I was careful not to let myself have any preconceived notions about this book or read any reviews. I had the feeling it was going to be a one of a kind read - and I was right! So funny, and yet so sad - Eleanor's story is a hard one to describe (I tried to do so to my husband and tied myself up in knots - just told him to read it instead!).

Brilliantly paced - you start off agreeing with those in Eleanor's world that she's exceptionally hard to like, but you end up in love with her. She's a protagonist that will stay with me for a very long time.

Original, terribly sad yet manages a good dose of humour at the same time. A good story, well told. Would make a great film.

This book both broke my heart and filled me with hope. Our heroine, Eleanor, is quirky to say the least - hardly surprising when one learns how she lives, and even more so when we learn her background.

I won't give away the plot - it's far too good for that - but here are a few hints! She initially feels that she is fine - her life follows the same pattern - same job, same meals, same drinks, weekly phone call to "Mummy". But it's apparent that she isn't actually all that fine - she's lonely, damaged and socially awkward. She develops a mega crush after a chance encounter with someone, and begins to try and fit herself into a more mainstream mould (some hilarious scenes of waxing and manicures). Her life begins to change on a superficial level - but only really begins to change properly when she and a colleague stop to help a stranger who's fallen in the street.

Eleanor is a wonderful character who has really got under my skin. I identified with her on several levels, admired her courage, and hope that she returns in another book.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me read an advance copy in return for my honest review.

On the face of it, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, could appear as a basic romantic story - reclusive young woman spots wonderful man & changes her image to catch his eye. Sounds like the plot of a Sweet Dreams novel, right? But this book is so much more.
Initially, Eleanor is a bit much to take. To say she's intense is an understatement. I have my own theories about why Eleanor is as she is but it was not confirmed in the story. So I'll hold onto my thoughts.
In trying to change her looks to snare a man, Eleanor inadvertently starts to unlock her past. Through her friendship with a male colleague, Eleanor slowly faces up to the things that she has tried so hard to forget.
I don't want to say too much about the plot but this is a beautifully written book with fantastic twists. I absolutely loved Eleanor by the end. This book made me laugh and cry in equal measure. A truly gorgeous book.

Thanks NetGalley for this book. Thoroughly enjoyable, funny in parts but touching without being over sentimental. Great character development. Highly recommend.

What an incredible debut and so brilliantly written.

Eleanor Oliphant is so obviously not 'fine'. She's had an unfortunate and horrible childhood, in and out of foster homes, no family or friends, and an unsightly burn scar on one side of her face. But, in Eleanor's eyes, she has a job, a home and can look after herself so, she's absolutely 'fine'.

The book is split into three Parts – Good Days, Bad Days and Better Days. Good Days is the setting of the scene, we get to know Eleanor and her foibles. She is a strange, complex and eccentric young woman, one who you could imagine maybe being a bit picked on or seen as weird. After helping a collapsed man in the street, she begins to build a friendship with Raymond, her work colleague.

During Bad Days and Better Days, Raymond is an absolute rock for Eleanor. Written with sadness and pathos, the Bad and Better Days are a revelation into how childhoods and their traumas can impact on later life.

Gail Honeyman has written a truly amazing book and has cleverly woven a lovable character in Eleanor Oliphant and her sad life. There is much to laugh at as well as giving the reader deep and caring feelings for this strange young woman. I came to love Eleanor Oliphant and was truly sad to reach the end of the book and the end of my time with her. I haven't read a book quite like this since A Man Called Ove was released.

This is the story of Eleanor, who is doing completely fine, goes to work five days a week and treating herself to a vodka at the weekend....however, she lives alone, has no friends and is frankly socially awkward.

This novel is both incredibly funny and incredibly sad. Eleanor is such a wonderful character, she is damaged and part of me could completely relate to her.

This story was so much more than I was expecting; such a well written and emotional story which hits you on so many different levels.

A must read!!!

