First published 2021
In a nameless English town, a young woman traces her literary obsessions from childhood through early adulthood. She devours books, scribbles stories, and navigates the complex terrain of creativity, class, and female identity. As she grows, her relationship with literature becomes both sanctuary and battleground—a way of understanding herself and the world around her. Each encounter with a book, each writing attempt, reshapes her understanding of possibility. Bennett follows her protagonist's intellectual and emotional evolution with razor-sharp prose, tracking how reading transforms personal experience into something luminous and strange.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, adult-fiction, 21st-century, books-about-books, academic
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: bildungsroman, character-driven, introspective
Setting: England
Period: 21st-century
288 pages · Hardcover · Riverhead Books