Short Synopsis
Claire-Louise Bennett's debut, Pond, is a shimmering, unusual novel that demands to be devoured in a single sitting.

Full Synopsis
In Claire-Louise Bennett's shimmering debut, an unnamed young woman—wry, somewhat misanthropic, keenly observant—chronicles her life on the outskirts of a small coastal village. The charms of bananas and oatcakes in the morning and Spanish oranges after sex; the small pleasures and anxieties of throwing a party, exchanging salacious emails with a new lover, sitting in the bath as it storms outside. Broken oven knobs prompt a meditation on survival that's both haunting and playful; a sunset walk leads to an unsettling encounter with a herd of cows; the discovery of an old letter recalls an impossible affair.

Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, Pond refracts the narrator's uncannily intimate experience in the details of daily life, rendered sometimes in story-like stretches, sometimes in fragments, and suffused with the almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world as we remember it from childhood. As her persona emerges in all its particularity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help seeing mirrored there our own fraught longings, our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known.

Enchanting and unusual, Pond will linger long after the last page.

"Ms. Bennett seems to know exactly what to take seriously. She puts us inside a complicated, teeming mind, and she doesn’t dabble in forced epiphanies. . . . I’ll be in line to read whatever she publishes next" ---New York Times

"Bennett has achieved something strange, unique, and undeniably wonderful." ---Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"This is a truly stunning debut, beautifully written and profoundly witty." ---The Guardian

“Elegantly inventive.” ---Financial Times

"Rayner's adept vocal performance and Bennett's intriguing prose make for an interesting listen for dedicated listeners." ---AudioFile

"A dazzling new novel . . . [an] exquisitely written and daring debut work of fiction.” ---O, The Oprah Magazine

"Pond, in its quirky structure and language, calls to mind the Irish fathers of literary modernism Joyce and Beckett. But then it also echoes Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Carroll's Alice, Thoreau's Walden and, more contemporarily, Strout's Olive Kitteridge, as well as anything by Nicholson Baker." ---Shelf Awareness

Publishers Weekly Bestseller

Publishers Weekly Review