Books like Claire-Louise Bennett

Pompey Casmilus, a secretary, writes on her employer’s yellow office paper—and promptly refuses every rule of orderly narration. Anecdote, quotation, political argument, private joke and sudden lyric flight jostle together, conducted by a voice too intelligent and unruly to be contained.

Published in 1936, Smith’s debut has endured as a cult modernist novel rather than a period curiosity. Like Bennett, she makes digression the real action: reading is not cultural decoration but part of the narrator’s nervous system. Anyone delighted by Checkout 19’s sense that a woman can write herself into freedom should discover Pompey, one of fiction’s great ungovernable talkers.

This is the novel for the part of you that loved Checkout 19 as a book about what books do to a life. Sibylla, a brilliant and financially precarious single mother, raises her son amid Homer, mathematics, multiple languages and repeated viewings of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Their minds turn culture into both refuge and method: a way of resisting the meagreness of the world they have been given.

DeWitt’s audacious debut disappeared from ready circulation before returning to become a fiercely cherished modern classic. Its typography, multilingual jokes and intellectual swerves are never mere cleverness; they dramatize the ecstasy and danger of trying to live by one’s reading. Missing it would mean missing one of the few novels as genuinely book-drunk as Bennett’s.

An eighteen-year-old Irish woman arrives in 1990s London to study acting, carrying embarrassment, ambition and a body whose meanings she has barely begun to claim. McBride puts us inside her consciousness through sentences that stumble, flare and accelerate, making attraction and artistic awakening happen at the level of syntax.

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize, which honours fiction that breaks the mould, The Lesser Bohemians shares Bennett’s conviction that unconventional prose can tell the truth more precisely than smooth realism. Yet McBride’s music is entirely her own: intimate, bruising and rapturous. Read it for the rare thrill of watching a young woman’s language expand as her life does.