Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: Reese's Book Club: A Novel Audiobook by Gail Honeyman
2018 Audie Award · Fiction
Gail Honeyman's Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine follows a fiercely regimented Glasgow office worker whose weekends run on frozen pizza and vodka until an act of kindness cracks her sealed life open. Funny, devastating, and finally hopeful, it is the definitive novel about loneliness and the slow work of coming back.
Why the audiobook wins
Eleanor Oliphant is a first-person character study, which means the entire book rises or falls on one voice, and Cathleen McCarron's performance is the reason this audiobook won the Audie Award for Fiction. She plays Eleanor's clipped formality completely straight, precise about bus timetables and the correct way to eat a meal deal, and never once winks at the audience about how much pain that precision is holding back.
The comedy and the heartbreak in this book are the same sentences, and that only works if the reader trusts Eleanor's logic even when it's clearly protecting her from something. McCarron's flat, dignified delivery does that trust-building for you, so the moments Eleanor's control finally slips hit with real force instead of feeling like a genre swerve.
This is eleven hours in the company of one of the more distinctive narrators in recent fiction, and McCarron's Audie-winning performance is a big part of why so many listeners come back to Eleanor. One credit, and she's telling you everything, in her own careful way.
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