Tuttle, only for the drugs she knows she needs to fulfill her year of sleep. The year is 2000, the narrator’s parents are both dead, and she lives in an Upper East Side apartment she bought in cash with her inheritance. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories.” I knew in my heart - this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then - that when I’d slept enough, I’d be O.K. “Sleep felt productive,” she tells the reader.

“My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” Moshfegh’s darkly comic and ultimately profound new novel, also concerns itself with a miserable woman in her mid-20s seeking “great transformation.” This unnamed narrator, however, takes a vastly different approach: She plans to spend a year sleeping. “Eileen” is the story of how she disappeared. The book is narrated by an older Eileen, who tells the tale of how she succeeded in liberating herself from her past - she’s changed her name, both first and last, and has moved to New York, never having returned to X-ville. One day a beautiful woman named Rebecca comes to work at the prison and entangles Eileen in a noirish plot that reveals how wholly original a character Eileen really is. Eileen spends her evenings pacifying her alcoholic father with bottles of booze, and her days laboring as a secretary at a correctional facility for boys. In “Eileen,” Ottessa Moshfegh’s riveting 2015 novel (a Man Booker finalist), a miserable woman in her mid-20s dreams of escaping X-ville, the Massachusetts town where she was raised and where she tended to her dying mother. MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION By Ottessa Moshfegh 288 pp.

My rest and relaxation