![]() When the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a handsome prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father's messes. As Christmas approaches, Eileen spends her life between her day job in a boy’s penitentiary and her home where she delivers round after round of gin to her alcoholic fatherĬonsumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. Eileen Dunlop is bookish, in itchy knee-length woollen skirts she is the picture of respectability. This is a book about escape.Īt the beginning of this taut, unconventional thriller the narrator tells the reader to be sure not to judge her by her appearance. There are a lot of stories about the way people become trapped by their lives, this isn’t one of those this is something quite different. There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. ![]() ![]() I was like Joan of Arc or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life – the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. ![]() Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016 ![]()
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