Checkout 19 Clairelouise Bennett by Claire-louise Bennett 9781473594364, 1473594367 instant download after payment.

From the author of the “dazzling... & daring” Pond (O Magazine), the adventures of a young woman discovering her own genius, through the people she meets – and dreams up – along the way.

“Bennett writes like no one else. She is a rare talent, & Checkout 19 is a masterful novel.” – Karl Ove Knausgaard

In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles stories in the back pages of her exercise book, intoxicated by the first sparks of her imagination.  As she grows, everything & everyone she encounters become fuel for a burning talent. The large Russian man in the ancient maroon car who careens around the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk & slips her a copy of Beyond Good & Evil. The growing heaps of other books in which she loses – and finds–herself. Even the derailing of a friendship, in a devastating violation. The thrill of learning to conjure characters & scenarios in her head is matched by the exhilaration of forging her own way in the world, the two kinds of ingenuity kindling to a brilliant conflagration.

“Singular... The prized darkness at the centre of the human mind, the place where whatever is really real about us resides, is what Checkout 19 dedicates itself to protecting.” — The New Yorker

“Wildly imaginative, unabashedly odd & mordantly funny... This book-full-of-books is a gift & proof of a rare talent... a volume to be consumed whole, on one long, strange trip... [in which] the deep magic of writing is revealed.”  — The Los Angeles Times

Exceeding the extraordinary promise of Bennett’s mould-shattering debut, Checkout 19 is a radical affirmation of the power of the imagination & the magic escape those who master it open to us all.

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Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of Pond, which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, & winner of the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize.