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A Novel
by Claire-Louise Bennett
A woman confronts the afterlife of intimacy, in a deeply tender novel by one of our most acclaimed and inventive fiction writers.
The things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away. Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she's left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, who has always been certain he knows her better than anyone, better than she knows herself. Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept.
An unexpected letter from an old acquaintance brings back a torrent of others she's loved or wanted. Each has been a match and a mismatch, a liberation and a threat to her very sense of self. The ephemera left by their passage—a spilled coffee, an unwanted bouquet, a mind-blowing kiss—make up a cabinet of curiosity she inventories, trying to divine the essence of intimacy. What does it mean to connect with another person? What impels us to touch someone, to be touched by them, to stay in touch? How do we let them go? In yet another tour de force of fiction, Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp.
"A striking novel about a writer's retreat into solitude in the aftermath of a love affair … Bennett ranges freely in register and tone, from passionate desire evocative of Ulysses's Molly Bloom to a measured treatise on violence in cinema…An intellectual tour de force." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The speaker's exquisite sensibility, and her assured sense of her own perceptions, provides a throughline for the pastiche of scenes, dreams, and conversations that make up this book...[It] reminds us that the goal of art is sometimes to see clearly and specifically what is there to be seen, with no duty to dictate its progress or its outcome. A languorously unfurling novel that rewards the reader's attention and time." —Kirkus Reviews
This information about Big Kiss, Bye-Bye was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of two previous novels, Pond and Checkout 19. Her short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and other publications. She lives near Galway, Ireland.
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