BEST BOOKS ON... LONELINESS

The author suggests novels to help with the trickier times in life ...

Patricia Nicol LAST week Theresa May appointed a ‘Minister for Loneliness’. To help with her new role, MP Tracey Crouch should read the recent winner of the Costa First Novel Award, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.

Gail Honeyman’s funny, troubling debut, out in paperback on Thursday, has been the past year’s word-of-mouth fictional hit. It is narrated by Eleanor, 31, ‘a sole survivor’, a routine-bound clerk who spends every weekend alone with two bottles of vodka.

As the gentle kindness of her colleague Raymond cracks her reserve and Eleanor reveals more about her mental and physical scars, you realise this novel is also a meditation on sociability as a skill that must be learned.

The book’s Glasgow setting touched me, too. It’s a city I love, yet when I moved there for work in my 20s I was horribly lonely, but too shy and proud to admit it.

Elizabeth Strout is another contemporary writer to weave something life-affirming from examining isolation. Her book Anything Is Possible, a series of interweaving stories, returns to the remote Illinois community left far behind by Lucy Barton, the writerprotagonist of her last novel.

In the story Sister, Lucy calls her brother Pete to say she will be visiting after 17 years. Pete, a loner, still living in their childhood home, ‘… was astonished. “Great!” he said. And as soon as he hung up he felt fear.’ The three Barton siblings convene amid recriminations, but also love and redemption.

George Eliot’s gentle classic Silas Marner is a powerfully redemptive tale. Marner is seen as a miserly misfit by his fellow villagers. Then one New Year’s Eve, he discovers a little girl asleep on his hearth. His adoption of the child (‘It’s a lone thing and I’m a lone thing’) is his social and spiritual rehabilitation ‘warming him into joy’.

Like all these books, it shows there is no shame in loneliness, and nor does it have to be a permanent state.