Boatmaker

A fierce and complicated man wakes from a fever dream compelled to build a boat and sail away from the isolated island where he was born. Encountering the wider world for the first time, the reluctant hero falls into a destructive love affair, is swept up into a fanatical religious movement, and finds himself a witness to racial hatred unlike anything hes ever known. The boatmaker is tempted, beaten, and betrayed: his journey marked by chilling episodes of violence and horror while he struggles to summon the strength to make his own way. The Boatmaker is a fable for our times, a passionate love story, and an odyssey of self-discovery.

"[W]ell crafted debut....spellbinding." Publishers Weekly

"The Boatmaker is a wonderful novel — wonderful as in spectacularly good and wonderful as in full of wonders. There are echoes of our own time and of older times; it is set in a very intelligently imagined country, a mirror of our Western world and its evils and virtues rather than a fantasy land." John Casey, National Book Award-winning author of Spartina

"John Benditt's The Boatmaker is made of primal stuff: stone and sea, blood and snow, dreams of wolves and men like bears. This is a novel that will anchor you firmly to the earth, close enough to the pulse of the world that you might hear its drumbeat echo on every page." Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

As an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, John Benditt studied with Adrienne Rich and was awarded the John Russell Hayes Poetry Prize by Robert Creeley. Over time the emphasis of his writing shifted from poetry to prose-poetry and then to fiction. His journalistic career began at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. As an editor at Scientific American, he was responsible for conceiving and editing the magazine's 1988 single-topic issue on AIDS. He lives in New York City.