Checkout 19 / Claire-Louise Bennett

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.

English