2017/18 Ottessa Moshfegh: Eileen ****

It is always a delight to encounter a new, different and confident voice, often a woman, and you ask yourself how they managed to think their way into the being of the protagonist. Imagination is indeed a remarkable thing. Eileen is a screw up, pretty much despised by her sick and now dead mother and failing to look after her half-crazed retired, Catholic, small town alcoholic cop of a father. Eileen works at the juvenile prison for boys and the scenes with her appalling co-workers are very rich in grim detail. There is much wit and some laugh-out-loud moments.

Madness and obsession are never far away and the sordid is meat and drink to Moshfegh, who is the daughter of professional musicians from Iran and Croatia, who settled in Boston, Massachusetts. I don't spend too much time exploring the background of writers but I like to know something about them. She does seem to have been a tortured teen, probably with a rich inner life and writing seems to have been her way back. She wrote Eileen because she needed the money and decided to knock out a psychological thriller and see how far she could push things. This is a confident and absorbing novel, with some great twists and turns and an excellent sense of small town life in the 1960s.