Claire-Louise Bennett

Checkout 19 beautifully explores the makings of a young woman writer.

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.

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.

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.

A deeply personal, completely singular book that somehow also spoke directly to my own private impressions and experiences. Extremely funny, extremely sharp, devastating, invigorating.

Brilliant, singular, feminist, ambitious - Claire-Louise Bennett is an extraordinary writer.

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.

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.

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.

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*

This is the book - the one you've been looking for. It really is. It's full of desire, rage, mischief, opulence. This is the book. It's about what's important - about finding it, grasping it, losing it. This is the book.

On the basis of just one book, the mysterious Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett established a devoted following pretty much worldwide. This is her new book to shake the world anew.

CHECKOUT 19 has radically altered my idea of what is possible in a novel, while being continuously gripping, sometimes deeply moving and often very funny. There are long passages in here which feel touched by the hand of god, more channelled than written.

There's no one in whose language and rhythms I'd rather immerse than Claire-Louise Bennett, as her character plumbs her own past and a personal history of literature, via classrooms and train stations, supermarket aisles and Viennese opera houses, pickled cucumber and cheese on toast. Witty, moving and propulsive, Checkout-19 makes a triumphant case for what novels - and reading - can do.

A profound and very funny book about growth and promise, and how not to kill them off; about women reading and writing and how they survive... thrilling.

An extraordinary document about the richness of inner life... It is rare to feel the sensation of another mind as vividly as in this radiant book.

Unconventional and imaginative... this is a book about memory, reading and writing that is intelligent and often absorbing.

Checkout 19 inches close to what it is to love... The novel is defiantly told through impulse - the impulse to write a certain character, to read a particular book, to say something or stay quiet - and in this way, a woman, and a writer, emerges.

Checkout 19 is a fresh take on the coming-of-age novel-one in which we don't already know how the story will end, or if it will have an 'ending' at all. Bennett manages to convince the reader that somewhere, her narrator continues to think and ponder and live and wrestle with being in a body, like the rest of us.

Lit Hub, *Most Anticipated Books of 2022*

A fantastically various novel consisting of seven sections in which we loosely follow a narrator...at different ages and in different places - through an intricate collage of ideas, sensations and emotions.

Claire-Louise Bennett is a once-in-a-generation talent. Plugging into and transforming the rich (if much suppressed) seam of literary history that runs via Ann Quin, B. S. Johnson, Ingeborg Bachmann and Mary (not Percy) Shelley all the way back to Milton and beyond, she affirms a real belief in literature-as-literature: the confidence to let it do its thing on its own terms, and a jubilant pleasure in watching it all unfurl.

Surprisingly exhilarating, packing both an intellectual and emotional punch... Checkout 19 offers plenty to relish: fizzing sentences, set pieces that are funny, alarming or both a convincingly fractured portrait of a convincingly fractured narrator.

This is one of the most extraordinary books it has been my privilege to review... elegant... marvellous... phenomenally engineered... If I were a Booker judge again, I would move heaven and earth to get this on the shortlist.

An immersion in literature serves to inspire in a larger sense, to inflame a feeling of wonder and possibility - a dynamic not only evoked but also achieved by this elatingly risky and irreducible book.

That we come to life through reading is the idea that grounds these free-roaming stories. Experiencing Checkout 19 is equally earth-shaking; mundanity is spun into the magical... This is a book that is meant to be read backwards as much as forwards - turning back the pages, fishing for jewels missed the first time around.

A book that refuses to abide by conventional expectations of storytelling... What emerges, all the more affectingly for being so serpentine, is an invigorating portrait of the artist as a young - and then older, surer - woman... Turn the final page of this most uncompromising of works and you'll be filled with admiration for the way in which its freewheeling momentum turns out to have been so sinuously choreographed, its every mystery, commonplace and apparently defunct deviation mesmerically apposite

Bennett's stunning debut introduced us to a writer of extraordinary talent, and this follow-up is sure to cement her position among the finest contemporary storytellers.

[An] intriguing, at times hallucinogenic, debut novel.

Claire-Louise Bennett's Checkout 19 is a book unlike anything you will have read before... at times a fast changing novel, at others a magnificent listing of a life lived in books, and at others a smartly written polemic on the vicissitudes of contemporary society, it's simply unclassifiable.

Brilliantly clever and brilliantly fun

Encompassing literary criticism, suggestive fables, feminist polemic, a portrait of the artist, and a phenomenology of reading, [Checkout 19] transfixes on both the right page and the left. Bennett marvels once again.

Ambitious, unsettling and funny, this book is full of desire and mischief with surprising results.

‘A book to shake the world anew’ Sebastian Barry

A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2022 Selection 
 
'Extraordinary . . . radiant' Sunday Times 
'An existential tour-de-force' Eimear McBride 
'Elatingly risky' Guardian 
 
'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. 
 
* A 'Books of 2021' pick in the Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Irish Times Culture and New Statesman * 
 
'This is her new book to shake the world anew' Sebastian Barry 
 
'Mesmerising, whip-smart, full of genius . . . It is also very funny' Elaine Feeney 
 
'Her voice is all her own' Anne Enright

Claire-Louise Bennett

Praise for Checkout 19

Checkout 19 beautifully explores the makings of a young woman writer.

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 c ...

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.

Checkout 19 beautifully explores the makings of a young woman writer.

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 c ...

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.

Checkout 19 beautifully explores the makings of a young woman writer.

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 c ...

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.

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