About the Book
A thrilling, furious and stunningly original debut novel about womanhood, art and life, from the award-winning author of Pond, for fans of Eimear McBride, Ali Smith and Deborah Levy
*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.
About the Author :
Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and her debut book, Pond, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Claire-Louise's fiction and essays have appeared in a number of publications including White Review, Stinging Fly, gorse, Harper's Magazine, Vogue Italia, Music & Literature, and New York Times Magazine.
Review :
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.
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.
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.
