EILEEN

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Fully lives up to the hype. A taut psychological thriller, rippled with comedy as black as a raven's wing, Eileen is effortlessly stylish and compelling. - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father's carer in his squalid home and her day job as a secretary at the boys' prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a handsome prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father's messes. When the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England, blending true noir and the eerie, unforgettable books of Shirley Jackson and Flannery O'Connor, this mesmeric, terrifying, sublimely funny debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Eileen keeps a dead mouse in the glove compartment of her Dodge and refuses to clean, cook, or care for her abusive, alcoholic father, an ex-cop. Wishing him dead, yet still needing his approval, she keeps him supplied with gin while secretly planning her escape. At age 24, she works as a secretary for a boys prison, a job she hates until the arrival of Rebecca, a new employee, who offers Eileen friendship but at a price. Moshfegh's (McGlue) creepy thriller is full of strange, antisocial behavior that helps express the rage and low self-esteem of a damaged young woman with few options. We know escape is possible, however, since the story is told by a much older and contented Eileen, looking back to a Christmas week in 1964. Unfortunately, too much of the book is about Eileen's degradation, and the excitement, when it does come, seems contrived and unsatisfying. Alyssa Bresnahan narrates in a convincing voice that captures Eileen's painful self-absorption as well as her father's drunken paranoia. VERDICT This book will appeal to listeners who appreciate beautiful language and don't mind a work that also explores the revolting side of being human. ["Readers of all kinds will relish this well-crafted fiction": LJ 6/1/15 review of the Penguin hc.]-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.