Kate Jennings Books In Order

Snake

Everywhere praised for its mesmerizing intensity and taut, quick witted prose, Snake tells the story of a mismatched couple Irene, ambitious and man crazy, and her quiet, adoring, responsible husband, Rex who tumble into marriage and settle as newlyweds on a remote Australian farm. It is amid this unforgiving landscape that Irene and Rex raise their two children. It is here that, as Rex bears silent witness, Irene tends her garden and wrestles with what seems to be her fate. And it is here that their marriage unravels inexorably, bitterly, spectacularly.

Moral Hazard

On Wall Street, reflects Cath, women are about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag. Funny, liberal and left leaning, she is an unlikely candidate to be writing speeches on derivatives in a cubicle in a Manhattan tower, ‘putting words in the mouths of plutocrats deeply suspicious of metaphors and words of more than two syllables’. She finds herself on Wall Street because she needs serious money. After ten good years, her beloved older husband Bailey is suffering from Alzheimer’s. So begins Cath’s journey into two nightmare worlds. By day she deals with the topsy turvy logic and ingrown personalities at work in high finance; by night she has to watch the slow disintegration of the man she loves. In between, she must stop herself from falling apart. Friendship with Mike, a colleague and incognito socialist, helps her survive the assault course of the workplace with its vicious office politics. But as the money markets hurtle towards financial meltdown, Cath faces personal disaster and a Moral Hazard that she cannot ignore. Kate Jennings’ prose is lean yet rich in unexpected, telling detail. Tense, taut and compulsively readable, Moral Hazard is peopled by extraordinary characters and informed by a mordant, witty intelligence.

Stanley and Sophie

‘I fell in love with a prideful, tense bundle of muscle and sinew 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. She is swept off her feet, stunned by the depth of her love. Her life is suddenly overtaken by Stanley and, when she is seduced into getting him a companion, by the pair of them.

But after several years with her willful yet cherished dogs, Jennings came to the heartrending realization that they needed more than she could give — and that she must reas*sess her own life, too. First and foremost, Stanley and Sophie is a book about dogs, understanding them, doing the best by them. It is also a vivid chronicle of Jennings’s grief and sadness — for the loss of a husband, for the city after September 11, for two pigtailed macaques in Bali, for a world going to hell in a handbasket. This is a bittersweet and darkly humorous memoir about the way two rivalrous, demanding, idiosyncratic, exhilarating dogs gave Jennings daily purpose and showed her the way to her own heart.

Trouble

In 1970 Kate Jennings, twenty one, stunned a Sydney anti war rally with a pull no punches speech that put women’s lib on the map. Brave, impassioned and searing, the speech set the tone for the idiosyncratic career that was to follow. A few years later, she was on her way to New York, where she would make her name as a writer and enjoy a ringside seat at some of the most confronting events of our time. Trouble collects Jennings s best work from the last four decades. With a polemical anger tempered by a keen sense of the absurd and a fiercely independent streak, she writes incisively about politics, morality, finance, feminism and the writing life. She describes America with the keen eye of an outsider and looks back at Australia with an expatriate s frankness. Trouble is both an unconventional autobiography and a record of remarkable times. From the protest movements of the 1970s, via Wall Street s heyday and dramatic collapse, to the historic election of Barack Obama, Jennings captures the shifts seismic and subtle, personal and political that brought us to where we are now. After four decades, Kate Jennings work is as exhilarating and impossible to categorise shocking with the shock of recognition as the day it was written.