In this edition, I’ll review three examples that demonstrate the power of conflict-driven isolation and how it can ratchet up tension and reader appeal.

• Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: A Novel by Gail Honeyman tells the story of three people enduring lives marked by isolation, and how they find their way out by opening their hearts to one another.


• Jonathan Franklin’s 438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea, an example of literary nonfiction, recounts the astonishing experience of a man who left Mexico on a two-day fishing trip and washed up on a small Pacific Island more than a year later, half crazed from the horrific experience—the exposure, the deprivation, and the isolation.


• Sue Halpern’s collection of essays, Migrations to Solitude, examines the dichotomy that people yearn for solitude yet dread loneliness, and how sometimes when they wrestle with this paradox, they end up isolated.

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