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Blood Knots
- Author: Luke Jennings
- Category: Non-fiction Biography / Memoir Narrative
- Publisher: Atlantic (UK)
- Pub date: 1 April 2010
- Length: 232 pages
About Blood Knots
shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize 2010
shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2010
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… The prose is graceful and the treatment of material utterly fresh. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
- Jim Harrison
As a child in the 1960s, Luke Jennings was fascinated by the rivers and lakes around his Sussex home. Beneath their surfaces, it seemed to him, 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 learnt stealth, deception and the art of the dry fly. 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, honour and coming of age. As an adult Jennings has sought out lost and secretive waterways, probing waters ‘as deep as England’ 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, Jennings suggests in this most moving and thought-provoking of memoirs, can you connect with your own deep history.
About the Author
Luke Jennings is the author of three novels, including the Booker Prize-nominated ATLANTIC, and (with Deborah Bull) of THE FABER GUIDE TO BALLET. As a journalist he has written for Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Time, as well as all the British quality titles, and is currently the dance critic at the Observer. He is married with three children, lives in North London, and fishes whenever he can.