I absolutely loved this book! It was such an original, surprising story with a great twist. The characters were the most engaging element - so loveable and richly drawn. I felt it was a lot like The Rosie Project in the way it dealt with a closed off personality type with such warmth and humour. I'd fully recommend to anyone and will be buying a couple of copies as Christmas presents!

I found this so difficult to rate out of 5. On one hand, the writing style is so character-driven, delicate and has such a strong voice - seriously, Eleanor is one of a kind. However, the story itself was paced quite strangely. I started out finding it very slow and almost gave up halfway through. Something about Eleanor's quirks kept me going and I'm glad I finished it because the twist at the end was great, although it was dropped in too late. If there had been more clues earlier on as to her backstory, or more of a driven plot, it would've been easier to sink into.

The overall mood was very depressing, but rightly so because the book deals with some important issues. I can't help but think some more comic humour and light relief would've gone a long way because it felt contradictory that Eleanor's sense of humour was light, but the mood stayed very dark without a break.

I'd recommend this to someone who is used to heavy literary fiction or interested in fiction books on mental health.

This was such a thought provoking book, really enjoyed it and would recommend if you want something that is going to make you smile but also cry, its just really different and again can't recommend enough.

Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine…until you scratch the surface of her life and realise that she isn’t. At all.

You see, Eleanor lives a life of pared down efficiency. Her meals are one pot, one plate. Her shoes are smart but comfortable, with Velcro for quick fastening (none of those inefficient shoe laces). Her role as a finance administrator requires analysis and ordering of numbers, which can be broken down into repetitive tasks and scheduled accordingly. All of this means that Eleanor creates minimal fuss and requires minimal interactions with other people. All perfectly FINE, thank you. Until you realise that Eleanor treats vodka like an essential basic grocery and thinks of a pot plant as her one and only friend.

Eleanor struggles with people, and as the book progresses, you start to guess at what might have happened in her childhood to make her so ill equipped to deal with social situations. Apart from having burn scars across her face and body, Eleanor has a very troubling relationship with her mother (Mummy) who she only contacts via telephone for 15 minutes on a Wednesday (and thank God, because this woman is a BITCH). As the book progresses, Eleanor makes some woeful (often hilarious) attempts to make herself more attractive to her crush and through a freak event is forced to spend time with Raymond, who she knows from work. Through this very off-kilter friendship Eleanor begins to accept herself and explore ways in which she can, ultimately, be fine (no capitals).

I have to say that I really enjoyed this book. Eleanor was such a great character and although she is clearly odd and her life is terribly sad, the novel is written in such a way that you don’t ever feel that you’re laughing at her, or at least not in a malicious way. There’s so much darkness in the book and Eleanor is such a bullied, broken individual that you immediately want to defend her, but you don’t just like her out of pity, you want her to be your friend because she’s genuinely funny, interesting and kind. When she acts inappropriately you can see it’s because she doesn’t understand social norms and never because she aims to cause offense – but to outsiders I suppose she seems aloof or downright rude. It’s this constant formality and awkwardness that made me empathise so much with Eleanor – you can’t help but be completely on her side.

The book is very cleverly written and is such a fantastic achievement for a debut author. The surname Oliphant means a monster or monstrous elephant and the full name of Eleanor Oliphant sounds like a play on the word Elephant. I suspect Gail Honeyman wanted us to think of the metaphor “the elephant in the room” which could often be applied to Eleanor – the strange, silent person that, with her pensioner style clothing and scarred face, is completely obvious but no-one wants to acknowledge.

The ending of the book has a fantastic twist that I half guessed at but the sadness of the whole situation really hit me. I loved how Eleanors past was hinted at throughout the novel and that by the end of the book everything had come to light. It certainly kept me guessing right to the end and I would love to know how Eleanor gets on (although I said this after Me Before You and look how After You panned out).

