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Riverhead Books
July 2016
On Sale: July 12, 2016
208 pages
ISBN: 0399575898
EAN: 9780399575891
Kindle: B017SCQKW4
Hardcover / e-Book
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Women's Fiction | Novella / Short Story
Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennettโs debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. 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. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experienceโfrom the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cowsโrendered 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. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointmentsโthe ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narratorโs 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. Shimmering and unusual, POND demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page.
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