Feverish and forthright, Pond is an absorbing chronicle of the pitfalls and pleasures of a solitudinous life told by an unnamed woman living on the cusp of a coastal town. Broken bowls, belligerent cows, swanky aubergines, trembling moonrises and horrifying sunsets, the physical world depicted in these stories is unsettling yet intimately familiar and soon takes on a life of its own. Captivated by the stellar charms of seclusion but restless with desire, the woman’s relationship with her surroundings becomes boundless and increasingly bewildering. Claire-Louise Bennett’s startlingly original first collection slips effortlessly between worlds and is by turns darkly funny and deeply moving.

‘This is an extraordinary collection of short stories – profoundly original though not eccentric, sharp and tender, funny and deeply engaging. A very new sort of writing, Bennett pushes the boundaries of the short story out into new territory: part prose fiction, part stream of consciousness, often truly poetry and always an acute, satisfying, delicate, honest meditation on both the joys and frustrations of a life fully lived in solitude. Take it slowly, because it is worth it, and be impressed and joyful.’ — Sara Maitland

 

 

'I loved Bennet’s book for its highly strung prose detailing fragments of a solitary everyday amongst things and matter suspended in the intervals of absent narratives, unabashedly adrift in the details of a bewildering mundane, from drawn-out contemplations of arrangements of fruit and vegetables on the windowsill to the best ways of eating porridge in the morning, composed with what Brian Dillon has befittingly called ‘profoundly odd expression’. — Swen, Jot

Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015, 184pages.