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Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

A Novel

Author Claire-Louise Bennett
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Hardcover
$29.00 US
| $39.00 CAN
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Riverhead Books
On sale Oct 21, 2025 | 224 Pages | 9798217046645
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“Gorgeous and a little unnerving. . .Reading it is a strange and wonderfully invigorating experience.”–The New York Times

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.
Praise for Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

“A formidable one-woman show … Bennett allows the reader to sit in the house with her … without unctuousness or hypocrisy. And what an engrossing house it is.”-The New Yorker

“Good old-fashioned modernist fun… The novel contains many … moments of almost febrile power, rendered in prose both gorgeous and a little unnerving. To call Big Kiss, Bye-Bye entertaining would be to do an injustice to its discomfiting depth, but reading it is a strange and wonderfully invigorating experience.”–The New York Times Book Review

“Utterly original … among the most rapturous pieces of writing about desire that I’ve ever read.”–The Star Tribune

“A work of extraordinary subtlety. . .Bennett displays her characteristic aversion to identikit templates of feeling and desire that distort the real emotional complexity of our attachments and aversions to other people, and especially those people who have most profoundly shaped our inner lives. . .Its visceral and unerringly convincing depictions of sexual feeling. . . capture inexpressible intensities of experience.”–Financial Times

“A writer of great linguistic inventiveness.” –The Atlantic

“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
© Mark Walsh
Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of Pond, which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and Checkout 19, which was named a The New York Times “10 Best Books of the Year” and an “Essential Read” by The New Yorker. Her short fiction and essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives in Galway, Ireland. View titles by Claire-Louise Bennett

About

“Gorgeous and a little unnerving. . .Reading it is a strange and wonderfully invigorating experience.”–The New York Times

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.

Reviews

Praise for Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

“A formidable one-woman show … Bennett allows the reader to sit in the house with her … without unctuousness or hypocrisy. And what an engrossing house it is.”-The New Yorker

“Good old-fashioned modernist fun… The novel contains many … moments of almost febrile power, rendered in prose both gorgeous and a little unnerving. To call Big Kiss, Bye-Bye entertaining would be to do an injustice to its discomfiting depth, but reading it is a strange and wonderfully invigorating experience.”–The New York Times Book Review

“Utterly original … among the most rapturous pieces of writing about desire that I’ve ever read.”–The Star Tribune

“A work of extraordinary subtlety. . .Bennett displays her characteristic aversion to identikit templates of feeling and desire that distort the real emotional complexity of our attachments and aversions to other people, and especially those people who have most profoundly shaped our inner lives. . .Its visceral and unerringly convincing depictions of sexual feeling. . . capture inexpressible intensities of experience.”–Financial Times

“A writer of great linguistic inventiveness.” –The Atlantic

“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

Author

© Mark Walsh
Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of Pond, which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and Checkout 19, which was named a The New York Times “10 Best Books of the Year” and an “Essential Read” by The New Yorker. Her short fiction and essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives in Galway, Ireland. View titles by Claire-Louise Bennett

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