How Eleanor Oliphant changed a writer's life, and set the publishing world ablaze: an interview with Gail Honeyman

GAIL Honeyman shakes her head, as if to shrug off the shades of a dazzling but unbelievable dream.

We are meeting in a cafe bar in the west end of Glasgow, where her debut novel, the source of that sense of slight but delighted bewilderment, is also largely set. Her book is entitled Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. It is a moving, funny, and by the end, devastating novel, and also a rare thing: a debut novel from Scotland which pitched the literary world into a kind of delirium. Ms Honeyman, 45, wrote the novel while she worked at Glasgow University - she created it, as many aspiring writers do, in snatched parcels of precious time - in the morning, in the evening, on holiday. But when it was complete, and in the hands of her agent, it ignited the publishing world. "It was a massive shock," she says.

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