The Book of Jonah

A Telegraph Book of the Year

By: Luke Kennard

Narrated by: Luke Kennard

Read by the author, Luke Kennard

‘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’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, TLS

None of the Old Testament prophets were 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 who can give him a sense of what his work might be beyond a five-star capitalist purgatory in a series of exotic locations. What would it mean to be a prophet – or even a false prophet – in this milieu?

Taking on the decimation of funding for the arts, the emptiness of the hero’s journey and a literary culture regarded by wider society with cynicism, ignorance and apathy, The Book of Jonah is a blistering poetry collection from the Forward Prize-winning author of Notes on the Sonnets.

Critic reviews

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)

Kennard is an overachieving poet, the youngest ever finalist for a Forward Prize back in 2007; his work combines accessibility with formal daring and a twist of surrealism

Kennard . . . has a poet's ear for noticing the electric in the quotidian

Luke Kennard has the uncanny genius of being able to stick a knife in your heart with such originality and verve that you start thinking "aren’t knives fascinating . . . and hearts, my god!" whilst everything slowly goes black (Caroline Bird)

Brilliant . . . Deadly serious in the way only the playfully comic can be, the poems here are liable to leave you both smiling and wincing in the same breath (Rishi Dastidar)

'A fun, testing read – rather like being regaled at the pub by a tipsy Theology professor' – Telegraph, Books of the Year (Books of the Year)

My standout poetry read of the year. A playful, and frequently profound reimaging of the Old Testament story, this is the sort of collection where you discover a fresh bullet of truth with every reread (Jan Carson, Books of the Year)