What a fantastic novel. One of the best I've read this year - I wish I wasn't so busy and I'd turn right around and read it again. The characters stuck with me for at least a day after I finished, as I thought about Eleanor and the others.

A book about quirkiness and loneliness, and what it means to love and live. I highly recommend it.

I absolutely loved 'Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine', and I devoured it quickly from start to finish.

It's dazzlingly well-written: the writing seems effortless, as if Honeyman just sat down at a desk one day and wrote the whole thing from start to finish. But actually, like many great books such as this, on closer inspection it is meticulously plotted and beautifully structured - I'm sure there was nothing at all effortless about writing it!

The character of Eleanor is funny and touching: she's living a tiny life of careful routine, until one day something happens and her routine starts to unravel. With this unravelling, the reader begins to learn what brought Eleanor to this point, and watches her slowly start to emerge from her cocoon into a beautiful butterfly of a person.

Eleanor's slightly skewed observations of life are witty and amusing, such as:

"I opted instead for a coffee, which was bitter and lukewarm. Naturally, I had been about to pour it all over myself but, just in time, had read the warning printed on the paper cup, alerting me to the fact that hot liquids can cause injury. A lucky escape, Eleanor! I said to myself, laughing quietly."

This novel is really funny and engaging, perfect for people who enioyed 'My Name is Leon'.

I absolutely loved this book. Not the genre I would normally read, A well written book in every respect, intriguing, happy, sad, a mixture of everything.. The author has done a fantastic job with the characters-they are so 'real' with twists and turns right to the very end. This book puts Bridgette Jones to shame-Elinor is far better. Looking forward to the film and more books by this fab author.

Eleanor Oliphant goes to work every day, she eats her pasta and pesto (and pizza on Fridays) and drinks a bottle of vodka from Friday to Sunday. She does the crossword, listens to something on the radio and has a weekly phone call from Mummy. Eleanor Oliphant is completely alone. Eleanor Oliphant is complete fine.

Eleanor's character is beautifully constructed and the slow reveal of her childhood and experiences is perfectly managed (even though it is predictable). But this is the charm of her character - the story follows the small changes that she makes to her life after falling in immediate love with her musician. But the changes that she makes mean that when everything crumbles around her, she is in the best place possible to survive.

I loved Eleanor's character and voice, her observations and interactions with others. This book is perfectly heart-breaking, but also shows the goodness and kindness of humanity, not to mention the fears and voices that we all hear.

As you may guess from the title, Eleanor Oliphant is NOT fine. She's been in an odd way for years. She doesn't understand cultural references, and doesn't know how to react in social situations, but this isn't just another book about a 'quirky' character who may or may not be autistic/on the spectrum (fwiw, I don't think she is - her behaviour seems more nurture than nature).

It's ultimately a story about how kindness from one person to another can transform lives. It can teach someone else to be kind. It can teach someone else why they ought to stay alive.

Eleanor is both an Eleanor Rigby and the elephant in the room. She is a difficult, lonely person, living in secrecy and despair. To both strangers and colleagues, she is an oddity who doesn't respond correctly to just about any situation. But this is a feature of her loneliness - she genuinely doesn't know how to behave, or indeed why people behave as they do.

You learn that she doesn't know affection or love, that she is sorely missing even a handhold.

Her life begins to change when a colleague at work reaches out to her in a simple friendly way. They witness a man having a medical emergency and she discovers what happens when you merely get involved in another life. It starts changing everything.

But the more she talks to people, the more she grows, the more people start asking uncomfortable questions about her past. Eleanor Oliphant doesn't want to answer, because she's been avoiding the past for decades. But until she confronts it, how can she be a whole person?

I got totally swept along with Eleanor's story - both how she changes in the present and what happened to her in the past. Would recommend.

I read this while on holiday as I am always looking for long novels which will last me a while. This however I read within 2 days as I just couldn't put it down. Absolutely loved it and it had me hooked straight away. My only disappointment was getting to the last page! I wanted the pages to go on forever. Highly recommended!

