24 January 2014
When Pandora Halfdanarson’s brother Edison, whom she hasn’t seen for years, turns up in Iowa for a visit weighing 28 stone, she doesn’t recognise him. At first neither she nor any of her family states the obvious, but Edison’s behaviour soon starts to have devastating effects, from cooking up heart-attack brunches to causing serious rifts between Pandora, her fitness fanatic husband and their two children.
Inspired by the life and death of her own morbidly obese brother, Shriver’s novel about the compulsions of overeaters and their consequences on those closest to them is hard to like but brilliantly done.
