Award-Winning Books of 2016
'Tis the season for gold stickers on fresh book covers. Here's our lowdown on the best of the best.
By Mark Athitakis
By Ottessa Moshfegh
272 pages; Penguin
The title character of
Eileen could've walked straight out of one of Patricia Highsmith's moody noirs or Alfred Hitchcock's suspense films. And like those masters, Moshfegh has a knack for keeping you guessing. Everything about Eileen's life suggests entrapment, from the house where she lives with her moody, hard-drinking father to her day job at a prison. But while she's nursing dark, near-suicidal thoughts ("People died all the time. Why couldn't I?"), a glimmer of light comes into her life in the form of a new co-worker—setting in motion a crime story that is at once seductive and provocative.
Eileen won the
PEN/Hemingway Award for a debut work of fiction, and it's not hard to see why: Moshfegh has a superb command of language and tone, elevating its downbeat story by drawing us deep into turmoil of a young woman desperate to break free of her small-town life.
Published 11/17/2016
