In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

When the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship. 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. As Christmas approaches, Eileen spends her life between her day job in a boy’s penitentiary and her home where she delivers round after round of gin to her alcoholic fatherĬonsumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. Eileen Dunlop is bookish, in itchy knee-length woollen skirts she is the picture of respectability. This is a book about escape.Īt the beginning of this taut, unconventional thriller the narrator tells the reader to be sure not to judge her by her appearance. There are a lot of stories about the way people become trapped by their lives, this isn’t one of those this is something quite different. There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was like Joan of Arc or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life – the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016

Eileen novel by ottessa moshfegh