Checkout 19

Young and restless in a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl fills the back pages of her exercise book with stories, dazzled by the first flickers of her own imagination. As the years pass, almost everyone and everything she meets begins to feed the creative fire growing inside her.

Among the people who shape her path is a hulking Russian man who drives an old maroon car at reckless speed around the supermarket where she works on the checkouts, and who presses a copy of Beyond Good and Evil into her hands. Stacks of other books pile up around her, and in their pages she repeatedly loses herself and then finds herself again. A friendship collapses after a devastating violation, another moment that tests who she is becoming.

Learning to invent characters and scenarios in her head brings a thrill that runs alongside the rush of carving out a place for herself in the world. These two kinds of resourcefulness eventually merge into something blazing and bright. Following on from Bennett's debut, the book is a celebration of imagination and of the escape that opens up to anyone who learns to master it.