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.
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
French paperback with flaps, 168 pages | Audiobook read by Claire-Louise Bennett
Published 9 October 2025
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
I.
Two weeks from now I won’t be living here anymore. I’ll be in the woodshed in L-. Xavier won’t know I don’t live here anymore. We are no longer in touch. It’s been three months since his last email, which I did not reply to. There really was no way of responding to it. I sort of feel like calling him now – I wonder what he would say? But it seems irreversible, that’s really how it feels. It’s better, I suppose, to have nothing more to do with him – and what choice has he given me anyway? I don’t remember what I was wearing the last time I saw him. It was the end of July, so I still had a nice bit of colour. I looked nice. I always wanted to look nice when I went to meet him. We hadn’t seen each other for almost a year because of the pandemic. When I got to the hotel restaurant he was already there, drinking a glass of prosecco. I always arrive a few minutes late so that Sean has gone and he’s already settled into a seat, nice and relaxed. He was sitting right beside an enormous TV screen. It was such a peculiar place to sit, I was demonstrably put out. ‘Come and sit next to me,’ he said, and I did. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we’re the only two people in the room who can’t see it.’ And he was right, we were, but I was conscious that when this or that person looked over at the TV they took a surreptitious look at us too. In fact it seemed to me that they weren’t looking at the TV at all. There was one man in particular who looked over quite a lot, and less discreetly each time. He was dining alone. Just come in from the racetrack, it was obvious. Had steak and chips and a big glass of red wine and after that a big glass of brandy. He drank and looked, eventually I stared back at him. Think what you like. It was race week, and I’d not been very optimistic that we’d get a table. He’d called them. I’d asked him to and he’d called them. Probably said to whoever picked up that Patrick knows us, and perhaps Patrick would remember us. Probably he would actually, because I’d complained about the afternoon tea we’d had. It was very poor. I wrote an email explaining how disappointingly lacklustre the cakes and sandwiches were, and Patrick, the recently appointed general manager, wrote back promptly and invited us to lunch by way of an apology. It was a good lunch. We’d enjoyed ourselves. It was probably one of the most successful lunches we’d ever had. We shared some prawns to start and they were very good. We ordered them again this time and they weren’t nearly as good and my glass of prosecco was flat. I asked him if his prosecco was flat and he said he didn’t think so, and it didn’t look flat – mine looked very flat, so I asked for another. I was surprised, relieved really, at how pleasant it was in the hotel restaurant – I’d anticipated it to be full of women dressed to the nines, because it was Thursday and Thursday is Ladies Day at the races. He’ll like that, I thought, while I was getting ready. He likes to see women dressed up, he’ll be in his element. Not that he’ll look at them very much. Just a glance probably, to register the effort that’s been put in and the overall effect. That will be quite sufficient. Too much scrutiny might spoil the illusion of sophistication and Xavier isn’t interested in having his illusions dispensed with – he rather likes them and is of the opinion that there isn’t much else: ‘Life is an illusion,’ he’ll say, ‘but then you already know that, don’t you.’ I wore a black dress, I can remember now, kind of silky. He liked it. Asked if I’d bought it with the money he’d given me and I said yes even though that wasn’t exactly true. I was wearing a pair of little gold hoops, one of which I lost the following week. They were practically brand new. He held my hand and there’s no harm in that. I ordered for him, as I usually do: ‘Pick something out for me,’ he says. ‘What are you in the mood for?’ I say. ‘I don’t mind, love,’ he says, ‘it’s not the food I’m interested in.’
‘Shape-shifting and splendid in its disregard for conventional wisdom and contemporary minimalist tastes, it weaves rococo abundance and brazen mundanity into something as porous and unknowable as the narrator’s inner world. Claire-Louise Bennett is a true original, working at the brink of what language can do.’
— Annie McDermott, Times Literary Supplement
‘If Bennett might seem at first blush a more quietly innovative writer than the novelists with whom she is inevitably compared, this is not to her detriment, but inseparable from the extraordinary subtlety and emotional detail of the psychological portraits her fiction paints.’
— Doug Battersby, Financial Times
‘Big Kiss, Bye-Bye delivers an exhilarating approximation of what memory feels like. Certain specifics appear fixed – the colour of a shirt, say, or an ex-lover’s hurtful words – but the rest swirls about, shifting depending on circumstance. Bennett’s writing is unpretentious and unselfconscious, with an often startling immediacy. Her vocabulary is precise – she finds a message ‘discomposing’; her empty flat is ‘languidly transporting’ – and sometimes unexpected. Pages of spare, simple sentences are offset by meandering digressions full of possibilities. Bennett is always conscious that every moment might one day be remembered, reshuffled, retold. Memory never fully settles.’
— Zoe Guttenplan, Literary Review
‘Bennett draws on “polyvocal, and apparently experimental” (note the tonal eye roll) techniques not to obfuscate, but to elucidate the real conditions of living, and writing, from the perspective of the underclass. Far from the stylistic abstractions of modernist masculinist totality or the avant-garde elite, this is the prose, we could say, of precarity. Bennett’s heroines might seek shelter in rooms of their own, but the walls always feel treacherously porous.’
— Jane Hu, Bookforum
‘Bennett writes like no one else. She is a rare talent.’
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The Wolves of Eternity
‘Claire-Louise Bennett’s latest novel is a quietly brilliant exploration of desire, memory and the peculiar – and often frustrating – rhythms of relationships. Following her narrator through past loves and fleeting encounters, including a failed relationship with an older ex-partner, Xavier, Bennett deftly captures and skewers the idiosyncrasies of our attempts at connection and the inevitability of unresolved endings.’
— Vanessa Peterson, Frieze
‘Claire-Louise Bennett sets the conventions of literary fiction ablaze in this ferociously intelligent and funny debut. Don’t be fooled by Pond’s small size. It contains multitudes.’
— Jenny Offill, author of Weather
‘This is an extraordinary collection of short stories – profoundly original though not eccentric, sharp and tender, funny and deeply engaging. A very new sort of writing, Bennett pushes the boundaries of the short story out into new territory: part prose fiction, part stream of consciousness, often truly poetry and always an acute, satisfying, delicate, honest meditation on both the joys and frustrations of a life fully lived in solitude. Take it slowly, because it is worth it, and be impressed and joyful.’
— Sara Maitland, author of A Book of Silence
‘I’d heard more good whispers about Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett than almost any other debut this year so, by the time I read it, expectations were high and – as it turned out – not disappointed. These stories are intelligent and funny, innovative and provocative, and it’s impossible to read them without thinking that here is a writer who has only just begun to show what she can do.’
— Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
‘Bennett’s language is an ornate and long-winded riposte to all those pared-back minimalists, and I love it.’
— Jon McGregor, Guardian
Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and currently lives in Ireland. 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. Her second book, Checkout 19, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2021 and was part of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2022 Selection. Claire-Louise’s fiction and essays have appeared in a number of publications including The White Review, Stinging Fly, frieze, Harper’s Magazine and the New Yorker. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is her third work of fiction.
