Checkout 19 · Claire-Louise Bennett · Ireland (2021)
This is a book about a girl who falls in love with reading, then can’t help becoming a writer herself. Simple enough on paper. Not simple at all in practice.
There’s barely a plot to hang onto. Instead, the narrator drifts through memories: a strange man at the checkout who hands her a copy of Nietzsche, a friendship that quietly falls apart, piles of books she disappears into and resurfaces from changed. Sentences spiral and double back on themselves, more like listening to someone think out loud than following a story.
It sounds like it shouldn’t work. Somehow it does. Critics have called it funny, sad, and completely singular, and it landed on the New York Times list of the best books of the year. Claire-Louise Bennett, a British writer settled in Galway, writes like she’s inventing a new way to tell a story from scratch, and once you fall into her rhythm, it’s hard to climb back out.
