"Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine" by Gail Honeyman

     This is a first novel by Gail Honeyman, an Englishwoman in her forties. It has been critically acclaimed (to use the cliché) and it deserves the praise it has received.
     Eleanor is a loner, a stranger to social contacts, whose routine follows the same pattern from day to day and week to week. She works in an office and is something of a figure of fun to her fellow workers, with whom she minimizes her interactions. At the weekends she buys herself two bottles of vodka and drinks them over the next couple of days. She speaks on the telephone to her mother ("Mummy") every Wednesday; it seems her mother is in some form of institution, and in each conversation  Mummy finds ways to denigrate Eleanor. And, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that Eleanor has suffered some major trauma as a child.
      Eleanor becomes obsessed with the idea that she is destined to marry a wholly unsuitable pop-singer and that he will fall desperately in love with her when they meet. She Googles him, finds his home page, and follows him on Facebook and Twitter. Change comes to Eleanor, partly through the obsession with the singer, and partly because she helps a friendly colleague--Raymond--go to the assistance of an elderly man who falls in the street and is hospitalized. This brings her into contact with the old man's family and leads her into new social situations--a party, a funeral--and at the same time she is preparing herself to meet the singer--who is, of course, in ignorance of her existence--by buying new clothes, having her hair fixed, and starting to use cosmetics. The latter helps to disguise some scars she has on her face.
      And slowly, but with some major set-backs, Eleanor evolves, partly with the help of her relationship with Raymond, with whom she is constantly finding fault--his smoking, his T-shirts, his colored running shoes. At the close, Eleanor may not be "Completely Fine," but she is getting there. 
       One of the pleasures of the book is the scornful eye that Eleanor casts on so many accepted social conventions and the cutting language she uses to deplore them.