Meet Walter
Walter Bennett is a writer and former lawyer, judge, and law professor residing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His first novel, Leaving Tuscaloosa, won The Alabama Author’s Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and the Crook’s Corner Book Prize for debut novels set in the American South. He has published short fiction and essays in both print and online journals, including Blackbird, The Courtland Review, Eclipse and Voices. An essay on trout fishing, “Black Quill,” appears in Astream: American Writers on Fly Fishing (Skyhorse Publishing, Spring 2012). He has written numerous articles on the law; and a highly acclaimed book: The Lawyer’s Myth: Reviving Ideals in the Legal Profession (U. Chicago Press, 2001). He is a native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Learn more about Walter’s forthcoming novel, The Last First Kiss, below.
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New release: The Last First Kiss by Walter Bennett
“Read it for the story. Read it for the writing. Read it to stir your own old memories. Just read it."
View Walter Bennet’s The Last First Kiss book trailer, produced by Minnow Media.
The Last First Kiss
Ace Sinclair has one eye on a hurricane churning up from the south and the other on his old high school sweetheart, J’nelle Reade, whom he has invited, on impulse, to spend a weekend with him at his Outer Banks beach house. Now in their seventies, both widowed, Ace and J’nelle expect to relive old memories. They soon discover that the past is still with them more than they know, and they are pulled into a haunting search among old memories of betrayals, mistakes and missed chances for the illusive truth of their lives. As a dangerous hurricane turns in the Atlantic and heads their way, time runs short, and they must choose between the tidal pull of old dreams and the future’s wide unknown.
Walter Bennett’s characters and craftsmanship will remind readers of Kent Haruf and Richard Russo.
Praise for The Last First Kiss
“The Last First Kiss has everything a good novel needs: compelling characters so real you have the sensation they are old friends, a story that is at once romantic, precise, and without one whiff of the delusional. It is a story that leads to the deepest, most human sense of recognition. The Last First Kiss is for anyone who has fallen in love when young and thought about it later and longed for a second chance. I’ve read very few books that were equal to a line from T.S. Eliot, “mixing memory and desire…,” but The Last First Kiss is surely one of them. If you are grownup, you need this book now, and if you are young, you will need it soon.”
— Craig Nova, author of The Good Son and Cruisers
“Here is the story of an American generation, the Sixties, of all our lost young loves, and a brilliant meditation on the passing and relevance of time. An approaching hurricane adds increasing drama to the revelations from the past and the growing attraction between these two absolutely real and deeply drawn characters. Walter Bennett has written a compulsively readable novel which rings true all the way through.”
— Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill and Dimestore, A Writer’s Life
“The Last First Kiss is the generous-hearted story of a man and a woman, both in their seventies, who spend a weekend together in an old beach house, hoping to escape the confusion and pain in their pasts, looking to create something clarifying, even intimate, for the future. Maybe they are simply “seeking rebirth in old age,” as she says at one point. There are egrets and herons in these pages, "a large doe crossing a finger of water;” they form the backdrop for this engaging tale about the power and pull of memory, the power and pull of love. I was totally enthralled.”
— Judy Goldman, author of A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap, published by Nan A. Talese/Knopf Doubleday
Walter Bennett’s literary range is startling. From the surefooted Leaving Tuscaloosa, a coming-of-age novel set in Civil Rights era Alabama, to this new novel, The Last First Kiss. At first blush it seems like a beach romance between old sweethearts with the menace of an impending hurricane adding tension to their reunion. But Bennett rips the covers off their comfort as they revisit the 50-some years they did not share. He writes with utter authority.
— Georgann Eubanks, author of Literary Trails of North Carolina and Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction
“All that’s really important to know in this wild and evocative novel is that the human heart will prevail amid the most violent storms, and the words we bandy about are no match for what we silently know deep in our bones.”
— Dannye Romine Powell, Charlotte Observer, Raleigh News & Observer
Walter Bennett’s The Last First Kiss is a true gem of a novel, finely cut, brilliantly polished, and chosen from excellent stone. He’s taken what could have been a simple love story and imbued it with such honesty, originality, and sincerity that it rises above its genre and into rarely visited territory. The book is a gift of clean prose, realistic dialogue, a setting that leaps from the page, and, most of all, two characters who transcend labels and carry us into the complicated depths of human individuality. Bennett ventures bravely into aspects of life—aging, regret, imperfection, doubt—that most writers glide across or avoid entirely. I admired this book greatly and enjoyed it from first page to last.
— Roland Merullo, Author of Breakfast with Buddha and A Little Love Story
“Reads like a play, with lovely and expressive passages throughout… A quiet, conversational late-in-life love story.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“[I]f you pass this book by, you will miss some of the best writing to come out of the recent North Carolina literary scene.”
— D.G. Martin, Chapelboro.com
“What a work of art…. not only a good story, but also a great deal of wisdom about life and love.”
— Linda Brinson, Greensboro News & Record
“A powerful novel about endings, new beginnings, and forays into the past that provide a literary examination of hurricanes that batter both the Outer Banks and the inner souls of those who live in the eye of the storm.”