Checkout 19
Claire-Louise Bennett
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From the publisher
*A 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK IN THE GUARDIAN, DAILY MAIL, DAILY TELEGRAPH, IRISH TIMES CULTURE AND NEW STATESMAN*
'We read in order to come to life.'
With fierce imagination, a woman revisits the moments that shape her life; from crushes on teachers to navigating relationships in a fast-paced world; from overhearing her grandmothers' peculiar stories to nurturing her own personal freedom and a boundless love of literature.
Fusing fantasy with lived experience, Checkout 19 is a vivid and mesmerising journey through the small traumas and triumphs that define us - as readers, as writers, as human beings.
Checkout 19 beautifully explores the makings of a young woman writer. Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail, *Books to Look Out For 2021*
Mesmerising, whip-smart, full of genius and utterly singular, Checkout 19 is one of the most beautiful and political books I've read. Put simply, it's all about books. Bennett is a master at sweeping the caverns of life's minutiae with her uncanny observations and stunning prose, arriving at the most pressing things that haunt the human condition. It is also very funny (and very sad) and very very relatable. Just exquisite. Elaine Feeney
Checkout 19 is a beautiful, hurt, unsettled, funny, and moving book about meaning and reading and recalling, but most of all about coming to life. David Hayden
Reading Checkout 19 is not unlike coming back to life after a long and brutal winter. Highly original and deeply felt. I'm so glad Claire-Louise Bennett exists. A writer to fall in love with. Nicole Flattery
A deeply personal, completely singular book that somehow also spoke directly to my own private impressions and experiences. Extremely funny, extremely sharp, devastating, invigorating. Lisa Owens
Brilliant, singular, feminist, ambitious - Claire-Louise Bennett is an extraordinary writer. Sinéad Gleeson
I fell into Checkout 19 and didn't want to climb back out. It is wonderful - I'm not sure why, and that makes it all the more wonderful. Roddy Doyle
Bennett is a leading exponent of a new modernism, but her voice is all her own. Her prose is profoundly surprising; she gets to places you didn't know were there. Anne Enright
Reading Checkout 19 filled me with joy, it is so good! The writing is exceptional; rich, playful and at the same time full of presence and urgency. It is a book about literature, how reading both expands our world and takes us away from it, and it is also a book about life {when it is] at its most vulnerable, and these two merge into the question: how can we take back our own story? What is our own story? Bennett writes like no one else, she is in complete control of the language, skilfull and innovative in an almost joycean way. She is a rare talent, and Checkout 19 is a masterful novel. Karl Ove Knausgaard
I'll remember this book for its disarmingly figurative language and its subtle observational humour...Bennett...traces one person's idiosyncratic, recursive artistic becoming - not just the reading, writing, and cigarette smoking but the relationships and experiences that unlock new ways of seeing. Vulture, *Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2022*