Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman, 2017
Contemporary fiction RomanceLiterary fiction
A woman who has arranged her life into perfect, narrow routines discovers that a small kindness can crack it open. A dry, guarded voice carries you through quiet routines and sudden small kindnesses, with melancholy under the wit and a pace that stays unhurried.
Feels like melancholy, humor and hope. About solitude, identity and society.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy close first-person voices, dry humor, and stories about lonely people slowly making room for others. The narrator's blunt, withholding manner and long stretches of solitude can make the opening feel remote before the warmth comes through.
Why read it
It offers a sharp, funny look at loneliness and the ordinary kindnesses that loosen a rigid life, without turning its heroine into a lesson.
A page from the book
When a flat stops being a home and becomes a place no one enters.
No one’s been in my flat this year apart from service professionals; I’ve not voluntarily invited another human being across the threshold, except to read the meter. You’d think that would be impossible, wouldn’t you? It’s true, though. I do exist, don’t I? It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock. Gail Honeyman.Gail Honeyman's debut won the 2017 Costa First Novel Award and became a bestseller; she wrote it over several years in her spare time.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy close first-person voices, dry humor, and stories about lonely people slowly making room for others. The narrator's blunt, withholding manner and long stretches of solitude can make the opening feel remote before the warmth comes through.
- What is Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine like?
- A dry, guarded voice carries you through quiet routines and sudden small kindnesses, with melancholy under the wit and a pace that stays unhurried. Feels like melancholy, humor and hope. About solitude, identity and society.
- What should I read after Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine?
- If you liked Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, try Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata), A Man Called Ove (Fredrik Backman) and The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger).
A taste of the feed
What if being 'cured' meant being erased?
The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of. So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.
Convenience Store Woman · Sayaka Murata
The invisible duel that happens across a shop counter.
Another silence, as if two gunmen have suddenly realized they have forgotten to bring their pistols. Ove looks at the box for a long time, as though he’s waiting for it to make a confession.
A Man Called Ove · Fredrik Backman
The only job that feels worth doing, and why it can't be real.
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye, and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.
The Catcher in the Rye · J. D. Salinger
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