Blood Knots

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.

Luke Jennings' Blood Knots is simply the best bookwith fishing in it since Norman MacLean's A River Runs Through It. It's thatgood! --Stephen J. Bodio, author of Eagle Dreams, 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 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, This is literature with that rare combinationof the poetic and visceral. I can smell the air, the water. Beautiful. Sometrue set-the-book-down, gaze-out-your-window...ponder-that-last-beautiful-paragraph-you-just-read moments. --Michael Keaton, actor

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.