Roanna Gonsalves

It reminded me of The Bone People.

The 1984 novel by... Kerry Hume.

Yeah, from New Zealand.

And it's also got a lot of resonances, I think, with the Australian Indigenous experience.

It's a very tough book, but people are going to connect with this, I think, big time.

Well, annoying just because it is a debut novel and it's a bestseller.

I mean, who are these people who are knocking out these books first go?

No, but it's a very interesting book.

It's very warm, very touching book.

Right from the beginning, it tells us it's about loneliness.

And in fact, there's a quote just after the title page in the dedication about that.

In fact, I'll read it to you.

The lonelier a person gets, the less adept they become at navigating social currents.

Loneliness grows around them like a mould or a fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact no matter how badly contact is desired.

So pretty much from the beginning, we know what the theme of the book is going to be.

Eleanor is, of course, the lonely person.

And as we suspect from the title, she's really far from being completely fine.

Yeah, it's a very tightly controlled first person narrative and we're inside Eleanor's head and we hear her thoughts as she goes about her life and her job and we begin to kind of like her quirky ways and her fastidiousness, which we realise is actually more than just a personal habit, it's obsessive.

and we also see a bit of the humour that comes from her utter bluntness.

There's absolutely no social facade with Eleanor, and she just really says what she means, erring, of course, on the far too honest side of things.