Trapped in a grim New England town as the caretaker for her alcoholic father and a secretary at a boys' juvenile prison, twenty-four-year-old Eileen Dunlop passes her days steeped in resentment, self-loathing, and dreams of escape. Her bleak routine changes when she is enchanted by the prison's glamorous new counselor, Rebecca Saint John, whose friendship draws Eileen into a shocking crime that prompts her total disappearance.

“Eileen is a remarkable piece of writing, always dark and surprising, sometimes ugly and occasionally hilarious. Its first-person narrator is one of the strangest, most messed-up, most pathetic—and yet, in her own inimitable way, endearing—misfits I’ve encountered in fiction. Trust me, you have never read anything remotely like Eileen.” —Washington Post