The Book of Jonah

Cheaper in another edition — £11.69 at LoveReading The Book of Jonah · See that edition →

No prices right now — open the app to check again.

‘Kennard’s distinctive voice – surreal, funny, anxious, always overthinking, and cringingly self-deprecating – has made him one of the most widely liked and imitated British poets under forty’ Tristram Fane Saunders, TLS None of the Old Testament prophets was especially happy or confident in their calling, but Jonah was the only one who rejected it outright, disobeying direct instruction from God and literally running away. In The Book of Jonah, Luke Kennard transforms the unique and awkward position Jonah’s story occupies in scripture – part dream, part joke, part provocation – into a madcap picaresque which marries the sacred and the absurd. Though Jonah’s encounter with the whale is most commonly interpreted as the story of a reluctant prophet being punished by his maker, Kennard’s Jonah is more wily business traveller than seer. Taking his instruction instead from non-governmental organizations, arts development agencies and public-relations gurus, this Jonah keeps relentlessly busy, accepting any assignment that will take him further away from Nineveh and drown out the word of God in his ears. On his travels he meets errant writers, fixers, artists and consultants, but nobody…

Other editions

More by Luke Kennard

More by Luke Kennard