When a child is growing up he takes in what psychotherapists call introjects. These are pieces of information, feelings, attitudes picked up usually from the parents. What is particular about introjects is that they go in whole and unexamined like a bolus of food swallowed without chewing. Children pick up these ideas and behaviours often subconsciously and the parents are unaware that their feelings toward the child are leaking out drip by drip into the emotionally undiscriminating minds of their offspring.

The feelings that drip then pour out of Eva Khatchadourian into her son in Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin are pure glorious poison. They are feelings she daringly admits to herself that she has harboured even before Kevin is born. She dislikes her son. She senses even in the womb that he is a bad lot. This turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Lionel Shriver gives us permission to indulge in the guilty pleasure of hating a child whilst her 'heroine' Eva walks a tightrope between bravely slaying the sacred cows of motherhood and being an ungrateful sourpuss bitch.

The question burning at the heart of this novel is Nature or Nuture? The answer, as is often the case when faced with a polarised choice, is both. Kevin is a bright sensitive child who sucks up his mother's antipathy with the painfully expressed breastmilk and spits it back in her face. I empathised with Kevin's disappointment, I share with him the curse of imagination that means the world rarely lives up to our expectations. I don't share his retreat into nihilism though I did find his deliberately monotone school essays funny and I shall never be able to look a lychee in the eye again.

Written as a series of letters to her husband about their son who is in prison for a Columbine-style massacre, each chapter seems to end with a nail to the guts. We are treated to a finely-paced account of Eva's marriage, Kevin's increasingly frightening childhood and the fall-out from its crescendo of violence. Eva asks all the difficult questions and looks at them from all angles. This novel never lets up its superbly observed emotional intensity not even in the final heartrending paragraph.

The son Kevin is a brilliantly realised character who at first seems cartoonishly evil but I found a hard-won compassion for him towards the finish. I enjoyed his predilection for undersize clothes and his realisation that to care about nothing is a powerful position. He has the ultimate in cool: he hates all enthusiasms, all creativity. He is wracked by the big questions and senses life is meaningless apart from the meaning we give it but fails to find a way into making one for himself. Gradually Kevin comes across as the one who has the integrity even if it turns out to be destructively twisted.

I found myself drawing parallels between this work and Phillip Roth's American Pastoral. Both are an indictment of the American dream. Shriver has smug liberal baby boomers in her crosshairs and Kevin is a chillingly good shot. Eva represents immigrant energy, feisty feminism and irony. Her husband Franklin is for down-home Norman Rockwell mom and pop Americana. Kevin's soul is their battleground.

As a culture we all need to talk about 'Kevin', all the disaffected boys with an unfathomable grudge. How do we bring them up to be responsible happy men? If some people think women's literature is too focused on domestic issues I say what if Kevin grew up to be Saddam and took out his filial fury on a whole people?

I would rank We Need to Talk About Kevin with its beautifully-dissected and moving account of a dysfunctional family alongside Jonathan Frantzen's The Corrections. I truly felt I was reading the winner of this year's Orange Prize.

This book struck particular chords for me. I'm glad I didn't have easy access to serious weaponry when I was a teenager full of buried rage. I wondered did my mother ever think about me like Eva does about her son? The crackling silences across the dining table where very familiar to me. I cried in sympathy for their doomed relationship.

Grayson Perry was born in Chelmsford, Essex in 1960 and studied art at Portsmouth Polytechnic. He learnt pottery at evening classes, has exhibited in the contemporary art world since 1983 and won the Turner prize 2003. As well as ceramics he also makes embroideries, photographs and etchings, has exhibited extensively at home and internationally and is represented in several major collections including the Tate and Moma New York.

He recently made a television programme for C4 on masculinity and transvestism called 'Why Men Wear Frocks'. Grayson lives in London, is married to Philippa, a psychotherapist, and they have a daughter Flo, 12.

“Oi darkie, show us your tail”

Andrea Levy in Small Island brilliantly captures a world before the Race Relations Act and multiculturalism. A mastery of dialogue and capacity to capture mood and place make this novel a must-read. Levy sets her work in a “Mother Country” defended by West Indians rallying, with the rest of Empire, to the call; in the Empire from whence they and others came, and in the post-war Britain which they rebuilt and settled.

It is this last of which I have some childhood recollection. The wonder with which complete strangers would pat my curly hair in the streets of fifties London. The repeated questions to my white mother “Is he yours?”. The defiance, born of sometimes bitter experience, of her reply “Of course he is!”. Just daring them to say what some certainly thought. How could she?

This is the context for a work that explores not just the reality of race relations during and immediately after the War, but the nature of migration and the movement of people itself. The dream, the disappointment, the dawning of new experiences for people unaccustomed to each other. A language shared but, at the same time, unfamiliar. Hortense, who joins her Jamaican ex-serviceman Gilbert in his mean little bedsitter, horrified at the place to which her husband has brought her, is simply not understood with her formal English. This is a West Indian for whom an idealised vision of Britain and its landmarks was as familiar as the Jamaica of her birth was as strange and foreign to the English. Queenie, the white landlady, has grown familiar and accustomed to the sound of the island. Many haven’t. Gilbert struggles with his own thwarted ambition, the white Bernard, Queenie’s husband takes up the White Man’s Burden in India, fighting in a world where his superiority is, as he senses, never again to go unchallenged.

This is a carefully crafted story of interwoven lives. Levy writes with remarkable insight into the meanness, cruelty and pettiness of lives caught up in conflict and circumscribed by race, class and circumstance. There is passion and anger, but also warmth and humour in these lives and in her acute observation of their workings. This is an England and a world far removed from our current experience. Today’s London might truly be another country. And yet Burnley is not so very far away. We have come far and yet difference still has the capacity to stir up fearfulness. As Gilbert says ‘For me, I had just one question - let me ask the Mother Country just this one, simple question… How come England did not know me?”

Panic and emptiness, the failure to connect lurk beneath the surface. We continue to live our lives locked in the legacy of Empire. This is a largely neglected period. Levy, in this great novel, does it justice.

Rt. Hon. Paul Boateng MP was born in Hackney, London in 1951, but spent much of his childhood in Ghana, West Africa, where his father was first a lawyer then a member of the Government of Kwame Nkrumah. After the military coup of 1966, Paul returned to the UK aged 15.

He worked as a solicitor before being elected to represent Brent South for Labour in 1987, becoming the first person of African descent to be elected to the British Parliament.

He was appointed to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in May 2002.