Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Female of the Species | 1987 |
| Checker and the Derailleurs | 1988 |
| The Bleeding Heart / Ordinary Decent Criminals | 1990 |
| Game Control | 1994 |
| A Perfectly Good Family | 1996 |
| Double Fault | 1997 |
| We Need to Talk About Kevin | 2003 |
| The Post-Birthday World | 2007 |
| So Much for That | 2010 |
| The New Republic | 2012 |
| Big Brother | 2013 |
| The Mandibles | 2016 |
| The Motion of the Body Through Space | 2020 |
| Should We Stay or Should We Go | 2021 |
| Mania | 2024 |
| A Better Life | 2026 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| The Standing Chandelier | 2017 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Property | 2018 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Abominations | 2022 |
About Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver (born Margaret Ann Shriver in Gastonia, North Carolina, on 18 May 1957) is an American novelist and journalist. She is best known for “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005 and was filmed in 2011 with Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller.
Her father was a Presbyterian minister who went on to become president of Union Theological Seminary in New York. She changed her name from Margaret Ann to Lionel at fifteen, and studied at Barnard College and Columbia University, where she took a BA and an MFA. She has lived in Israel, Nairobi, Bangkok, Belfast and London. In 2003 she married the jazz drummer Jeff Williams, and in October 2023 the couple moved from the United Kingdom to Portugal.
Her first novel, “The Female of the Species”, appeared in 1987, and more followed over the next decade on subjects ranging from rock drumming to the Northern Irish Troubles, demography and professional tennis. None found a large readership. “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2003) changed that: a study of maternal ambivalence, it is told by the mother of a teenager who has murdered nine people at his high school, and it built its audience largely through word of mouth.
The novels since have usually taken on a public argument. “So Much for That” (2010), a National Book Award finalist, is a criticism of the American health care system. “The New Republic” (2012) had been written in 1998 but failed to find a publisher at the time. “Big Brother” (2013) was inspired by the morbid obesity of one of her brothers, and “The Mandibles” (2016) is a satire set in a near future in which the United States cannot repay its national debt. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2014 for “Kilifi Creek”, and her collection “Property” followed in 2018.
Shriver has written a column for The Guardian and now writes for The Spectator. A selection of her essays was published as “Abominations” in 2022. Her most recent novels are “Mania” (2024), about a parallel society that prizes ignorance, and “A Better Life” (2026), which deals with an overwhelmed immigration processing system in New York City.