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

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From the point of view of this Iowa transplant, Shriver nailed the details, the positive and the negative, of everyday life in Iowa. Just as interestingly, it's a novel about sibling and familial responsibility, and the extent to which it's possible, ethical, realistic or even desirable, to intervene. Not to mention the fact that his gaining just over 200 pounds in 4 years does not actually match up with what he supposedly eats in a day. Moss painstakingly revealed how companies use salt, sugar and fat to addict us and linked his findings to the emerging obesity epidemic.

The "twist" ending is the only reason I kept reading this book and it turns out it's not a twist; it's a "Dallas" ending with a fat guy instead of a dude in the shower. She comes at this huge subject through a sister torn between saving her morbidly obese older brother, who has "buried himself in himself," and an unsympathetic, belligerently fit husband — a situation that raises questions about divided loyalties and whether blood is thicker than water. Pandora's childhood was somewhat unusual - her father was in a successful television show and all the members of her family are either distant or no longer alive, apart from her adored elder brother, Edison. It doesn’t convey the the emotions ABOUT NOT UNDERSTANDING OBESITY, the denial, the relationships within a family, addiction itself, the ‘walking on eggshells’ of suppressed communications, the huge food budget, food, from hunger from the lack of it.As with all Shriver's novels, the best parts were the moral inquiries I will be turning over long after I turn over the last page. Then, to make matters even worse, she uses this cheap plot device at the end that made me feel like I totally wasted my time reading the story. And there is yet another reason I almost ditched the book: it’s a hard read for anyone who didn’t get above 700 on their SATs. Shriver's writing and observations are often profound and challenging, but I can't quite shake the feelings of being somewhat manipulated as I read. And really, much of this book is funny, especially when the family dialogue comes out, which always make for a good laugh, in and outside the pages of a book.

Pandora gains access to the bathroom, where she finds the toilet brimming, "turds scattered all over the floor", balls of faecal matter shooting out of the bathroom door before she has a chance to close it behind her.

It appraised whether I was strong, whether I was self-possessed, whether I was someone anyone else would conceivably wish to be. 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.

As the years have passed, more of her titles have joined the ranks in my To-Be-Read stacks, but this is this novel’s intriguing premise made me unable to resist immediately reading it. I could think of it as Shriver meanly manipulating us, but I prefer to think of her as winking at us after creating a masterpiece. She lives in the Iowa Corn Belt with her husband of seven years, Fletcher Feuerbach, an underappreciated furniture craftsman, and his two teenage children. 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.Self righteous husband Fletcher is not pleased when Pandora's big brother Edison decides to come "visit" - down on his luck as an out of work jazz musician, the visit is actually set for two months. Mass murder, snooker, the US healthcare system – who but Shriver could pull off a novel about terminal cancer that's angry, yes, but also warmly, movingly upbeat?