Fitzcarraldo Editions publisher Jacques Testard has acquired UK, Europe & Commonwealth exc. Canada rights to Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye. Testard acquired the book from Peter Straus at RCW and will publish on 9 October 2025. NA rights were acquired by Rebecca Saletan at Riverhead from Melanie Jackson at Melanie Jackson Literary Agency, on behalf of Peter Straus at RCW.
Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, the narrator of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye 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.
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is Claire-Louise Bennett’s third work of fiction after Pond, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2015, and recently issued in the First Decade Collection; and Checkout 19, published by Jonathan Cape in 2021. Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and her debut book, Pond, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Claire-Louise’s fiction and essays have appeared in a number of publications including The White Review, Stinging Fly, gorse, Harper’s Magazine, Vogue Italia, Music & Literature, the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker.
Claire-Louise Bennett said: ‘Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is the beginning of a new phase of work which gets into areas of private life I’ve wanted to explore artistically for a very long time. Fitzcarraldo Editions is committed to publishing authors, rather than books, as such I am fairly confident that they will stick with me wherever this exploration takes me, which is a very valuable situation to be in. What more can a writer ask for, really?’
Publisher Jacques Testard added: ‘I am delighted, as are my colleagues, to be publishing Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye. It’s a very powerful and tender novel about love and how we relate to one another. It’s surprising, funny, insightful, moving, tender, odd, and exceptionally well written. I’d follow her sentences anywhere: she is an extraordinary stylist, one of the very best in the English language, and everyone at Fitzcarraldo Editions is excited to be publishing this book, which is sure to be an event.’