Overall, I loved the character of Eleanor and seeing how she stopped trying to just survive and started trying to live. I loved how what could have been fluffy chick lit was turned into something much more challenging and emotive by offsetting the lighter elements with something far darker. The book is very well written and is perfect reading for this time of year, when the days are still mild but there’s a bit of a nip in the air.

Charming, funny and oh-so heartbreaking, a great debut novel from an author to look out for.

I liked this book! It was kind of weird, but in a good way. Eleanor felt very real, and very human - Honeyman has done a great job of creating characters that are human, instead of just caricatures. The same goes for the story itself - sometimes plot points can feel artificial, as if they've been created just to cause drama, but the plot felt very natural. This book itself was a kind of soft heartbreak, but one that also buoyed you up again towards the end. I very much enjoyed watching Eleanor come out of her own private world and start interacting with those around her. Would recommend if you are looking for easy-read fiction with a bit of heart to it. Will definitely look out for Honeyman's next novel too.

Well when I first started reading this book I wondered about it, but it is definitely worth sticking with it. You get to see the world through the eyes of Eleanor who hasn't had the best start in life. You go through all the emotions with Eleanor as she try's to come to terms with her past. Once I got into the story I couldn't stop reading I really got drawn into Eleanor's life. An emotional but very interesting read.

Coming of age stories are not unusual.  Nor are novels about misfits.  Yet despite its apparently commonplace premise, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine hit me like a sucker punch.  Gail Honeyman's novel is tackling that very twenty-first century malaise - the thing that nobody likes to talk about or even really acknowledge.  Loneliness.  It's the one thing that nobody ever wants to admit to, that the nicely filtered photos on Instagram may not quite reflect our daily reality.  How do you cry for help when your very problem is not being able to find the words?

Eleanor Oliphant leads a carefully timetabled life with nothing left to chance.  She works through the week, never uses up her annual leave entitlement and every Friday buys herself the same pizza from Tesco along with two bottles of vodka so that she can spend the weekend neither drunk nor entirely sober, then returns to work on Monday without having spoken to another human being in between times.  On Wednesdays, 'Mummy' calls and the less Eleanor thinks about her, the better.  Approaching thirty, Eleanor has been in the same job for nearly ten years and speaks carefully and with precision, signing her emails 'Miss Oliphant' and interacting as little as possible with her colleagues.  Of course, she's fine and perfectly happy with her life - everything is fine.

Of course, there is rather a lot more going on.  Half of Eleanor's face is scarred from a fire in her childhood which she does not wish to recollect or discuss.  Her childhood was spent in care and she still has to have welfare checks from a social worker, even though she explains to them that she is completely fine.  Mummy seems to be calling from some sort of prison or psychiatric facility and the words that she says to her daughter are foul and leave Eleanor in tears.  We sense her disconnect as she watches her colleagues laugh and joke, unable to understand their light-hearted lives, not even sure if she likes them but wishing despite herself to be included.

Honeyman captures the outsider perspective well here, no easy feat while operating within the first person.  Eleanor overhears colleagues joking about her and often only partly understands.  Winning concert tickets in a work competition, she first catches sight of 'the musician' and develops a crush, convincing herself that he is destined to be the love of her life.  The snippets we get from this pathetic pop star via his Tweets - a rare foray outside the four walls of Eleanor's consciousness - are part of the comedic twists which Honeyman sprinkles in, keeping the novel from ever becoming too dark in tone.  Eleanor is determined to learn all about this man and to make herself over in order to win his heart.

I realised how attached I had become to Eleanor when I realised how badly I did not wish to see her humiliated.  I really did not want a novel where the unworldly heroine has to go through Bridget-Jones-esque prat-falls in order to find her One True Love.  Thankfully, this is actually not that kind of novel.  Honeyman is a far more humane writer and she treats Eleanor with far more kindness and a good deal more empathy.  An internet issue leads Eleanor into contact with her colleague Raymond from IT, someone she at first dismisses as far too shabby and poorly-spoken.  Later they have to come to the assistance of Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen in the street.  Eleanor starts having to actually talk to real people and discovers that they are actually not so bad after all.