Eleanor Oliphant has no friends, no hobbies and no family to speak of, and that suits her just fine. Her weekends pass by in a purposefully drunken haze, and her days in work are spent trying to attract as little attention as possible. Eleanor has had enough attention to last her a lifetime. Then two things occur almost simultaneously that shatter her bubble of preservation, she falls in love and she makes a friend. Suddenly she is unable, and unwilling, to hide in the shadows anymore, but as she slowly emerges back into society the demons from her past come rushing to meet her.

This is one of those books that grabs you from the first page and refuses to let go, even after you have finished reading. Eleanor is an incredible protagonist, socially awkward, rude, vulnerable and incredibly lonely. It is a difficult balance but Honeyman has masterfully intertwined her character’s conflicting personality traits to create someone the reader will sympathise with and care for deeply. Watching Eleanor try to manoeuvre her way through life without really understanding the rules is both painful and hilarious, making the reader want to shake her and hug her at the same time. Raymond, the kind-hearted, lumbering IT consultant also deserves mention. His flawed yet endlessly patient character is both realistic and incredibly endearing making for a lovely contrast to Eleanor’s unintentional insensitivity. This is not a book of cute misunderstandings and social transformation however. Throughout there are hints of an extremely dark chapter in Eleanor’s early life that has caused her to hide away from the world, and it colours even the most hopeful passages with a background sense of fear and dread. This is an amazing debut, and one that deserves to win Honeyman a horde of fans.

Who is Eleanor, why is her "mummy" so controlling. An unlikely friendship at work, a random act of kindness and slowly we uncover the real Eleanor. Loved this book, at times funny, at times sad, at times you feel awkward for Eleanor but you do grow to understand and love the character. Just a beautiful book. Really recommend..

I love, love, LOVED this book! It was probably the best book I've read in years and refreshingly different. Anyone who wants to know how to show not tell should read this. It's moving, emotional and just wonderful. You NEED to read this book.

Fabulous
Ouldnt put it down
Poignant and yet really uplifting
A must read

Eleanor Oliphant is a 30 year old woman who works as a clerk in a graphic design company. She has a first class honours degree in the Classics, scars on one side of her face and a vodka problem. Her social skills are almost non-existent but this doesn't stop her from judging the skills of others and, in almost every instance, finding them wanting. If you were to look up the word quirky in the dictionary, I'm pretty sure you'd find Eleanor Oliphant. A more irritating and unlikable character I have yet to find this year. I got to around the half-way point, considering giving up on the book at the end of each chapter, but I persevered and I am very glad I did.

While I spent a fair proportion of the book wanting to slap Ms. Oliphant, I ended up rooting for her. The supporting characters were well drawn and while the speed at which character change occurred is a tad unbelievable, the reasoning behind the changes seemed valid to me.

This book is undemanding, an easy read, but it left me with the warm and fuzzies and that can't be bad.

A word to publishers: enough with the quirky book titles, please!

Eleanor Oliphant leads a normal but isolated existence as an accounts clerk but has hidden secrets. One day she and a colleague help an elderly man and this leads her to discovering the world of friendship and who she really is. A bittersweet, intuitive lovely novel.

It’s like The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry all over again: everybody loves this book, but I can’t summon up much enthusiasm even though I read it quite quickly. It veers wildly between light and dark, which suggests this debut author is not in control of her tone. I also never worked out who Honeyman meant for Eleanor to be: a clueless nerd, on the autistic spectrum (she’s like a female version of Don Tillman from The Rosie Project), or just a bitch? The book is too long by 1/3+, and you’ll see the twist and the ending coming from a mile away.

The basics: “For more than nine years, I’d got up, gone to work, come home. At the weekends, I had my vodka. None of that would work now.” Eleanor Oliphant is a thirty-year-old finance clerk for a Glasgow graphic design company with scars down one side of her face from a house fire she survived as a child. Raised by foster families, she still communicates with her abusive mother even though she doesn’t want to remember her childhood. She keeps herself to herself, which is for the best given her peculiar habits and lack of basic social awareness.

