Checkout 19

In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles in the back pages of her exercise book, thrilling to the first sparks of her own genius. As she grows, she becomes one on whom nothing is lost. Not the novels an eccentric customer slips her at the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, nor the indelible impression of the fellow himself. Not the growing heaps of books in which she loses—and finds—herself. Not even the derailing of a friendship, in a devastating violation. The thrill of learning to conjure characters and scenarios is matched by the exhilaration of forging a fate of ones own, the two kinds of invention coming together in a brilliant conflagration.

Exceeding the extraordinary promise of Bennett's mold-shattering debut, Checkout 19 is a radical affirmation of the power of the imagination and the magic escape those who master it open to us all.