Reading this book before Austen in August, and finally reviewing it afterwards, I can see that Honeyman is harking back to Austen herself and indeed some direct allusions are made but it would be too big of a spoiler to go into here.  Austen's novels tended to focus on the moral education of her heroines and was particularly firm about the perils of self-deception.  Elizabeth Bennet discovered that her own prejudice had led her to build her own interpretation of Mr Darcy's character.  Emma's stories and conspiracies drew her into rudeness at the expense of poor Miss Bates.  Catherine Moreland's fantasies led her to utter humiliation.  And Eleanor Oliphant hides her eyes from the past and it makes it impossible for her to move on.  None of Austen's heroines have seen the horrors that Eleanor has but she has to put aside her own conditioning, the barriers she has built to protect herself, the prejudices she learnt from her mother, it all has to come down if she is to truly see herself.

There are certain elements of the novel which did feel problematic - the idea that a good haircut is all a girl needs to feel better is an uncomfortable cliche which brings up images of the makeover scenes from Hollywood rom-coms whereby the 'ugly' girl (who was not ugly in the first place) is suddenly rendered sexually desirable.  It was interesting though because I know that in years gone by, I found getting a haircut to be incredibly stressful since it required close physical proximity to people I did not know who then insisted on talking to me.  It's a big reason why in my teenage years I once went a whole year without cutting my hair.  It was not a good look.

The only part of the novel which I really was not a fan of was the 'twist' towards the very end - that felt totally unnecessary and to be honest, I have mentally excised it from the plot as it threatened to undermine a book that I otherwise absolutely adored.  I never survived a fire, I never had an abusive boyfriend, I have never spent whole weekends drunk on vodka and I have no facial scars, but at different points in my life I have had to overcome extreme loneliness.  Honeyman captures the way in which one can get out of practice with navigating social situations.  Through Eleanor, Honeyman draws a parallel to how people once used to avoid the word cancer, but now 'loneliness is the new cancer - a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way'.  People can be very judgmental towards the lonely and even their nearest and dearest can be ready to show them contempt.  In our social-media focused world, it is easy to believe that you are doing life wrong, not having enough fun, not having wild enough experiences.  Reaching out can seem an admission of defeat.  Not waving, but drowning.

I felt that Honeyman's depiction of Eleanor's search for help was well-portrayed, demonstrating though that sometimes third party assistance is required to get them there.  The way in which it can be so difficult to throw aside a thought pattern which has been inflicted upon you was also so well put across, with Eleanor encountering kindness from people who her mother had taught her she should despise.  This kind of mental and emotional abuse leaves deep scars because it leaves the sufferer struggling to find the tools to get help.  Even as Eleanor is sitting down to speak to her counsellor, she is judging the woman's earrings and thinking with disdain that this was a person who was trying to be 'fun'.  All too often the Eleanors of this world do not make it easy for themselves.

I am glad that I did not read this book a few years ago - I cried more than a little reading it this time, I do not know how I would have coped reading it then.  I liked that Honeyman did not require Eleanor to finish the novel utterly reborn.  She still spoke with precision, deciding against text speak and that 'LOL could go and take a running jump' and expressing disgust when Raymond spoke with his mouthful.  I hope it is not too much of a spoiler to say that I found it more credible that she got a cat rather than a lover - never say never, but I did not think Miss Oliphant was quite ready for anyone else's rubbish and I would recommend that she take some time for herself before she tried signing up for Tinder.  I may not be a cat person myself but it was heart-warming to see Eleanor so happy taking care of her cat.  I finished the book feeling inexplicably grateful to Honeyman for writing this and for making it clear that loneliness is not a personal failing.  Life can and does get better - writing the review has made me teary again and although the book was not perfect in its execution, it has affected me more than anything else I have read this year and tapped into a sadly far too misunderstood human experience.  Eleanor Oliphant is a novel which celebrates kindness both in its tone and in its subject matter - something about which the importance of we could all do with being reminded.

