The Checkout Girl

The Checkout Girl is a psychological thriller about obsession, class envy, reinvention, and the terrifying cost of wanting another woman’s life. It begins in June 2025, with a glamorous blonde woman walking into a Dublin supermarket with two little girls. She is rich, powerful, and beautifully dressed. She remembers Eleanor Nolan, “the checkout girl,” and thinks that Eleanor is dead because of her own choices. The ending later reveals the blonde is not Savannah Hart, as the reader might first assume, but Eleanor herself, remade as Elle Hart.

The main story begins two years earlier, in June 2023. Eleanor Nolan works at checkout five in Freshways, an expensive organic supermarket where wealthy people buy things without looking at prices. Eleanor is twenty-five, lonely, poor, and invisible. She lives with her mentally ill mother, Margaret, in Kilgara, cares for her, and spends her free time scrolling through Instagram, worshipping beautiful women who seem to have perfect lives. Her greatest obsession is a rich customer she privately calls Barbie: Savannah Hart. Savannah comes in every Thursday after ballet with her two daughters, Olivia and Suki. Eleanor has served her more than a hundred times, but Savannah has never noticed her.

Eleanor is also attracted to Ben, the handsome new employee at Freshways, but Savannah is the real fantasy. She represents everything Eleanor lacks: money, beauty, children, husband, status, ease. Then one Thursday Suki collapses in the supermarket after eating something containing peanuts. Eleanor knows Suki has a nut allergy and rushes to Charlie’s locker, breaks it open, steals his EpiPen, and saves the child. Savannah finally looks at her and says, “I owe you.” Eleanor feels seen for the first time.