Eileen: A Novel

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

In this taut psychological thriller from Ottessa Moshfegh, a young woman is pushed into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman, is trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s carer in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighbourhood and her job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own daily horrors. When the charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist a miraculously budding friendship. But her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings and is about to cost her dearly.

"Eileen is a remarkable piece of writing, always dark and surprising, sometimes ugly & occasionally hilarious. Its first-person narrator is one of the strangest, most messed-up, most pathetic — and yet, in her own inimitable way, endearing — misfits I’ve encountered in fiction. Trust me, you have never read anything remotely like Eileen ... Eileen may bore some readers and repulse others, but those with a yen for the perverse may well embrace its unsettling pleasures & exceptional writing." — Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post

Ottessa Moshfegh was born in Boston Massachusetts & is an American author & novelist.  Her work includes McGlue (2014); Eileen (2016), which was awarded the 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award & shortlisted forthe 2016 Booker Prize; Homesick for Another World (2017); & My Year of Rest & Relaxation (2018), which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize.