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Shelf Life: Howard Jacobson on five books that changed his life

There are many books that depict the permutations of growing older

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Reading lists

The best books that celebrate old age

The Merchant of Venice Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare)

Shylock is My Name

The Merchant of Venice, Retold

Howard Jacobson has written eighteen novels and six works of non-fiction. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question; he was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for J.

Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is brilliantly reinvented by Howard Jacobson, in his merciless, sharp and funny story of revenge, justice and antisemitism. 
 
With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It’s the beginning of a remarkable friendship... 
 
Howard Jacobson’s version of The Merchant of Venice bends time to its own advantage as it asks what it means to be a father, a Jew and a merciful human being in the modern world. 
 
‘Inspired...It does what any good literary subversion should do: deepens and enhances one's appreciation of the original’ Guardian 
 
‘Jacobson’s prose has the sort of elastic precision you only get from a writer who is truly in command… There's also deep and sincere soul-searching going on here’ Independent 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

What Will Survive of Us

A tender love story... Jacobson&rsquo;s sentences have always been things of beauty: ornate yet vigorous

A rare gift and one to be treasured

Something more subtle and melancholy than expected. In the best possible way, fans of Jacobson will not be disappointed

Essential human truths are conveyed through humour, melancholy and kinetic dialogue

Equal parts funny and challenging, this is a clear-eyed view of long-term love

A wonderfully wise, moving and heartfelt novel. A profound and vital book

Howard Jacobson at his finest. An intense expression of romantic love and sexual desire

Linda Grant, author of The Story of the Forest

Jacobson has lost none of his garrulity and ebullience&hellip; What Will Survive of Us powers along with stretches of nimble verbal exchange in which the opponents are equally matched. And you're never far from a profound reflection on life's challenges

Funny, self-knowing and floridly romantic

Love can change your life. Can it survive marriage and middle age? 
 
‘Wonderfully wise, moving and heartfelt’ WILLIAM BOYD 
 
‘A tender love story’ DAILY TELEGRAPH 
 
*LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2025* 
 
Lily falls in love with Sam the minute she sets eyes on him. It takes Sam a day or two longer. Curious, because Lily has never quite believed in love, while Sam thought he understood it inside out. 
 
Lily, a documentary maker, and Sam, a playwright, are both in relationships that have quietly expired, and an affair takes hold that they are powerless to resist. 
 
Arriving in mid-life, their relationship opens unexpected new worlds. But what will happen to them when familiarity and age begin to take their toll? What will survive? 
 
‘Celebrates love in later life’ 
HARPER’S BAZAAR 
 
‘Playful, knowing…a romping read in all senses’ 
EVENING STANDARD 
 
‘Jacobson at his finest’ 
LINDA GRANT

Pussy

A provocatively entertaining, savagely funny satire on Donald Trump by Britain’s greatest comic novelist. 
 
Pussy is the story of Prince Fracassus, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its golden-gated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality shows on TV, imagining himself to be the Roman Emperor Nero, and fantasizing about hookers. He is idle, boastful, thin-skinned and egotistic; has no manners, no curiosity, no knowledge, no ideas and no words in which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again? 
 
'Deliciously laugh-aloud nasty about not just the making of this rough beast but what in the American character enabled it to go slouching into the White House' Mail on Sunday 
 
'Undigested rage, whip-smart wit devastating fluency and an aim as straight as an arrow… This is the story, savagely well told by our greatest comic novelist, of how we got in the state we’re in' Oldie

A Writer's Beginnings

Mother's Boy

A wonderful memoir, written with great linguistic brio. Candid, shrewd and moving - a classic of its kind.

Howard Jacobson has always been hilariously brilliant at writing fictional versions of his life. He can, it turns out, also tell the real story with all that brilliance and hilarity, with the added gain for the reader of finding out what - and who - made him that writer.

Side-splittingly funny and serious, too, Howard Jacobson has written one of the all-time great memoirs.

Mother's Boy is a synthesis of his life's work...as well as an original story... it is every bit as funny.

Laugh-out-loud glorious and uproarious of course - but don't let the self-ribbing fool you; this is deep and poignant.

Mining down to the roots of his creativity, Mother's Boy is very funny, profoundly serious and demonically fluent. If there is a better contemporary account of the cost of becoming a writer, I've yet to read it

Howard Jacobson meticulously chronicles his lifetime of failures. But with the rat-a-tat-tat delivery of a great stand-up, he brilliantly transforms calamity into rip-roaring comedy.

Pure delight. Witty, sometimes acid observations jostle with tender reminiscences and enduringly wise insights into what it is to be a Jew, a man, a human being. Its joys help explain why Howard Jacobson is rightly regarded as one of Britain's very greatest writers.

Utterly captivating... behind the comical grandiosity of Mother's Boy, there is a sense of something much graver and more sombre, to do with...lifelong struggle.

I was totally absorbed at every stage. . . It is a joy to read. . . I believe it will become a classic.

This memoir, at once hilarious and poignant, braids together a brilliant stand-up comedian's depiction of a Jewish child's coming-of age in mid-20th-century England with a subtle, nuanced account of the growth of a novelist's mind. Crafted in a vivid, resourceful English in which Yiddish repeatedly surfaces as the mot juste, Mother's Boy is a thrilling book, full of tenderness, rage, and sharp intelligence.

[A] wonderfully funny, moving memoir.

A wisecracking memoir about growing up in Jewish working-class Manchester.

This memoir, full of the bittersweet and the humorous, relates vividly, touchingly, and often self-flagellatingly his [Jacobson's] experiences of childhood...school...jobs...and, along the way, two marriages.

Exquisite elegance... Few Jewish writers, except possibly for Isaac Bashevis Singer or Bernard Malamud, document so well the paradoxes of Jewish life in a Western society.

[An] enjoyable memoir...[Jacobson] makes a powerful case for a wider and deeper array of Jewish stories.

Instantly engaging and sublimely intelligent.

Moving... at the end of the book in a breathtaking scene, one of the best Jacobson has written.

The vivid prose and comic episodes make the book a marvellously entertaining read throughout.

A laugh-out-loud funny, yet sentimental, memoir... Like all great memoirs, Mother's Boy is equal parts acerbic, tender, and indiscreet.

It is said that fiction writers' autobiographies reveal much less about themselves than their fiction does. But this is certainly not the case with Howard Jacobson. Be it in Manchester or Melbourne, Cambridge or London, his recollections are forensic. In Mother's Boy, he has exposed his family, his faults and his failings. And it is still funny.

'One of the all-time great memoirs' Daily Telegraph 
'Wonderful...candid, shrewd and moving' William Boyd 
'Laugh-out-loud glorious and uproarious' Simon Schama 
 
Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer. 
 
Howard Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother's Boy, he traces the life that brought him there. Born into a working-class Jewish family in 1940s Manchester, he did not lack encouragement or subject matter. Jacobson takes us from childhood and studying at Cambridge, through landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor, and on to his first marriage and the birth of his son. Later, he begins new - and often surprising - ventures in places as disparate as London, Wolverhampton, Boscastle and Melbourne. 
 
Infused with bittersweet memories of Jacobson's parents and friends, this is the story of a writer's beginnings, and of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be. 
 
'Hilariously brilliant' David Baddiel 
 
'Howard Jacobson brilliantly transforms calamity into rip-roaring comedy' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Live a Little

A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question

A joyous new novel… A life-affirming tale of late-flowering love… if we manage to live a little longer, we might have the privilege of enjoying more novels such as this one.

Let’s pause to consider [Howard Jacobson’s] comic elegance and precision… Just look at the way he makes the English language dance for us… the characters, as they converse, striking sparks off one another.

Brilliantly observed… No other novelist writing in Britain could dramatise this nonagenarian love story with greater verve and tenderness, while never forgetting that this is a resplendently comedic form.

[Howard Jacobson] is not one to let the catastrophe of old age get in the way of a good laugh, or a surprisingly tender love story… [Live a Little is] merrily bonkers… This book is alive. It pulses with warmth and intelligence, and, unusually for a novel about old age, it has a lot of style.

A master of the slightly dark comedy… Jacobson brings this little pocket of North London to life superbly, and his two ageing protagonists are wonderful creations, depicted with wit and compassion.

A thoroughly enjoyable read. For a literature snob and a language obsessive… there is a lot to feast on… for someone looking for an emotionally honest storyline, the book also delivers.

Howard Jacobson is a rather rare bird among contemporary novelists, for he devotes himself to what Arnold Bennett called the great cause of cheering us all up. So one opens a new Jacobson novel in the expectation of pleasure… Jacobson’s observations are as acute and funny as ever.

This is a soft-hearted novel, warm and optimistic… [with] nimble, chewy sentences… there is writing to relish on every page.

With effortless precision… [Jacobson’s] exceedingly funny and discursive prose style often belies more serious observations on life… There are opportunities for humour, redemption and hope regardless of how close the end is.

A meander of a novel that nonetheless feels urgent… it’s rarely less than bitterly funny in its determination to face up to the obliteration that awaits us all.

Witty and razor sharp… Almost forty years after the publication of his first novel, Jacobson shows that he has lost none of his verve, insight or ability to write dark comedy.

A tender story of unlikely love… Wise, witty, and deftly crafted.

As vigorous and darkly mirthful as it is tender… [Live a Little has] unparalleled linguistic verve. Vintage Jacobson.

A darkly funny geriatric love story… Jacobson is nearing eighty, and Live a Little is one of those late-life novels full of such wisdom and insight that it makes you wonder why anyone ever bothers reading – or watching – the young at all.

A joyful excess of invention… Here love is a grave matter, but then skulls are famous for their grins.

Jacobson's familiar wit and whimsy combine with verve and tenderness in this narrative of nonagenarian love found along Finchley Road… witty banter and enjoyment of conversation is at the very heart of the novel.

A tender and insightful portrait of unlikely love blossoming in old age.

We can forgive Mr Jacobson anything for the sake of his wit and wisdom… Readers would be ungrateful not to allow themselves an occasional smile or chortle.

You will be hard pushed to find a more enjoyable novel to get stuck into… Thanks to its warmth, humanity and humour, Live a Little feels like the ideal book for these autumnal months.

Jacobson has a wonderful ear for language…he is compassionate, funny and occasionally very profound.

'A . . . tender love story . . . This book is alive. It pulses with warmth and intelligence' The Times 
 
A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. 
 
At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything – including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two carers with tangled tales of her husbands and affairs. 
 
Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he’s whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. He forgets nothing –especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has long hung over him. There's very little left remaining for either of them. . . But perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left. 
 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020*

Shakespeare's Magnanimity

Lively, free-ranging and entertaining essays on four tragic heroes that bring something fresh and unfamiliar to the field of Shakespearean studies - co-authored by Wilbur Sanders and the Man Booker prizewinning novelist Howard Jacobson

The field of Shakespearean studies is cluttered with the fossils of past discussion, and somehow we have to pick our way around them. In the opening scene to this unusual book, these obstructive entities are brought to life and engage in lively argument. Four essays on Hamlet, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus follow, all of which freshen the air: unfamiliar, unspecialised, free-ranging and openly argumentative, but tied at all points to the original text. Shakespeare wrote out of, and about, a common humanity, and it is with humanity, common and uncommon, that we must read or watch him. This book is accordingly addressed to the academic or the new student.

J: A Novel

A life-changing novel by one of Britain's greatest novelists, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2010

Remarkable… May well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times

Snarling, effervescent and ambitious… Jacobson’s triumph is to craft a novel that is poignant as well as troubling

Jacobson…goes from strength to strength.

Very little about Jacobson’s circuitous romance-cum-murder mystery is straightforward – other than its originality and its devastating brilliance.

A dystopia that invites comparison with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

To say J is unlike any other novel Jacobson has written would be misleading: the same ferocious wit runs throughout… That said, comparisons do not do full justice to Jacobson’s achievement in what may well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times.

A snarling, effervescent and ambitious philosophical work of fiction… Jacobson’s triumph is to craft a novel that is poignant as well as troubling.

Jacobson once jokingly referred to himself as a Jewish Jane Austen. Here he reinvents himself as a Jewish Aldous Huxley – and displays mastery in the role.

Jacobson has crafted an immersive, complex experience with care and guile.

J is a remarkable achievement: an affecting, unsettling – and yes, darkly amusing – novel.

A provocatively dystopian novel that depicts a disturbingly nice world.

Sufficient testament to a writer who is…producing some of his most powerful work.

A subtle, topical, thought-provoking and painfully uncomfortable novel.

You can’t help feeling that this is an important book, and it’s hugely compelling… Worthy of its status as a Booker long-listee.

Jacobson’s most significantly Jewish book and quite possibly his masterpiece.

The persistent reader will be duly rewarded, as the denouement reveals a hidden logic and the book climaxes with a brilliant literary (and philosophical) coup.

Contemporary literature is overloaded with millenarian visions of destroyed landscapes and societies in flames, but Jacobson has produced one that feels frighteningly new by turning the focus within: the ruins here are the ruins of language, imagination, love itself.

The savagery of his imagery and his conclusions are impossible to forget, and maybe even to deny.

Confounds expectations but confirms Jacobson’s reputation.

I loved this book. A compelling tale that is bound to be a hot contender for the Booker.

Impressive, disturbingly timely – a massive step aside and a noticeable step up from most of his other fiction.

A pivotal – and impressive change of direction for [Jacobson].

Sentence by sentence, he remains perhaps the best British author around.

This is Jacobson at his provocative, surprising, brilliant best.

Thrilling written and the most ambitious work on the shortlist… Once you’ve worked out what’s going on, you’ll be gripped by its hints of an anti-Semitic armageddon.

A brilliant conspiracy yarn examining the manipulation of collective memory.

It's not just the subject of this book that will shock Jacobson fans, its distinct narrative style also comes as a surprise. A pleasant one at that.

A dystopian vision, haunting and memorable

It’s a triumph of creative writing. I finished it and started it again

Jacobson has written a subtle, topical, thought-provoking and painfully uncomfortable novel

The funniest British novelist since Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe

chilling and provocative, Jacobson is at the height of his powers here

A thought-provoking prescient novel from the Booker-prize winning author of The Finkler Question. 
 
‘Remarkable…May well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times’ Guardian 
 
Two people fall in love, not yet knowing where they have come from or where they are going. 
 
 They aren’t sure if they have fallen in love of their own accord, or whether they’ve been pushed into each other’s arms. But who would have pushed them, and why? 
 
 Hanging over their lives is a momentous catastrophe – a past event shrouded in suspicion, denial and apology, now referred to as What Happened, If It Happened. 
 
 Set in the future – a world where the past is a dangerous country, not to be talked about or visited – J is a love story of incomparable strangeness, both tender and terrifying. 
 
 Shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize and Longlisted for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize.

The Act of Love

'The Act of Love is naked, haunting, unflinching. Its account of sexual obsession is frightening, painful and finally very moving. A tour de force' - Harold Pinter

It's Jacobson's genius that he uses Felix's perversion as a torture garden in which a hundred interlinked images, theories, arguments, stories and literary allusions flourish and blossom... A startling achievement: shocking, argumentative, funny, rude, querulous, intellectually bracing

A gloriously literary, highly wrought narrative as darkly transgressive, as savage in its brilliance, as anything Jacobson has written... Jacobson is a connoisseur of the harm lovers inflict on each other: he rolls their recriminations on his tongue, savours the bile, relishes the sticky sweetness of passion, and tastes the salty tears that can never quench the perpetual thirst for love

The narrative is masterly. Entertaining as well as erudite, it prompts reflections upon art, obsession, masculinity, betrayal and the nature of the erotic... serves above all to confirm his creator's mighty individual talent. There surely cannot be a more vigorously intelligent novelist than Howard Jacobson writing in this country today

Howard Jacobson injects a kind of molten energy into English that makes it move like another language altogether... Obsession, hidden desires and the salacious thrill of voyeurism all play their part in this brawny tale of love's flagellant

Intense, powerful, surprisingly funny, totally affecting and deeply touching

An impressively sustained, and unusually intense, literary experiment

He is a master of the comedy of social awkwardness... Jacobson is playing a sophisticated literary game, in this most literate of novels

Mesmerising...also as delightfully funny a novel as one would expect from Jacobson, who revels in language and in the perverse spell it can cast... The Act of Love is spellbinding, not just in its characterisation, or in its simplicity of plot, in the flirtatiousness with which Jacobson courts language, or the stylish sardonic humour that seems to come so easily, but in its entirety

The Act of Love, like Jacobson's other work, contains a rich vein of humour...Intelligent and erudite, Felix is a fascinating character

Jacobson's page-turning account of sexual obsession is replete with erudite flourishes and sophisticated insight

One of the author's most affecting, honest and brilliant works. It is a searingly well written piece by a ridiculously underrated novelist

Entertaining... Jacobson's prose is incisive and off-kilter, abrasive and often hilarious

Felix Quinn, the narrator of the book...explains it beautifully - and this is a very good novel... Feeling unsafe makes him feel alive. And loss, of course, is the wellspring of good storytelling

The Act of Love is an ambitious and at times extremely uncomfortable novel

It is an almost frighteningly brilliant achievement. Why did the Booker judges not recognise it?

Jacobson's 10th novel is a moving, thought-provoking and darkly witty story of desire and love

No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else. 
 
Felix Quinn calls himself a happy man. He owns one of London's oldest antiquarian bookshops. He is married to and adores the beautiful Marisa. But a childhood experience has taught him that loss is intrinsic to love, and Felix realises that he can only be truly happy if his wife is sleeping with another man. Enter Marius into Marisa's affections. And now Felix must ask himself, is he really happy? 
 
By the winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

No More Mr Nice Guy

'A savage and scabrously entertaining sex comedy, the likes of which I have not encountered since Philip Roth's masterly Sabbath's Theater' - Sunday Times

A savage and scabrously entertaining sex comedy

Howard Jacobson is one of the funniest writers alive…his writing pulsates with nerve and edge; it is colossal in comic precision

Howard Jacobson is one of the funniest writers around... It's hard to imagine a more entertaining book

A very funny, very intelligent novel... How many of Jacobson's contemporaries have described the male condition with such wry, unsparing honesty?

Brilliant and funny... No More Mr Nice Guy shows invention on every page, every paragraph. Jacobson is unique

Frank Ritz is a television critic. His partner, Melissa Paul, is the author of pornographic novels for liberated women. He watches crap all day; she writes crap all day. It's a life. Or it was a life. But now they're fighting, locked in oral combat. He won't shut up and she is putting her finger down her throat again. So there's only one thing for it - Frank has to go. 
 
But go where? And do what? Frank Ritz has been on heat more or less continuously since he could speak his own name. Let him out of the house and his first instinct is to go looking for sex. Deviant sex, treacherous sex, even straight sex, so long as it's immoderate - he's never been choosy. But what happens when sex is all you know but no longer what you want?

The Making of Henry

A riotous comedy about the ghosts of the past and the surprises of the present, from the master of farce and winner of the Man Booker Prize 2010.

One of the country's very best writers. The British Philip Roth

Jacobson's writing is as luscious and funny as ever... You're never far from comic brilliance

This is a beautifully rounded portrait of a man gazing into the prism of the past... And love, no less, is the key, exquisitely articulated and celebrated

Terrific... Jacobson is at the top of his form

What elevates The Making of Henry..is the way it talks about love. That, and being funny

This is brilliantly, biliously funny. It is also painfully, movingly sad...Expansive and compassionate...  Sharp and hilarious, this latest novel shows Jacobson at his best

One day, out of the blue, Henry Nagel inherits a sumptuous apartment in St John's Wood. Divine intervention? Or his late father's love nest? Henry doesn't know, but he is glad to escape the North. After nearly sixty years of angry disappointment, Henry's life is about to change. 
 
