Despite my intial preconceptions that this would be a dark, dreary gloomy book, it proved very difficult to put down, following me around the house - front room to kitchen, to bathroom, to bedside table - until I'd finished it.

To be fair, it was a dark and gloomy book, I'll make no bones about that, but it wasn't dreary.

The Kevin of the title is the narrator's son, who "did a Columbine" and killed lots of people in his school, and the chapters of the book are a series of letters his mother writes to his father, looking back at his upbringing. You know you're jumping directly into this from the beginning, as the back of the book tells you, so you've got ample opportunity to avoid it if you don't like the subject matter.

Kevin isn't a very lovable character, and I found myself wishing that someone he'd encountered much earlier would have had the decency to bump him off at some earlier point: ideally with his parents, as I didn't become particularly attached to them either.

So, despite all this, why am I rating it as a 4?

Because while the subject matter may be gloomy and depressing, it makes you ask questions about yourself, and your relationships with your parents and your children. Because it gets under your skin, drawing you forward towards what you suspect is probably coming but you know you're going to have to face it anyway…

It's extremely well written, and as soon as you ask yourself the big "what if" question, it goes from being a work of fiction to something much more powerful - a survivor's manual. Not the manual of a survivor of a massacre, a manual of the equally wounded animal - the family of the kid that did it. The family whose name is now synonymous with mass murder.

How would you cope? Could you cope? Could you bear to go shopping in the same supermarkets, watching the parents of children your son murdered push their trolleys around the same supermarket? Can you bear to watch Eva try to pull the shattered pieces of her life back together after that Thursday? I couldn't bring myself to look away…

I'd not choose this as a holiday book. I like upbeat, frothy things for that, which this plainly isn't.

As a work of literature, it's one I'd recommend. If you like thought-provoking, sometimes harrowing novels, this will suit you down to the ground. It's the literary equivalent of a Ken Loach film. It's like Bournville chocolate: dark, powerful, and while you know not everyone is going to like it, some will love it.

But I'm still not entirely sure why the high-school slaughter had to be set on my birthday…