This book is a brilliant and touching read, which broke and warmed my heart in equal measure. We'll all be able to relate to Eleanor and the story of how she navigates and learns to live in a world she's previously protected herself from and never really understood. Equally, alongside this narrative and exploration of Eleanor's growth, there's a second, deeper thriller style story unfolding of Eleanor's past, what happened, how it shapes her present and whether she'll allow it to shape her future.

Although at times it's heart-breaking, I finished this book with a happy perspective, and I would fully recommend it as it's a great and entertaining story, which will also change the way you think about and live your life.

This book was very different from what I was expecting. I loved that fact that this book centres around one character and her view of the world and I really loved that fact that this book was set in Glasgow. It means that instantly the reader can recognise what is going on and can experience everything in the book along with the main character. I thought the writing style made it very easy for us to sympathise with the main character and to see the world through her eyes.

Eleanor as a character was interesting. I wouldn't say that she was easy to like, but she was definitely easy to sympathise and sometimes empathise with. This meant that the book moved quickly. I still wasn't sure by the end of the book whether I liked her or not. She is very com,plex and yet simple at the same time. She obviously has some social issues as well. The synopsis mentions her drinking and so I expected her to be aware of the drinking but she really wasn't aware that this was an issue, or that anything else in her life was an issue for that matter.

The relationships that Eleanor builds with other characters is very entertaining. You don't always expect things to go the way they do and neither do Eleanor or the other characters, the book is cleverly written in that sense. Other parts of the book move a little slower and some parts are a little repetitive, but I think that this was a conscious choice on the author's part because Eleanor's life relies on those routines and repetitive tasks.

I enjoyed reading this book, it was sometimes a little slow for my liking but it did make me laugh in parts and I am glad that I read it.

I read Eleanor Oliphant whilst on holiday and it was a great bit of escapism - I wasn't completely engaged in the first part, but when I hit the 'Bad Days' I really felt for Eleanor. She's such a brilliantly written character and I could completely understand her despite having absolutely nothing in common!

I have so much to say about this novel, I’m struggling to put my thoughts into a coherent sentence. It’s honest and touching and warm and dark and utterly unforgettable. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine will break your heart, then mend it, then leave you feeling as if you are a new person by the time you finish it. I can’t stop thinking about this book and I’m so glad I finally picked up my copy. It was meant to be a treat for myself – an unbirthday present – for finishing my second novel and what a treat it was! I couldn’t have asked for a better book!

Eleanor Oliphant leads a lonely life. She follows her timetable, sticking to the regime of meal deals for lunch, vodka for her weekends and the same strict dress code every single day but then all of a sudden something happens that sends her spiralling off into a new way of life. And she must navigate a new path which holds more surprises than she ever could have predicted possible.

Eleanor is such a special character. She’s kind, honest, compassionate, sweet and funny. What more could you want from a character, a friend, a person?
I won’t go into it too much but suffice to say Eleanor has lived through a lot of hardship, and yet at no point does she pity herself or feel sorry for herself, she takes bad days as they come, meets the rudeness and cruelty from society with a flair and sweetness that is unparalleled. I loved her so much! And not just her, Raymond too! He is equally as wonderful.

I thought about quoting a paragraph or two from the book but when it came to it I just couldn’t. There are too many elements to it that touched me, too many sentences brimming with emotion and meaning, too many paragraphs filled with warmth and character that inspired a love for this wonderful person, to possibly chose from.

This novel will pull at your heartstrings and fill you with love and admiration for a single remarkable character – someone who will no doubt linger on in your mind for a long time to come. Marvellous!

Moving. Dark. Tender.

Well! What an interesting book! Eleanor is a completely engaging character. Quirky, odd, eccentric! A really well drawn character - fascinating, you become drawn in by Eleanor's strange ways and view on life. A bit like someone or something you know you shouldn't stare at but you just can't help yourself!