Not that the ghosts of Henry's past are prepared to disappear without a struggle - his old school-friend and rival Osmond 'Hovis' Belkin, currently enjoying success in Hollywood; his tragic great aunt Marghanita for whom Henry once entertained a dangerous passion; and his father Izzi, upholsterer turned illusionist, fire-eater and origamist, whose shade Henry interrogates relentlessly. But the present clamours as loudly as the past. His dyspeptic neighbour Lachlan wants his sympathy; Lachlan's sloppy red setter, Angus, wants a walk; and Moira, the waitress with the crooked smile and custard hair, seems to want him. Kicking and screaming every inch of the way, Henry realises he might finally be falling in love.

Coming From Behind

'A very funny, bitterly intelligent novel...do read it' - Malcolm Bradbury

Howard Jacobson is one of the funniest writers alive... His writing pulsates with nerve and edge; it is colossal in its comic precision; at its best it simply tears you apart

Lucky Jim undated... Witty, observant, clever, a first-rate entertainment and something more besides

Jacobson's humour is unashamedly savage and his jokes as sharp as a switch-blade... comic vitriol worthy of Evelyn Waugh

The funniest book I’ve ever read… Every line is funny in a cutting, clever way

Every word of this novel rings true, and nothing is funnier than the truth. But as a master of creating laughter on the edge of pain, Jacobson also likes us to think

In an ever divided Britain, this wryly observed novel is a timely and thought-provoking read from the Booker-winning author of The Finkler Question. 
 
'A very funny, bitterly intelligent novel...do read it' Malcolm Bradbury 
 
Sefton Goldberg: mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands; small, sweaty, lustful, defiantly unappreciative of beer, nature and organised games; gnawingly aware of being an urban Jew islanded in a sea of country-loving Anglo-Saxons. Obsessed by failure - morbidly, in his own case, gloatingly, in that of his contemporaries - so much so that he plans to write a bestseller on the subject. 
 
In the meantime he is uncomfortably aware of advancing years and atrophying achievement, and no amount of lofty rationalisation can disguise the triumph of friends and colleagues, not only from Cambridge days but even within the despised walls of the Poly itself, or sweeten the bitter pill of another's success...

Who's Sorry Now

'A raunchy comic novel from a contemporary master of sexual imbroglios' Observer

Marvin Kreitman, the luggage baron of South London, lives for sex. Or at least he lives for women. At present he loves four women - his mother, his wife Hazel, and his two daughters - and is in love with five more. Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, nice Charlie, loves just the one woman, also called Charlie, the wife with whom he has been writing children's books and having nice sex for twenty years. Once a week the two friends meet for a Chinese lunch, contriving never quite to have the conversation they would like to have - about fidelity and womanising, and which makes you happier. Until today. It is Charlie who takes the dangerous step of asking for a piece of Marvin's disordered life, but what follows embroils them all, the wives no less than the husbands. And none of them will ever be the same again.

Peeping Tom

'The funniest book about sex ever written' - Time Out

Brilliantly funny and inventive-An astonishing display of irreverent wit, marvellous situational set-pieces and biting one-liners

Howard Jacobson comes from behind the "tropic swamps of the imagination" to drag admirers into them again, kicking and screaming and laughing our heads off

Barney Fugleman has two major preoccupations in life: sex and literature. He is obsessed by the life and work of a man hailed by many as a genius of the nineteenth century - and by Barney as a 'prurient little Victorian ratbag'. 
 
This curious propulsion drives him out of Finchley, and out of the life he shares with Sharon and her 'rampant marvellings', to Cornwall. There he offends serious ramblers with his slip-on snakeskin shoes, fur coat and antagonism to all things green and growing as he stomps the wild Atlantic cliffs on long, morbid walks, tampering with the truth, tangling with the imperious Camilla - and telling a riotous tale. 
 
By the winner of the Man Booker Prize and author of The Finkler Question.

Redback

'The most dangerously funny writer in the English language' - Sunday Times

It makes one laugh... and that is a gift above rubies

Redback does for Australia what Clive James has done for England... Literate, outrageously and consistently very funny

The most beguiling innovation in British letters in years. Rude, stylish, conversational, pithy, anecdotal, ruminative, fantastical, self-deprecating, allusive

Dazzlingly, brilliantly clever; and side-splittingly, knee-slappingly funny

Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize. 
 
