups reading the same books all over the world and sharing ideas- and it’ll be really interesting to find out whether there is a difference of opinion on the book. I look forward to hearing from you. x