Claire-Louise Bennett

"From the author of the "dazzling. . . . and 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. In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles in the back pages of her exercise book, thrilling to the first sparks of her own inventiveness. As she grows, she becomes one on whom nothing is lost. Not the novels an eccentric customer slips her at the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, or the indelible outline of the careening creature himself. Not the growing heaps of books in which she loses-and finds-herself. Not even the sudden swerve a college friend's mounting envy of her blooming talent takes, derailing in a devastating violation. Threaded through it all, the escapades of her first fully fleshed character-one Tarquin Superbus, bouncing among various time periods and exotic locales-are matched by our delight and exhilaration as the scenarios she is learning to conjure, and the fate she is forging for herself, come together in a brilliant conflagration. Exceeding the extraordinary promise of Bennett's mold-shattering debut, Checkout 19 is a radical affirmation of the power of the imagination and the magic escape those who master it open to the rest of us"--

A Novel

Checkout 19

Levi-Mae 

‘She wanted to unmask him, and so she betrayed him.’ 

‘He was certainly extremely pale, his long fingers were practically white and his visage was so white it shone. Perhaps that was the strange thing - he was a doctor that looked like Death. There was nothing inside of him, he was vaporous, empty as a hologram, he achieved movement, not via the mechanism of his body, but by the fact that he consisted of a substance lighter than air - Death.’

‘On and on I experienced gaping periods of time when I was flattened by a sense of doom. Quashed completely by deep despair and anxiety which was relieved now and then by anguished though relatively merciful bouts of sobbing. I had no small children, no errant husband -I had plenty of friends, was getting educated - the world, I was told again and again, was my oyster - I could go anywhere, be anything. Yet in my heart i was bereft, grieving - homesick for a place I had never seen. For a place that doesn't exist, yet I belonged there nonetheless.’

‘That light in the wrong place can be a poison, that she felt quite at home in the dark.’

‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.’ - Heinrich Heine 

‘I don’t want to lose myself in their shadows their darkness might swarm in and drench mine so that I won’t be able to tell them apart and what then?’ 

Abigail Mills

Mimicry can be unkind, but at least it acknowledges that you're there.

I got home and was sitting on the edge of my bed. I am not long for this world. I am not long for this world. I was already experiencing the sensation by this time that I was outside of the world, looking in, and the feelings that sense mostly gave rise to were ones of forlornness and anguish. 

She occasionally wondered if her lack of interest in the things around her wasn’t in someway due to her inability to accurately depict them, or perhaps it was the other way around - her inability to accurately depict the things around her was due to her lack of interest in them. But she was interested in them, she was extremely interested in nearly everything, just not so much with how they appeared. She was distrustful of appearances. 

She quickly discovered she liked him not being here because it meant she could think about him and about where he might be and what he might be like there. 

Checkout 19 quotes

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