Original debut reflects one woman’s state of mind

Pond: a stagnant body of water that holds a teeming mass of life, and an apt title for Claire-Louise Bennett’s original debut, published by the ever-ambitious Stinging Fly press. Marketed as a collection of stories rather than a self-contained work, there is a novelistic quality to Pond, although the non-linear narrative and fragmented form allies it firmly to the modernist tradition rather than popular literature.

Laid out as a series of stories, fragments ...