She sees life through the lens of books in 'Checkout 19'
The protagonist of Clare-Louise Bennett's novel is a determinedly unfixed and unrooted person who marks time through which writers she has read.
Rarely has a book astonished me as much as Claire-Louise Bennett's 2015 debut, . is a slow, dark burn of a book in which a young woman moves into an old cottage, rearranges her possessions, cooks a lot, and goes for some walks. It offers a sharply detailed portrait of its protagonist's inner life through almost nothing but solitary domesticity. is so unusual, and so unsettlingly pleasurable, that I thought it would be greedy to hope Bennett's new novel, , would be better. Lucky
