Eileen

Eileen Dunlop narrates from decades later, recalling the week before Christmas in 1964. At 24, she is a secretary at Moorehead, a juvenile correctional facility holding teenage boys. It sits in a small Massachusetts town she calls X-ville.

Eileen is lonely and full of self-loathing. At home she keeps house for her father, a retired police officer who drinks and trusts no one. She dreams of getting away to New York City, but nothing in her days suggests she will.

Then Rebecca Saint John arrives as the facility's new director of education. Eileen's admiration for this colleague hardens into obsession, and the friendship that follows pushes the week toward dark and disturbing events.

Darkly comic and unflinching, the novel keeps an older narrator's eye on her younger self, softening nothing. It took the 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, and the Man Booker Prize shortlist included it. What Eileen does for Rebecca, and what it costs her, drives the week.