Big Brother: Brilliant family fiction from the award-winning author of We Need To Talk About Kevin

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In Big Brother's fictional scenario, Shriver's narrator attempts to rescue her enormous brother from his "slow-motion suicide-by-pie" by becoming his full-time, live-in weight-loss coach, putting her marriage on the line in the process. This is a novel about the morbidly obese and it is the anonymity of the overweight and obese that, for me, makes this so sad. As Pandora and Edison embark on their terrifyingly strict liquid diet, and as – touchingly and literally – a long-ago version of Edison starts to reappear, so too the experiment begins to take its toll on the whole family.

Rich with Shriver’s distinctive wit and ferocious energy, Big Brother is about fat: why we overeat and whether extreme diets ever really work.Well, what ensues is an admittedly interesting and insightful examination (though if it could have been a less direct one this would have been a much better book) of how both gaining and losing weight cuts both ways, and how we associate food with oh so many things.

our culture's obsession with food, weight loss, the 'perfect' body type and perhaps most importantly, the emotional toll that obesity takes , not only on the overweight person, but on the members of the family.The rest of Pandora's family was just as stunned by Edison's weight gain ; but despite everyone's shock, nobody talked about Edison's appearance. Obesity , because it is a condition which is easily observed by everyone and thus is a condition which is public and yet at the same time is intensely personal.