“Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine” by Gail Honeyman

“If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for consecutive days. FINE is what you say.”
– Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

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Eleanor Oliphant is a thirty-year-old woman who leads a simple life. She works the same job since university, wears the same clothes to work, eat the same meals every day, doesn’t involve herself in mindless office gossip and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.

“Em, and the Big hoom” by Jerry Pinto

“Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards until you fall in love and discover it’s disconcerting power. Depression means nothing more than the blues, commercially packaged angst, a hole in the ground; until you find it’s black weight settled inside your mother’s chest, disrupting her breathing, leaching her days, and yours, of color and the nights of rest.”
-Jerry Pinto, Em, and the Big hoom

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“Em and the Big hoom” is a story by Jerry Pinto of the depression-struck mother, Imelda, fondly called Em by her offsprings and Augustine aka The Big hoom, the reliable husband, the man of the house, the stoic father figure, the epitome of patience and the one keeping everything in order.
It is a story of four love battered people: mother, father, son, daughter and the struggle they go through as a family in keeping up with normalcy even with Em’s depression and her frequent attempts of suicide.