The Boatmaker

In John Benditt’s debut novel, a fierce, complicated, silent man wakes from a fever dream compelled to build a boat and sail away from the small island where he was born. The boat carries him to the next, bigger, island, where he becomes locked in a drunken and violent affair whose explosion propels him all the way to the mainland. There he struggles to understand the intricacies of a larger society and its dark underworld. As he encounters greed, corruption, and racial and religious hatred, he uncovers truths that allow him to redirect the course of his destiny. The boatmaker’s journey cannot be traced on any map, and yet it is located at the epicenter of European history.

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.