BENNY AND SHRIMP

Why is it so impossible to get a relationship to work between two mature single people, driven by an enormous longing and loudly ticking biological clocks ? Especially when they are struck by a totally unexpected passion when they first meet.

In alternate chapters, Benny and Shrimp tell the story of a love that started by mistake in a village cemetery, a love that should not really be as complicated as it seems. She is a childless young widow with a sharp intellect and a home so tidy that even her jam jars are in alphabetical order. He is a gentle, overworked milk farmer, a reluctant loner, who fears becoming the village's Old Bachelor. The attraction between them is powerful. But how will she learn to accept that he falls asleep at the opera and has a house full of his mother's embroidered wall hangings, and how could he ever feel at home in her minimalist apartment, bare as a dentist's waiting room?

In Benny and Shrimp, Katarina Mazetti brilliantly captures the intensity of an unexpected love affair, and the heartbreaking inevitability with which life tends to get in the way.