Checkout 19

"Bennett writes like no one else. She is a rare talent, and Checkout 19 is a masterful novel." –Karl Ove Knausgaard

From the author of the "dazzling. . . . and daring" Pond (O magazine), the adventures of a young woman discovering her own genius, through the people she meets–and dreams up–along the way.

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. Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of Pond, which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and winner of the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize. Her short fiction and essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and other publications. She lives in Galway, Ireland.