Blood Knots: Of Fathers, Friendship and Fishing

Blood Knots: Of Fathers, Friendship and Fishing by Luke Jennings. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781848871328.

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 Jennings learned 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 a memoir of angling, of great fish caught and lost, but it is also a story of 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, he suggests in this most moving and thought-provoking of memoirs, can we connect with your own deep history.