An obsessive, tortured domesticity runs through the fiction of Claire-Louise Bennett. The narrator of “ Pond ” (2015) forms an uncommon attachment to her seaside cottage: she takes great pains with the arrangement of her breakfast and her garden, organizing crockery “into jaunty stacks along the window ledge” and spending a memorable chapter on the deteriorating control knobs of her mini-kitchen. “ Checkout 19 ” (2021), by contrast, is haunted by the absence of a proper home and the despair of unbelonging. Its narrator is “homesick for a place I have never seen”; when imagining her perfect house, she pictures a place that favors “darkness, patina, and fragility.” It’s fitting, then, that “ Big Kiss, Bye-Bye ,” Bennett’s third and latest book, is formed around the upheaval of moving.

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