After Battersea Park

In an astonishing twist on the twins-separated-at-birth story, After Battersea Park narrates the lives of 27-year-old twins: Curt, a jazz musician living in Sydney, Australia, and William, a visual artist in Toronto. The brothers are drawn inexorably toward a reunion when a suicide note reveals the identity of their true parents: Jilly, an Australian teacher, and Noah, a Hawaiian bartender whose letters to his estranged sons begin to unravel the wrenching events of London's Battersea Park 23 years earlier. Over one year, three continents and two generations, William and his doppelg...nger conflate and dissolve, wrestling with the twin masters of memory and truth, nature and nurture, empire and colony, reason and passion. Here is a brilliant portrait of two men longing to be whole and wholly understood."There is a tenderness here, and a respect for the characters. This is not to say that After Battersea Park is without artifice or technique. Bennett is a skilled enough writer to vary cadence and rhythm, slipping from an almost documentary style into a convincing lyricism when the situation demands." -Quill & Quire