There are some good points for sure:

• Eleanor is ludicrously well spoken, which leads to numerous enjoyable turns of phrase:
a social worker “checking to make sure that I’m not storing my own urine in demijohns or kidnapping magpies and sewing them into pillowcases.”

“Both Sammy and Raymond were audible masticators”

“Men … would always be distracted by women who looked like her, having neither the wit nor the sophistication to see beyond mammaries and peroxide.”

• This character undergoes a sweet transformation, starting to care for other people by helping an old man who’s fallen over and is taken to hospital, then attending his coming-home party, his son’s birthday disco, etc. Making a true friend of her colleague Raymond Gibbons, a schlubby IT guy, and visiting his mobility-impaired mother are some of the best parts of the book. Think Rachel Joyce but funnier.

• The counselling sessions are well rendered, and kudos to Honeyman for showing that people sometimes need external help to deal with mental health issues and trauma, especially when they’re as serious as Eleanor’s – though the session write-ups are also a bit tedious and cause the narrative to stall towards the end.

But here are some reasons why this book irked me unduly:

• Eleanor seems like an alien engaged in an anthropological study of earthlings (e.g. “He smiled, put down his fork and held up his hand. I realized I was meant to place mine against his in what I now recognized as a ‘high five’.”). Are we really supposed to believe that she’d never danced, or heard the Village People’s “YMCA,” or owned any computing or telecommunications devices, until age 30?! She was in foster care, not on Mars! And she downs two bottles of vodka every weekend, but has never tried cider? She had a boyfriend for two years but can’t spot flirtation or realize that she’ll never bag the singer she has a crush on? She doesn’t realize it’s not okay to give someone a half-drunk bottle of liquor as a birthday present? All in all, she’s extremely particular in most respects but then in others seems to have no idea what’s proper.

• Why does Eleanor have to become more ‘normal’ – and in such depressingly clichéd ways (having a makeover, getting a haircut, wearing trendy black clothes and high heels, going to pubs) – to gain acceptance?

• The horrible cheap laughs of a bikini wax and a death metal concert.

A few more ranty thoughts:

• Did Honeyman think this had to be in the first person to convey Eleanor’s loneliness and delusions? The third person would actually be more effective in that you’d see her like a figure in an Edward Hopper painting, from the outside.

• Whatever have Americans made of all the British-specific references here (Eleanor’s enthusiasm for Tesco, her “shopper,” her “jerkin,” Magners drink, and so on)?

• What vanity for Reese Witherspoon (who has acquired the film rights) to think she can play a 30-year-old! To what extent will she ‘uglify’ herself for this role with scars and dowdy clothing? (I can see how this will work as a cross between her Elle Woods [Legally Blonde] and Tracy Flick [Election] characters, but she’s still a bit too pretty.)

• Raymond should be played by Chris O’Dowd – as the setting will undoubtedly be moved to New York or L.A., just make him Irish and he’ll be exactly the character he was on The IT Crowd and that will be perfect.

This is a quick and reasonably entertaining read, but the more I thought about it the less it convinced me.

I was not so sure about this book before starting it but then I got hooked and was sad when it was over. Sad, funny, clever, deep, sweet and above all uplifting. Possibly the best book I have read this year.

Eleanor Oliphant is 30 years old, lives in Glasgow on her own and does not talk or interact with many people. She goes to work, reads a lot, has a potted plant, talks to her mother once a week and drinks a lot of vodka. She believes she is happy like that. But something happens and she is forced to face up to reality.
The beginning of the book reminded me a bit of Adrian Mole, the thoughts of a smart person who is also very naive. These thoughts are often quite funny but there is a tragic side to Eleanor that we discover little by little with a few twists.
But the book is not sad, it is about friendship, forgiveness and reminds us that everyone has a chance. It is also about the reality we chose to believe in when we find it too hard to try to change our lives. It is easier to pretend that everything is ok than to change. But when we allow new things and people into our lives, it is often for the best.
Eleanor is difficult to forget, with all her flaws and eccentric behaviour I quite liked her, especially as slowly she reveals her true self, the one she had kept hidden for so long.

