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Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
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Narrator Lucy Rayner
Length 4 hours 51 minutes
Language English
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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.

Claire-Louise Bennett's short fiction and essays have been published in the Moth, the Irish Times, and other publications. She was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize in 2013. Pond is her first book.

Lucy Rayner is an award-winning British actress. Bitten hard by the acting bug whilst performing at the Edinburgh Festival as a teenager, she has gone on to work on both sides of the Atlantic in a number of theater productions and films, many of which have screened at festivals around the world. She loves to tell stories and voice characters in a number of British regional accents and has narrated many wonderful audiobooks. She has a master's degree in history from the University of Edinburgh and is a graduate of the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York City.

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Reviews

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