Checkout 19

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*