Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen is a young woman living in Massachusetts in the 1960s who works in a prison and cares – if you can call it that – for her abusive, alcoholic father. Moshfegh is a master at creating cruel and pitiful characters that you can’t help but be drawn in by. But just like her whodunit ‘Death In Her Hands’, the pace of this book is enragingly slow. When a hundred pages in we still hadn’t met Rebecca, who we’re constantly reminded will turn the whole story on its head, it was tempting to put the book down and give up. But just when I thought Eileen’s inciting action couldn’t possibly be worth the build-up, the big ‘it’ happened, and I was finally hooked. So if you’re a more patient person than me (which is likely), or you approach this book like a character study instead of a thriller, you might love it. MG

Vintage Classics