Verandah People:
Stories
~ Runner Up Danuta Gleed
Literary Award ~
~ “Best
of 2003” January Magazine ~
From the back jacket…
In these powerful stories the “verandah people” are Jonathan Bennett’s
own compatriots: Australians for whom the ever-present verandah is both stage and shelter, a retreat from a hostile bushland
or city street and a seductive barrier to participation in the wider world.
Bennett offers us extraordinary portraits of his characters, many of them dreamers and searchers. Also beautifully
rendered is the disquieting, sometimes overwhelming, landscape; Bennett makes us feel the relentless heat of a cloudless day,
smell overripe bush, witness the spectacle of a sudden coastal storm. While many of the characters are loosely connected to
one another across stories, a subtle sense of loss pervades Verandah People. We feel compassion for Bennett’s
complex community of Australians, even as they watch the world slip by, longing, from the “safety” of their verandahs.
Critical Praise
“Bennett
is sparse in his language, reflecting the laconic nature of the place; a place (Australia) where to say too much is to expend
energy -- something you just don't do in the heat. Yet like an artist with mere pen and paper, he creates fully rounded figures
with simple lines . . . Bennett replicates his hometown, capturing the language, the character, the climate, and the culture
with an insider's intimacy. Australia is indivisible from these stories, much like the south of the United States in Flannery
O'Connor's stories, or the city and suburbs of Prague from Milan Kundera's work. To read the talented Bennett's work is to
breathe in the eucalypts, hear the magpies warble, and occasionally flinch at a kind of rough justice.”
— Powells.com
click here for the full Powell’s review
“unsettling, raw and vivid… with ravishing language,
Bennett's ability to animate lives within a landscape that dwarfs the human, makes for a memorable read.”
— Kirkus Review
“In this skillfully interwoven set of 12 short stories...Bennett's characters, who make their brief, but intense
appearances across the various verandahs, are detailed with a compassionate eye, then are compelled to move, inexorably, each
to her or his own personal precipice. Bennett denies his characters shelter, indeed, turns them inside out in savage imagery.
He pursues his theme ruthlessly... Ordinary, everyday situations gather with the abruptness of storm clouds in the Australian
coastal sky, to climax in terror, separation, loss.”
— The Globe and Mail
“Bennett builds his narratives from the nerves up... he has a naturalist style, punctuated
with flashes of lyricism and compelling imagery, and a demonstrated gift for characterization, for revealing personality through
an accumulation of detail and action.”
— Toronto Star
“Bennett is a real find … master of the short fiction
form.”
— January Magazine (A “Best of
2003” book)
“Bennett’s tremendous talent shines in passages brimming
with sensuality. [These stories] evoke the continent’s harsh and exhilarating environment with striking images that
transcend mere physical description.”
— Quill and Quire
“Bennett exhales the very breath of Australia in this new collection of short fiction. In these probing, subtle
but powerful pieces, “Down Under” is less a geographical place than a state of mind, a psychic universe with its
own set of quirky laws.”
— Edmonton Journal
“The stories are valuable for, like a lot of good art, suggesting
more than is literally said. In creating these characters and their struggles with change, hope and regret, Bennett captures
something important and meaningful in an outstanding and memorable collection of stories.”
— Danforth
Review
Buying Verandah People
In Canada: The author
recommends that you visit your local independent bookstore.
For online
ordering: Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Indigo.ca, Powells.com
ISBN: 1551926490 / CAD:
$19.95
After Battersea Park: a novel
In an astonishing twist on the twins-separated-at-birth story,
After Battersea Park narrates the lives of 27-year-old brothers Curt and William, the former a jazz musician living in Sydney,
the latter a visual artist in Toronto. The brothers, unknown to each other yet leading parallel lives haunted by absence and
the need for escape, are drawn inexorably toward a reunion when a suicide begins to unravel the identity of their true parents
and the wrenching events of London’s Battersea Park twenty-three years earlier.
Part mystery, part love story, Jonathan Bennett’s debut
novel deftly examines fractured identities, families and cultures in a tale that spans one year, three continents and two
generations. As William and Curt conflate and dissolve they wrestle with the twin masters of memory and truth, reason and
passion. Here is a contemporary portrait of two men bound by blood and lies, but liberated by a chance to be both whole and
wholly understood.
