'Claire-Louise Bennett sets the conventions of literary fiction ablaze in this ferociously intelligent and funny debut. Quiet and luxurious all at once, this will be one of the most sensational debuts of the year.' - Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin And yet Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond feels entirely unique. A touch of Samuel Beckett. A touch of Edna O'Brien.

'Elegantly inventive.' Financial Times (UK) ' artful collection of shut-in soliloquiesstriking.' - The Telegraph (UK), 'What to Read in 2015' 'A beautiful, lasting book that privileges modes of human experience that are so often undervalued, if they are acknowledged at all: neither formative encounters nor outward achievement, but rather the workings of a roving, inquisitive mind, open and receptive to all.' Literary Review (UK) This is a truly stunning debut, beautifully written and profoundly witty.' - The Guardian (UK) 'What Bennett aims at is nothing short of a re-enchantment of the world. Strange and lyrical with an acute sense of humor.' - Kirkus 'Bennett's debut lingers long after the last page. Bennett has achieved something strange, unique, and undeniably wonderful.' - Publisher's Weekly Shortlisted for the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize

Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page. As the narrator's persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments - the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover.

Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience - from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows - rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood.

A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett's debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. This is a truly stunning debut, beautifully written and profoundly witty.' The Guardian

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