Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the 2017 debut novel by Gail Honeyman and the winner of the 2017 Costa Debut Novel Award. The book centres on Eleanor Oliphant, a social misfit with a traumatic past who becomes fixated on a singer she believes she is destined to be with, and it tracks her transformation towards a fuller understanding of herself and her life.

Eleanor narrates her own story. She lives in Glasgow, works as a finance clerk, and at the novel's start is twenty-nine years old. She is academically intelligent, holds a degree in Classics and reads well, and she completes the Daily Telegraph crossword on her lunch break. She is also socially awkward and solitary: she has no friends or social contacts, drinks two bottles of vodka every weekend, has gone without a haircut since she was thirteen, and describes herself as absolutely fine even at the most obviously awkward moments, tending to blame the other person's underdeveloped social skills for the trouble.

Her colleagues treat her as a joke, and the novel's first movement is spent inside a life that has been organised to keep everyone at a distance. It is Raymond, the unkempt IT man from her office, who breaks that pattern, first through the small crisis of helping a stranger in the street and then through ordinary, persistent company. The story is about isolation and loneliness, and about how slowly a person can come to understand her own history. Its reputation rests on the gap between Eleanor's flat narration of events and what the reader can see happening.