The College Novel for the 2023-2024 academic year is Gail Honeyman's Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Members of the College Community are invited to read the novel and join in the activities, discussions, and lectures related to the novel. Many faculty members will use the novel in class. The goal of the college novel is to create a reading community and encourage reading for pleasure, critical thinking, global awareness, and multicultural understanding.
Workshops, colloquies, and lectures support this activity.
Through the use of a College-wide Novel, we unite the Sussex community in an effort to encourage reading as life long source of pleasure and learning. Each year faculty, students, and staff select a novel that will best suit them.
Dr. Eleanor Carducci, retired Professor of English at Sussex, began the College Novel tradition in 1993. The current College Novel coordinator, Dr. Mary Thompson, annually asks the faculty and staff at Sussex to nominate novels and then holds a meeting for people to advocate for their nominations. At the end of the meeting, the group narrows the field to two options and a student vote determines which novel will become the College Novel for the new academic year.
Gail Honeyman is a Scottish bestselling author whose debut novel, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, won the 2017 Costa First Novel Award.
Gail was born and raised in Stirling, Scotland. Her mother was as a civil servant and her father a scientist. Gail was an avid reader in her childhood, visiting the library “a ridiculous number of times a week” due to her passion for books.
She studied French language and literature at the Glasgow University and continued her education at the University of Oxford, starting a postgraduate course in French poetry. However, Gail realised that an academic career was not for her and she started a string of “backroom jobs”. She worked at first as a civil servant in economic development and then as an administrator at Glasgow University.
Wolverhampton University Big Read
Honeyman answers questions about the novel
Review (focus on trauma and isolation)
Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy review
PBS NewsHour: Childhood trauma in America
TED: How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime
