Hi, I'm Ann Colter. Welcome to my sub-sack. I am interviewing an author I've been dying to interview

the magnificent Lionel Shriver, who has a brand new book that I think is my favorite of your books.

She's written 17 books, the most famous one. This probably

drives you crazy to hear because you love all of your books, Lionel, is we need to talk about

Kevin, which apparently was such a huge hit, was made into a movie. I'm sure the movie's great,

but you've got to read the book. I reread that this weekend. I liked it so much. It's really clever. It's

really clever. And like this book, A Better Life, we'll get to that in a second. The other ones I can

personally recommend Armenia, which is like all of Lionel's books. I mean, in a way, I'd say

it's an updated Kurt Vonnegut Harrison Bergeron

book, except like all of her books, it's realistic. It's what could actually happen. It just

takes very few liberties with what's actually going on in the world. And the current book,

which obviously is my favorite, is about immigration. It's called

A Better Life and Let me say, welcome, Lionel. I'm so happy to have you here. Thank you. I am delighted

to talk to you. And I'm very, very pleased that you liked the book. I was telling you before we started recording,

I am so frequently disappointed, especially on podcasts, that despite being sent the novel in

considerable advance, a lot of people haven't read the book. No, if anything, it was so much fun, I treated it like dessert.

It wasn't work reading it.

And so for a while I was putting it off because I'd read and think, oh, my gosh, this is so much fun.

Now let me do something I don't enjoy doing and this will be my reward.

But I couldn't wait to get back to it every time I did.

It's, I mean, I hate to compare it to anything you write to other books because they're very

original and very, very clever. But it's, it sort of reminded me of camp of the Saints,

...