Eileen Audiobook By Ottessa Moshfegh cover art

Eileen

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Eileen

By: Ottessa Moshfegh
Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
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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 and her day job as a secretary at the prison.

When the charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives as the new counsellor 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.

©2015 Ottessa Moshfegh (P)2015 Recorded Books Inc Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Suspense Thriller & Suspense Women's Fiction Fiction Unreliable Narrator Crime

Critic reviews

"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." ( The Times)
"Excellent...a taut, well-written, and completely engrossing novel...culminating in a dynamite ending." ( Boston Globe)
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Brilliant! Didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did MYOR&R but I did. Bravo Ms Moshfeg. The narration was excellent too.

Sublime and gross

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This book was a complete let down. I was told that "the prose just takes you to another place". Well it did that is true. It took me to a place that is neglected, where the people are one dimensionally horrible (not one character had redeeming qualities) and where the main protagonist is lazy, dirty, ego centric and just downright boring. It was a book of complaints about how horrible the main characters life was, how horrible all the people are until the very last instant when something finally happens.
The narrator did a good job with this drudgery, that is about the only good thing I could say about it.

Recommended by a FB page I trust.

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It's been a while since I read any Faulkner and this book is probably quite unlike his style but somehow his name kept lurching into my head as I listened.
This is an incredible piece of character development. Eilleen, told in hindsight in the first person, is the story of a young woman with some pretty full on self esteem issues, a morbid fashion sense and an admin job in a juvenile detention centre in the mid '60's.
It's also a cliffhanger with tension building subtly from the outset. Overall it's the best read I've had in a year :-) the reader wasn't to my liking but the story is so powerful it shone through.

Wonderful, bleak and raw

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Eileen has been dealt a bad hand of cards in life and carries a chip on her shoulder. She doesn't fit comfortably in society or in her own skin and resents her condition as an outsider. At the juvenile detention center where she works, she meets Rebecca, a lady that appears to be everything that she isn't: sexy, educated, worldly and idealistic, someone who embodies the prospect of new possibilities away from the coarse, cruel world that she's been confined to. Something about her spells trouble, however... Ottessa Moshfegh beautifully renders in a spare, precise language a brooding story of neglect, abuse and contained violence.

After greatly enjoying the author’s 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation’, I listened to her following novel, 'Death in her Hands', but wasn’t as impressed by it. 'Eileen', an earlier work, was more convincing. I kept marveling at how cinematic it is. It seems to borrow its tone from black-and-white noir dramas from the 40s and 50s. A film adaptation will be released soon, with Anne Hathaway in the role of Rebecca. I may just skip it and remember the story as told by Alyssa Bresnahan's excellent narration.

That cold Christmas

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