A collection of zingy, thought-provoking (and sometimes just provoking) essays from a writer whose fiction is sometimes not to my taste. This writing is very much my sort of thing, as I like to be challenged in my views, particularly when it includes a deft shot of humour. We’re heading as a society to a bland and benign purity-spiraling Sameness amongst social commentators and this book gives a hefty kick up the backside to that trend.
Do I agree with everything in this book? No. Did I have the most enormous fun reading Shriver’s take on pronouns, gender, the literary world etc? Yes, very much so!

Lionel Shriver's Abominations is a collection of essays that does not pull any punches.
I did not agree with everything that she says, and I expect that very few readers will.
She is opinioned, rather than opinionated, but not everyone will agree with that.

Her essays are well reasoned and normally fairly forceful, and I really enjoyed reading them.

It is rare that I get to see a different side of an author to that shown by their fiction.

Try it you'll like it.

My thanks to the publisher for an advanced copy for honest review.

Warning: this book is not going to go down well with anyone who doesn't relish having their (progressive, Left) views and opinions challenged and confronted, so echo chamber denizens who only want to see their own positions reflected back might want to read this with caution.

Me, I recalled the passionate arguments that we had as students when, despite our broad agreements on topics like feminism, racism, sexuality, history, art, it was the nuances and our positions on a spectrum that were up for debate. Shriver has that same passion, the intelligence, the articulacy that make these essays both hugely enjoyable and - at times - absolutely infuriating.

Straddling everything from flashpoint topics (gender, Brexit, identity politics, immigration) to the almost random (Ikea, punctuation) and almost-of-the-moment (Covid, gender-neutral pronouns, the dismantling of monuments), she enjoys her own iconoclastic and controversial status.

Importantly, what Shriver brings to the table - even when we disagree - is intelligence and nuance: too many of these topics are often treated in divisive ways from far apart, even extreme, ends of a spectrum, when some delving beneath the surface for gradations and fine distinctions would be more fruitful. Indeed, too often we think we know what Shriver thinks via soundbites on Twitter etc.- her actual essays are far less polemical, her arguments far more reasoned than social media allows.

Nevertheless, there is a sense that she's sometimes rather gleefully courting controversy and, perhaps, some wilful blindness - her essay on immigration particularly maddened me for, for example, the way she assumes that racial and ethnic groups will always stick together as separate communities and which ignores the level of mixed-race relationships that exist in London, say. It's also frustrating that she uses 'Leftist' as a pejorative and essentialist term, despite the relativity she flags up in the way she herself is regarded as left-of-centre in the US.

Overall, then, this collection is classic Shriver: defiant, fierce, smart and unafraid, using logic to dismantle some of the contrary positions we find ourselves in. She doesn't always expect us to agree with her or even not to find her opinions offensive but, most of all, she is asserting here her democratic right to free and opinionated speech.

Shriver's 'We Need To Talk About Kevin' still remains to be one of my favourite books of all-time (or at least one of those books that had significantly changed my views; high-impact, high-quality read basically). However, nothing else that she has ever written have moved me since. This collection of essays were personal and 'sweet' (or whatever the more appropriate term), but they didn't resonate with me in any way. Glad to have received the ARC, excited and grateful even. But alas, I only made it halfway through. I tried to go on further, but I am just not the right reader for the book.

What an opinionated person Lionel Shriver is. I was irritated by many of her rantings, but the last straw was in the Brexit chapter when she states:

''British Europhiles immediately pilloried Leavers as ''racist'' for wanting to control their own immigration laws, though the immigrants to whom EU membership was germane were overwhelmingly white'.

Is she really saying that the term racist only applies to hatred by white people of people with differently coloured skin?

At this point I gave up.