Written by Gail Honeyman

Quirky, filterless, literal, lovable: Eleanor Oliphant. I was captivated by her socially-awkward character and her very solitary existence as an office employee, living alone with her marguerita pizza and two bottles of vodka as her weekend splurge. As Gail Honeyman says about her book: “I realized that I wanted to tell a story about someone like this, or, rather, someone who’d ended up like this, living a small life. A lonely person, a slightly awkward person, and someone in whom loneliness and social awkwardness had become entwined and self-perpetuating. I wanted to tell the story of how this had happened to her, and of what happened to her next, and this became the story of Eleanor Oliphant.” Slowly other characters make their way into her life: Raymond, her fellow office worker who takes a friendly shine to her; Sammy, the man on the street who has an accident that Raymond and Eleanor help. The novel made me warm and it made me laugh. Over its course, we share in Eleanor’s transformational journey toward a fuller understanding of self and life. Over its course we learn that Eleanor has some very dark secrets from her troubled past that have made her who she is, but it isn’t until the final plot-twisting revelation that we see what Eleanor is truly made of. Three thumbs up.