Blood Knots: A Memoir of Fathers, Friendship, and Fishing
“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 Knotsis 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 rarifiedThe 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 Knotsis 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 ofTourist Season)“Luke Jennings'Blood Knotsis simply the best book with fishing in it since Norman MacLean'sA River Runs Through It. It's that good!” (Stephen J. Bodio,  author ofEagle Dreams)“Blood Knotsis 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 ofBrook Trout and the Writing Life)