Blood Knots: A Memoir of Fathers, Friendship, and Fishing - Hardcover

Jennings, Luke

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1616085878 ISBN 13: 9781616085872

Publisher: Skyhorse, 2012

Synopsis

By the author of Villanelle novels, the basis of Killing Eve, the sensational hit television series.

Blood Knots is a brilliant and dramatic memoir of an angler’s life. It places Jennings in the front rank of natural history writers. As a child in the 1960s, he was fascinated by the rivers and lakes around his home. Beneath their surfaces waited alien and mysterious worlds. With library books as his guide, he applied himself to the task of learning to fish. His progress was slow, and for years, he caught nothing. But then a series of teachers presented themselves, including an inspirational young intelligence officer, from whom he learned stealth, deception, and the art of dry-fly fishing. So began an enlightening but often dark-shadowed journey of discovery. 
It would lead to bright streams and wild country, but would end with his mentor’s capture, torture, and execution by the IRA. Blood Knots is about angling, about great fish caught and lost, but it is also about friendship, honor, and coming of age. As an adult, Jennings has sought out lost and secretive waterways, probing waters at dead of night in search of giant pike. The quest, as always, is for more than the living quarry. For only by searching far beneath the surface, he suggests in this most moving and thought-provoking of memoirs, can you connect with your own deep history. Jennings offers here a striking, elegiac narrative for lovers of unique memoirs and the finest fly-fishing literature.

About this title

From the Author:

Luke Jennings is an author and journalist who has written for Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Time. He is the author of BLOOD KNOTS, short-listed for the Samuel Johnson and William Hill prizes, and the Booker Prize-nominated ATLANTIC. With his daughter Laura, he wrote the teenage stage-school novels STARS and STARS: STEALING THE SHOW. His latest publication is CODENAME VILLANELLE, the Basis of KILLING EVE, the hit BBC America TV Series.

Review:

“

From the arresting title—Blood Knots—to the final word, Luke Jennings commands our awe and admiration with this unusually fine, wholly engaging memoir of that life affirming trinity—fathers, friendship, and fishing.

” (Tom Brokaw)

“Luke Jennings' Blood Knots is a wondrous book. As a lifetime obsessive reader of angling literature I know whereof I speak. As an occasional writer of it I am humbled indeed. In modern times Jennings is in the stratosphere of Roderick Haig-Brown and Tom McGuane's rarified The Longest Silence. The prose is graceful and the treatment of material utterly fresh. I couldn't recommend it more highly.” (Jim Harrison)

“

Luke Jennings has brilliantly described the full range of English angling, from drifting dry flies on the chalk streams of Sussex to chasing giant pike in the dark industrial waters of London. But this distinctive memoir is far more than a fishing book. In acuteness of observation and literary craft, this is autobiographical writing of the very highest order and a joy to read.

” (Howell Raines)

“

This is literature with that rare combination of the poetic and visceral. I can smell the air, the water. Beautiful. Some true set-the-book-down, gaze-out-your-window...ponder-that-last-beautiful-paragraph-you-just-read moments.

” (Michael Keaton, actor)

“Blood Knots is one of those small but enthralling surprises that lands every now and then on a writer's desk. Like all great fishing books, it can be embraced with unabashed delight by readers who wouldn't know a trout from a truffle. . . . Special and magnetic.” (Carl Hiassen, author of Tourist Season)

“

Luke Jennings' Blood Knots is simply the best book with fishing in it since Norman MacLean's A River Runs Through It. It's that good!

” (Stephen J. Bodio, author of Eagle Dreams)

“Blood Knots is one those books so surprising in its depth, its effect, its power as to leave a reader with a sense of an inability to convey just how intense and wonderful it is. But make no mistake. This is a book written from the heart, that acknowledges the mysteries in fishing, which, as the author so gracefully manages to suggest, is a stand in and an expression for many other of the most powerful parts of being human. And, on top of everything else, it is so keenly written as to make the beauty of the English language seem new” (Craig Nova, author of Brook Trout and the Writing Life)

About this edition

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1616085878
• ISBN 13: 9781616085872
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240