Eleanor Rigby is a 2004 novel by Douglas Coupland, about a plain, fat and lonely 42-year-old woman. The novel is written as a first-person narrative by the main character, Liz Dunn. 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... DeFoes Robinson Crusoe, Newspaper edition published in 1719 A novel (from French nouvelle, new) is an extended fictional narrative in prose. ... Douglas Coupland (born December 30, 1961) is a Canadian author and cultural commentator, raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. ... First-person narrative is a literary technique in which the story is narrated by one or more of the characters, who explicitly refers to him or herself in the first person, that is, I. The narrator is thus directly or indirectly involved in the story being told. ...

The novel centres on the changes to Liz's life when someone from her past unexpectedly re-enters her life. It is written in a light, often comic, tone, but touches on many issues, including loneliness, family, religious visions and multiple sclerosis. Loneliness is an emotional state in which a person experiences a powerful longing for contact with another person or other people. ... A family of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in 1997 A family is a domestic group of people, or a number of domestic groups, typically affiliated by birth or marriage, or by comparable legal relationships including domestic partnership, adoption, surname and in some cases ownership (as was the case in the Roman... In religion, visions comprise inspirational renderings, generally of a future state and/or of a mythical being, and are believed (by followers of the religion) to come from a deity, directly or indirectly via prophets, and serve to inspire or prod believers as part of a revelation or an epiphany. ...

Plot

Liz Dunn is a 42 year old single woman who has never had a partner and has no friends. She dwells on her loneliness.

Her life changes in 1997 when the Hale-Bopp comet appears in the sky, and she meets the child that she gave up for adoption when she was 16. Her son, Jeremy, is outgoing, funny, troubled and suffers from MS. He has passed through a dozen foster families, and is now 20 years old. A close-up of Hale-Bopp Comet Hale-Bopp (formally designated C/1995 O1) was probably the most widely observed comet of the 20th century, and one of the brightest seen for many decades. ... Adoption is the legal act of permanently placing a child with a parent or parents other than the birth parents. ...

The novel recounts their time together up until Jeremy's death, and then enters the present time, 6 years later, as Liz travels to Austria at the request of a detective investigating the strange behaviour of Jeremy's father.

The narrative includes a murdered transvestite, a school trip to Rome, bed salesmanship, an international terrorism alert, and a meteorite. The title comes from The Beatles song Eleanor Rigby, which Liz uses as her email address. This articles is about cross-dressing in general, that is the act of wearing the clothing of another gender for any reason. ... City motto: Senatus Populusque Romanus – SPQR (The Senate and the People of Rome) Founded 21 April 753 BC mythical, 1st millennium BC Region Latium Mayor Walter Veltroni (Left-Wing Democrats) Area  - City Proper  1290 km² Population  - City (2004)  - Metropolitan  - Density (city proper) 2,546,807 almost 4,000,000... The term terrorism is largely synonymous with political violence, and refers to a strategy of using coordinated attacks that typically fall outside the time, manner of conduct, and place commonly understood as representing the bounds of conventional warfare. ... A meteorite is a small extraterrestrial body that reaches the Earths surface. ... The Beatles were a British pop and rock group from Liverpool. ... Eleanor Rigby is also the name of a novel by Douglas Coupland. ...

External links

• Book review from The Guardian