“Who has not dreamed of it? The high school honey from the distant past reappears… In The Last First Kiss, she shows up to visit the septuagenarian widower at his old family beach house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Here is the story of an American generation, the ’60s, 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 that rings true all the way through.”
–Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill and Dimestore: A Writer’s Life
“The question is not if The Last First Kiss is the most necessary, heartbreakingly honest, profoundly moving novel in years, but why this is so. The book 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
“The Last First Kiss is the generous-hearted story of a man and a woman 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. 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
“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 fifty-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
“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. 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