| Kate Jennings, a
poet, essayist, and novelist, comes from the Riverina.
She attended Sydney University in the late 1960s, where
she gained notoriety as a feminist activist. She moved
to New York City in 1979. Her novel Snake (1996) was a
New York Times Notable Book of the Year, as was Moral
Hazard (2002), which was based on her experiences as a
Wall Street speechwriter. Her work has been in
contention for the Booker, IMPAC, and Los Angeles Times
literary prizes. She has won the prestigious Christina
Stead and Adelaide Festival prizes and been honored with
the Australian Literary
Society’s gold medal.
Stanley and Sophie:
‘I fell in love with a prideful bundle of muscle that
stood seventeen inches high. You would see a small brown
dog; I saw perfection’.
So begins the story of Kate Jennings’s unexpected love
affair with two border terriers, first Stanley, then a
few years later Sophie. A fiercely intelligent writer,
an astute
observer of people and her surroundings, a recent widow
not ready to face her grief, an irascible Australian
with no time for indulgent New Yorkers and their
pampered pets; Jennings falls hard. Swept off her feet
and surprised by the depth of her love, Jennings’s life
is suddenly overtaken by Stanley and when she is seduced
into getting him a
companion, by the pair of them. First and foremost,
Stanley and Sophie is a book about animals, but it is
also about grief and grieving ‐ for Jennings’s husband,
for the city after 9/11, for the world. And it is a book
about the way two rivalrous, demanding, idiosyncratic,
exhilarating dogs gave Jennings daily purpose and showed
her the way to her own heart. |
