All her life Miss Hawkins has taken orders from other people, first at the orphanage, where Matron made her life miserable, then at the candy factory where she worked for forty years. Now that she has retired she doesn't know what to do with herself and so prepares her suicide.

But wait! Her co-workers have given her a five-year diary. It feels like another command - she must fulfill it!

So begins this hilarious and cleverly written 1978 Booker-nominated novel. Each day Miss Hawkins writes a challenge in the form of an already completed order which she is bound to fulfill in the next 24 hours. At first the challenges are ordinary - "Took a long walk" or "Went to buy food" - very easy to check off with her red pencil. But when she writes the challenge "Went to library and met a man" she starts setting herself increasingly urgent challenges and her five-year descent into madness begins!

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Another one from the 1978 Booker shortlist. This book is bleak, relentless, full of savage humour, and undoubtedly memorable. At the start of the book we find Jean planning a suicide on the morning of her final day at work. A product of a strict and loveless orphanage, she has spent a life of duty working in a sweet factory, and as a leaving present her colleagues give her a five-year diary. This becomes another form of duty, as she sets herself tasks and ticks them off, taking her outside the simple limits of her experience - initially towards a form of fulfilment, but ultimately towards a disastrous denouement.

The 1978 shortlist was such a strong one that I can't place this one any higher than fifth on my list, but reading them has been an intriguing project. ( )

This book's salmon-pink cover, and vague air of twee English provincialism, belie a devastating and utterly ruthless narrative lurking under the surface. A Five Year Sentence puts its characters, and its readers, firmly in a vice – quite openly, without any deception – and then proceeds to turn the screw, rotation by rotation, unblinkingly and deliberately until something goes pop. It is breathtakingly uncompromising.

Bernice Rubens starts with some quite simple, blackly comic elements – the retiring spinster, the overbearing mother, the blandness of suburbia, the tyranny of routine – and with quite extraordinary resolve, she follows them all the way through to the darker recesses of human psychology: sexual deprivation, the need to submit or to dominate, the twisted resentment of parental dependence, the ultraviolence implicit in prolonged frustration. Though such themes are not exactly ignored by writers or filmmakers, they are usually explored by means of photogenic twentysomethings who give them a veneer of titillation. And much as I love veneers of titillation, there is something ferocious about seeing the same ideas made to play out in this handful of damaged, dislikable sexagenarians.

This book really took me by surprise. I was stunned and delighted by the skill and the fearlessness in the writing, even while I was horrified by its effects. It lost out on the Booker in 1978, but for my money it seems even more unusual and worth reading now, when its themes have been so taken over by other, more seductive and less clear-sighted narratives. ( )

Miss Jean Hawkins intends to kill herself on the day she retires from a lifetime of work at a candy factory. The parting gift from her co-workers changes her plan. She receives a 5-year diary/journal, and somehow this commits her to living five more years in order to fill in the diary's pages. Soon she takes to filling in the diary at the beginning of the day rather than the end of the day, and to interpreting the entries as orders that she must fulfill. Her orders become increasingly more daring, and her tenuous hold on reality begins to slip away.

This is a very disturbing book. It's a somewhat exaggerated exploration of the psychological effects of the absence of interpersonal relationships. Miss Hawkins is an orphan, and flashbacks to her life in the orphanage reveal psychological abuse at the hands of its matron. Brian Watts, whose chance meeting with Miss Hawkins sets him on a course to become a gigolo, has fared little better as the son of a single mother who has psychologically bound him to her for life. Having been deprived of normal human relationships their entire lives, the characters establish an intimacy measured in pounds and pence.

The most damaging experience in Miss Hawkins' orphanage childhood was finding the hanged body of a fellow orphan. This hit far too close to home for me. I didn't need to read a novel to tell me what might happen to a person who as a child found someone who committed suicide but didn't receive any psychological care following this experience. Years ago, I had a co-worker who had this experience, and it eventually resulted in his own suicide. This book is likely to linger in my memory, and not in a good way. ( )

On the day of her retirement from the sweets factory where she has been working for over 40 years, Miss Jean Hawkins has resolved this to be the last day of her life, and she had made all the necessary preparations to that end. Then she goes in to her last day of work and is given as a cheap retirement gift a five-year diary, and she takes this as an order from above that she's been given a five-year sentence to live, and that furthermore, she must fill a page from the diary every single day. Miss Hawkins has had up till then a rather sad and uneventful life, growing up in an orphanage, from which she took away mostly unhappy memories of the nasty Matron, who held her back from being adopted into a foster family because she was a good helper around the orphanage, and properly trampled down on any sense of self or individuality, among other minor horrors, and also of finding young Morris's body, a fellow orphan girl who took her life by hanging herself with the rags used as sanitary napkins, shortly after beginning her menstruation, after which Matron had convinced Miss Hawkins she had had a nasty nightmare and the event never took place, even though Morris was never seen again. In short, nothing since then has come into her life to make her forget these sad events, and nobody in all her decades at the factory has ever even bothered to find out what her first name was beyond the 'Miss', so that she has little to say for herself in that diary, until the day she has a sudden inspiration to give herself orders which she must follow up on and then tick off once they are accomplished. At first she starts with easy to accomplish things, such as "watch tv" or "take a long walk", and eventually she becomes more daring till she works her way up to "meet a man" then once that's accomplished, "have the man kiss you", no small thing for a woman who is still a virgin by her mid-sixties.

Rubens's writing is excellent, and her black humour just as excellently mordant as I enjoyed it to be in The Waiting Game, but somehow I couldn't enjoy this novel as much. For one thing, Miss Hawkins is such a pathetic character and so self-deluded, which in and of itself wouldn't have been so bad and might have been very amusing to me if there hadn't also been a man present to take advantage of her foolishness and rob her of all she had, a situation which I couldn't help but find unbearably sad. There's the way in which she goes about finding a man, which is initially very pathetic yet quite funny. It's mostly in the details, but in essence, she goes to the library and stands in the religious texts sections and there tries to grab the first man she sees by calling out to him "isn't it a nice day?!", and sure enough, eventually she does bump into a man and run her line by him, even though it happens to be raining by then. That he happens not to seem particularly interested and then shortly establishes that he lives with his mother who never lets him out of her sight other than to go to the library to get her lurid thriller novels which he picks out purely by how graphic the covers look doesn't deter our heroine, nor does the fact that he turns out to be a perfect cad who expects her to pay for everything. No self-respecting woman would give a man like that the time of day, but our poor Miss Hawkins has no notions of self-respect, so instead she finds him all the more appealing for it and is willing to enter into a little game with him, and furiously expends her frustrations in an endless scarf knitting project, where she puts all her anger about Matron, which has never abated, even after all these years, into every stitch, never once considering that the man who has been taking advantage of her and stealing her savings should be the target for her anger instead of all the girlish fantasies she indulges in over several years to come.

While I'm able to see the humour in the situation, it also cuts a bit too close to the bone. How many times have we women deluded ourselves to make untenable situations seem rosy just in order to keep going? In that sense, this book is truly brilliant, but I rated it based on the reading pleasure it did or did not give me, and in this case, I was rather looking forward to getting to the end of a difficult ordeal. All the same, recommended—Rubens does have such a great wicked sense of humour—but with some reservations of course.

The narrator Nicolette McKenzie was excellent on this audio version, but there is a very minor glitch, with one 3-second bit that was obviously intended to be edited out and left in by mistake. ( )