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. "Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring. … reminds us that small things have great depths.” – New York Times Book Review “A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent.
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