Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine: Debut Sunday Times Bestseller and Costa First Novel Book Award winner
Gail Honeyman's Costa First Novel Award winner announces itself quietly, then hits you somewhere unexpected. Jojo Moyes called it funny, touching and unpredictable, and it's difficult to argue with that assessment. Eleanor Oliphant has built her life around repetition. The same outfit, the same lunch, the same two bottles of vodka to see her through each weekend. It's a timetable so rigid it almost passes for contentment. Almost. There's a peculiar tension running beneath her orderly routine, the gnawing sense that something is absent, even when she insists otherwise. Then a small, unremarkable act of human kindness cracks her carefully constructed shell, and Eleanor is left facing a world that most people navigate without a second thought. For her, it requires real courage, particularly when it comes to the darker corners of her past she has spent years steering well clear of. Honeyman writes with precision and warmth in equal measure. Eleanor herself is a genuinely singular character, oddly funny, quietly heartbreaking, and completely her own creation. The novel asks whether rigid routine is a form of safety or a kind of slow disappearance, and it sits with that question rather than rushing toward easy answers. Change, Honeyman reminds us, isn't always comfortable. But staying completely fine might be the most uncomfortable choice of all.
- Author: Gail Honeyman
- Publisher: Harper Collins
- Genre: Contemporary Fiction
- ISBN: 978-0008258252
- Pages: 400 pages