Free Snake by Kate Jennings

Praise for Snake
    â€˜ Snake can be read in a single sitting. In fact, this is the ideal
way to absorb Ms Jennings’s stunning narrative … The brief
scenes … possess what feels like a holographic shimmer …
Snake is clearly the work of a powerful imagination.’
—C AROL S HIELDS , The New York Times Book Review
    â€˜A taut, poignant story. That she makes your heart ache
for both her protagonists is a testimony to her artistry.’
— The Sunday Telegraph
    â€˜Jennings’s black humour is distilled into a potent, bitter brew
that transforms her melodramatic subject matter – adultery,
lesbian love affairs, teenage pregnancies, car crashes and
suicides – into a novel of extraordinary, if bleak, beauty.’
— The Times Literary Supplement
    â€˜This snake of a novel is lethal and fast-moving – and
so spare it will leave readers wishing for more.’
— Publishers Weekly
    â€˜A novel that simmers with energy, passion, and thoroughly
unresolved tensions.’—D EBRA A DELAIDE , The Sydney
Morning Herald
    â€˜Kate Jennings’s style is as spare and compelling as the landscape
of her native country. The reader can feel the heat
and smell the disillusionment of this Australian rural scene
captured in breathtaking detail.’—J ILL K ER C ONWAY
    â€˜Superbly assured … evocative, unexpected and hard to
forget … Jennings has an unerring eye for the unexpected,
telling detail; her novel holds a wonderful balance
between deft, dry comedy and genuine heartbreak.’
— The Sunday Times
    â€˜It’s hard to believe a full-blown family tragedy can be told
so wholly and well in such small, deft snatches, but then
rarely has a poet’s skill at compaction been put to better use
in prose. You can easily read the entire book in one sitting
– and only upon standing be struck by how much pity and
terror you’ve consumed.’— The Los Angeles Times
    â€˜Not a word is misplaced, the colours leap out from the
page, and characters are sketched with a deft and terrible
economy.’— The Financial Times
    â€˜A book that will come to be regarded as a classic account
of the realities of Australian rural life.’— People
    â€˜What astonishment, stimulation, refreshment, enjoyment
is to be found in this short novel by Kate Jennings …
Snake makes various current challengers in the fiction
race look simply awful.’— The Bulletin
    â€˜Jennings’s detailed character studies and her beautiful use
of language create an uplifting and wonderfully satisfying
work.’— The Canberra Times
    â€˜Beautifully written, exquisitely painful, insidiously
memorable.’— The Adelaide Advertiser
    â€˜How often do you find a book that seizes you and doesn’t
let go until it has finished its assault? Snake does that,
quite painfully and beautifully.’— Australian Book Review
    â€˜Jennings lays bare the anguish of the mismatch at the heart
of the story … This slim, unyielding and yet poetic book
portrays a desperate marriage with great depth of understanding.’
— The Weekend Australian

Snake
    K ATE
J ENNINGS

Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd
37–39 Langridge Street
Collingwood Vic 3066 Australia
email: [email protected]
http://www.blackincbooks.com
    First published 1996 by Reed Books Australia.
This edition published 2011 by Black Inc.
    Copyright © Kate Jennings 2011
    A LL R IGHTS R ESERVED .
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
    e-ISBN: 9781921870125
    Book design: Thomas Deverall

When the dog at morning
Whines upon the frost
I shall be in another place.
Lost, lost, lost.
    ELIZABETH RIDDELL

1
    Poor Devil
    E VERYBODY LIKES YOU. A good