Critical Praise
" … written
in dreamlike prose … offbeat, low-key, [a] surprisingly resonant novel." —
Booklist
" … well-wrought
scenes that sparkle with wry humour and wit. A neatly constructed plot, engaging three-dimensional characters and a touch
of devil-may-care impudence make this novel a delight to read." — Amazon.ca
"Bennett’s characterizations of the twins as extensions
of each other through genetic code builds toward Coltrane’s ideal of a yearning searching climax. If resolution evades
the search, or, indeed, redefines itself through the search, in After Battersea Park Jonathan Bennett has left both character
and reader with—as he beautifully puts it—“loss, such gorgeous loss.”" — Literary Review of Canada
"[After Battersea Park] is complex, precise, and well written
… a remarkable debut novel." — Word
“There is a tenderness here, and a respect for the characters.
This is not to say that After Battersea Park is without artifice or technique. Bennett is a skilled enough writer to vary
cadence and rhythm, slipping from an almost documentary style into a convincing lyricism when the situation demands.”
– Quill & Quire
"After Battersea Park shows us the indelible struggle between
the need for autonomy and the need to belong to something, and how even after finding something to belong to, we don’t
necessarily solve the problems we face as individuals. This is a touching, often humorous novel of the young male experience,
of finding connectedness within disconnectedness … The ending of After Battersea Park is refreshing and unexpected without
being too pessimistic … It may not make you believe in brotherly love, but it will show you how two things can fit together
even when they are so very far apart." — Danforth Review
"Jonathan Bennett’s first novel revives the motif of separated
twins, adding contemporary zest to what has become, at times, a commonplace literary theme. After Battersea Park effortlessly
weaves through three continents and roughly 25 years of history in the lives of brothers … Bennett capably undermines
constructed notions of empire by having the brothers exiled to Britain’s past colonial holdings, Canada and Australia
… The novel assumes a high degree of sophistication in its readership … [After Battersea Park] is episodic, elliptical,
with curt, fragmented chapters. It is up to the reader to piece together the fragmented brothers’ fragmented lives.
Bennett is a skilful and modest storyteller, gently leading the reader into the epicentre of the twins quiet grief …
After Battersea Park is remarkably sophisticated first fiction." — Hamilton
Spectator
Buying After Battersea Park
In Canada: The author
recommends that you visit your local independent bookstore.
For online ordering: Amazon.ca,
Amazon.com, Indigo.ca
ISBN: 1-55192-408-0 / $21.95
CDN / $14.95 US
Here
is my street, this tree I planted: poems
From the back jacket…
Winding their way through places and lives, each undergoing a
change of purpose, the poems of Jonathan Bennett’s Here is my street, this tree I planted move with seductive language
and irresistible drive. As awestruck by the possibilities of change as it is keenly aware of loss, this debut collection rejects
the too-easy judgments of navigation guided solely by a single moral compass. With influences as diverse as the poetry of
Les Murray and the paintings of Edward Hopper, these poems—linguistically, culturally, emotionally—hitch one end
of the globe to the other. Moving, seeking, at times playful, but always revelling in an articulation of transition: Bennett
is writing the kind of poetry this country needs—one that is as universal as it is Canadian.
Critical Praise
“[Bennett's] ideas are vividly demonstrated in tightly-written
poems so compressed, so chock-full of vibrant imagery and sense impressions that they evoke the powerful, timeless works of
Dylan Thomas.” — January Magazine
Click here for the full January Magazine review
“Jonathan Bennett’s poetry debut, Here Is My Street,
This Tree I Planted, invokes a striking poetic language in constructing the urban and natural landscapes of Canadian and Australian
culture. Bennett roots his reader firmly in location in order to explore familiar themes of displacement, identity, and “home.”
The transition of locale offers further considerations of these constructs as shifting esoteric spaces we occupy. Beyond the
lyrical language, regard for form, and cultural insight of this collection is the humour, tragedy, and aesthetic triumph that
furnish both everyday life and good poetry.” — TaddleCreek
“A good debut.” — Matrix
Buying Here is my street, this tree I planted
In Canada: The author
recommends that you visit your local independent bookstore.
For online ordering: Chapters.indigo.ca
or Amazon.ca, or in the US, Amazon.com
ISBN: 1550226487 / CAD:
$16.95
