'In 1985 Jacqueline Kent was content with her life. She had a satisfying career as a freelance book editor, and was emerging as a writer. Living and working alone, she relished her independence. But then she met Kenneth Cook, author of the Australian classic Wake in Fright, and they fell in love.
'With bewildering speed Jacqueline found herself in alien territory- with a man almost twenty years older, whose life experience could not have been more different from her own. She had to come to terms with complicated finances and expectations, and to negotiate relationships with Ken's children, four people almost her own age. But with this man of contradictions - funny and sad, headstrong and tender - she found real and sustaining companionship.
'Their life together was often joyful, sometimes enraging, always exciting - until one devastating evening. But, as Jacqueline discovered, even when a story is over that doesn't mean it has come to an end.' (Publication summary)
'In 1961, at the age of 31, Kenneth Cook released his first novel, Wake in Fright, which remains his most renowned work. In the book, John Grant, a schoolteacher assigned to a tiny town in rural Australia, misses his flight home to Sydney and finds himself stranded in the fictive mining town of Bundanyabba (‘‘The Yabba’’).' (Introduction)
'Award-winning biographer Jacqueline Kent has written books about Beatrice Davis, Hephzibah Menuhin and Julia Gillard, but here she tells a much more personal story of her relationship with the writer Kenneth Cook. '
'Kenneth Cook (1929-87) was a prolific author best known for his first novel, Wake in Fright (1961), which was based on his experience as a young journalist in Broken Hill in the 1950s. In January 1972, as I sat in a London cinema watching the film made from this novel by director Ted Kotcheff, its nightmare vision of outback life seared itself into my brain. I was about to return home to Australia after two and a half years away, and I wondered why on earth I had made the fateful decision to go back to a place as violent and cruel as this. (Introduction)
'In 1961, at the age of 31, Kenneth Cook released his first novel, Wake in Fright, which remains his most renowned work. In the book, John Grant, a schoolteacher assigned to a tiny town in rural Australia, misses his flight home to Sydney and finds himself stranded in the fictive mining town of Bundanyabba (‘‘The Yabba’’).' (Introduction)
'Kenneth Cook (1929-87) was a prolific author best known for his first novel, Wake in Fright (1961), which was based on his experience as a young journalist in Broken Hill in the 1950s. In January 1972, as I sat in a London cinema watching the film made from this novel by director Ted Kotcheff, its nightmare vision of outback life seared itself into my brain. I was about to return home to Australia after two and a half years away, and I wondered why on earth I had made the fateful decision to go back to a place as violent and cruel as this. (Introduction)
'Award-winning biographer Jacqueline Kent has written books about Beatrice Davis, Hephzibah Menuhin and Julia Gillard, but here she tells a much more personal story of her relationship with the writer Kenneth Cook. '