Breathtakingly good, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine gently lures the reader into Eleanor's world before delicately unpicking it. The limited cast of characters move the narrative along nicely, each one beautifully drawn and playing their part. Eleanor's past gradually creeps back, and we finally learn what makes her the strange but charming creature we have grown to love. A lovely, lovely book.

A charming book that is bound to be a bestseller. Eleanor is a special character whom the reader is immediately engaged by. She finds interaction difficult and we follow her journey to find a place in the world around her. My only gripe was that I found the revelation at the end unnecessary and thought it diminished rather than enhanced the story.

Eleanor is an engaging protagonist, though it's a challenging row to hoe for the author, whose heroine teeters on the fine line between quirky and tragic. Honeyman accomplishes this quite deftly though and I found myself drawn to this endearing character whose trauma unfolds for the reader at the same time as it does for her.
This is a novel with heart and will appeal to readers who enjoyed Elizabeth is Missing.

Although we still have just over a month left, this is my book for summer 2017. I'm recommending it to everyone who's asked, and even to some people who didn't.

I loved it because it showcases how the smallest acts of kindness can have the largest impacts on people's lives. Even just by being a little thoughtful-- giving a good haircut, teaching someone how to apply makeup, asking an awkward colleague to lunch (to name a few)-- can have outsize ramifications on someone's happiness.

With 2017 presenting its own challenging circumstances in the world, this book gave me faith in humanity. Sure, it's fiction. But it reminded me of the basic decency of most people, and that's something.

I'd heard good (great, even) things about this book before I picked it up, so I was ready to be impressed - and I was!

Eleanor's narrative voices is the freshest and most interesting I've read all year. I found her sensible and ridiculous, sombre and laugh-out-loud funny all at the same time, and when I turned the last page I was just as charmed by Eleanor as the people she met within the pages were.

I have to admit I was slightly worried about what effect this book would have on me. I've struggled with loneliness and there were times that I felt I identified far too strongly with Eleanor, but the beauty in this is that she never feels like a hopeless case.

As much as Eleanor's life is humourous (some of the things that go over her head and the social mistakes she made had me clutching my stomach laughing) this book is keen to emphasise how painful her childhood was/loneliness is. The moment of realisation she has in the nightclub was particularly emotional and you could really feel through the narration the amount of self pity and self loathing she had in that moment.

There was one part of the book I had a problem with. Her mother having been dead all along. I thought it was a lazy plot device right at the end of the book which was totally unneeded. After I realised that the 'phonecalls' she'd been making had been fictional it did clear up a few moments when they'd seemed very abrupt, and one time I noticed that Eleanor (usually meticulous in her description of events) hadn't mentioned the phone actually ringing. It irked me that her mother's speech had all been in Eleanor's head, yet she'd made cultural references that Eleanor wouldn't get - like referring to Sex and the City 2 as being the film she wanted to watch. Anyway, it's a minor niggle because I don't feel like it massively disrupts the story at its heart, which isn't about the crime committed against her but her personal development through meeting Raymond.

I love this book! Please everyone read it :)

Eleanor Oliphant struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. She wears the same clothes to work and at weekends she has pizza and vodka. She has phone calls with mummy on a Wednesday. Then Eleanor meets Raymond and everything changes. Raymond is the unhygienic IT guy from work. Then they meet Sammy, an elderly gentleman who fell on the sidewalk. The three become friends who rescue one another from the isolated lives they have been living.

What an absolutely fantastic debut novel this turned out to be. It is well written and will make you both laught and cry. I was overwhelmed by Eleanor and her and her view of the world and her relationship with Raymond. I liked the way Eleanor developed throughout the story and came to terms with her past. This is a book I'm going to be thinking about for a long time. I highly recommend this wonderful book and I look forward to reading more from the author, Gail Honeyman in the future.

I would like to thank NetGalley, HarperCollins UK, HarperFiction and the author Gail Honeyman for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.