Eileen: This novel takes the form of an astonishing and gripping first-person account of her early life by an old woman in the USA recalling her appalling relationship with her disgusting alcoholic father. She describes how, at twenty-four, she was working in a boys’ prison in the mid-60s when she became obsessed with a glamorous new female teacher there. Explosive consequences follow from that situation. The reader gradually realises that the narrator is on the edge of insanity and probably has a personality disorder. Her anger at the people around her is matched only by her self-disgust. The novel is intense and compellingly horrible.