Claire-Louise Bennett's "Checkout 19"
Kate and Medaya are joined by Claire Louise Bennett whose new novel Checkout19 follows an unnamed young woman born into a working class family, who is slowly discovering her own sense of self through the many books she reads and the stories she writes. Her development and her relationship to her own experiences is partly filtered through the work of these other writers, as she eventually attends college, finds work as a checkout clerk in a grocery store and dates a few inadequate, jealous men, with literary ambitions of their own. The book seamlessly moves between literary textual analysis, fantastical storytelling, and life itself, eventually confronting the realities of sex, violence and death.
Also, Isaac Butler, author of The Method, returns to recommend Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins by Amanda Vaill.