Karl Leon Forelock is a product of the northern English town of Partington (the wettest spot in Europe) and a graduate with a double starred first in the Moral Decencies from Malapert college, Cambridge. Sent to Sydney on a CIA bursary on a mission to teach the Australians how to live, Leon quickly discovers that there are some natives who believe that they have an education to pass on in return. But it is at the hands of the women in Australia that Leon receives his most painful, and on occasions his most pleasurable, lessons. 
 
Meanwhile, in a foul, dilapidated bush privy, way up in the Bogong high plains, the Redback sucks her teeth and waits her turn...

The Mighty Walzer

'Poignant, moving, hilarious...laugh-out-loud funny...the sort of book that might change your life' - Observer

Jacobson is a great storyteller: phrases, anecdotes and atmosphere roll off the page with the ease and sublime, scary grace of drunken eels...he is unsurpassable

This mature novel has the sustained exuberance and passion of his youthful writing...an achingly funny book...an amazing acheivement... There are few novelists today who can imbue the trifles of life with such poetry

Marvellous. Jacobson has not just written the first great novel about ping-pong. He has written one of the greatest sporting novels ever...a towering work of authority

Jacobson's humour is unashamedly savage and his jokes as sharp as a switch-blade...comic vitriol worthy of Evelyn Waugh

From the beginning Oliver Walzer is a natural - at ping-pong. Even with his improvised bat (the Collins Classic edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) he can chop, flick, half-volley like a champion. At sex he is not so adept, but with tuition from Sheeny Waxman, fellow member of the Akiva Social Club Table Tennis Team and stalwart of the Kardomah coffee bar, his game improves. 
 
Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

Kalooki Nights

A blackly comic novel from the British Philip Roth, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize

In this age of lazy reviewing, facile judgment and inflated rhetoric, how is one to convey news of the arrival of a work of genius? This powerful, troubling, moving, profound novel is nothing less…What really steals one's breath away is…a sharpness that flays, and a depth almost too vertiginous to describe - and the remorseless tragedy it unfolds, even as it makes one laugh aloud, sometimes in shock. It is the most intelligent and important novel to appear in this country in years.

This is turbocharged; someone has put a rocket under Jacobson and the result is scintillating....Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dream, with a complete mastery of technique...He can have you in stitches either with a long, beautifully timed paragraph or with a mere two words...

The raging, contentious, hilarious, holy, deicidal, heartbreaking Kalooki Nights is a novel that stands toe-to-toe with the greats

Kalooki Nights is a book to laugh at, learn from and argue with

Very funny...a rich, dense book...not so much like reading a novel as sharing a train carriage with its narrator...There is much to learn and a good deal to enjoy

Kalooki Nights is far and away Jacobson's most ambitious, most fully realised and, above all, most entertaining novel. For its near reckless bravery it deserves some kind of literary VC

Develops into a profound and despairing examination of modern life

This is a welcome return to the bittersweet Yiddish-inspired humour at which Jacobson excels, and which has rightly earned him comparisons with Philip Roth...a gloriously pugnacious novel which, not unlike the fiction of Kingsley Amis in his pomp, wants to take on all-comers

It is likely to be the funniest book published this year...prose sharper and brighter than any of his contemporaries...The jacket says Jacobson has won just one prize for his novels...[Kalooki Nights] deserves to redress the injustices meted out on its author

Broadsheet reviewers had praised it as a 'work of genius' - and they were right. The book is Jacobson's masterpiece. The writing is flawless, with the author's trademark blending of tragedy and comedy. A ferocious intelligence courses through it, reminiscent of Philip Roth at his 'Counterlife' best

The biggest laugh and the biggest cry since Angela Carter's Small Children

‘This book is Jacobson’s masterpiece’ Jonathan Freedland 
 
'A work of genius' A.C. Grayling, The Times 
 
Wild, angry and uproarious, Kalooki Nights is a darkly comic, timely novel of what it means to be human. 
 
 Max Glickman is son to an atheist boxer, Jack 'The Jew' Glickman, and a glamorous card-playing mother. Growing up in the peace and security of the 1950s Manchester suburbs, the word 'extermination' haunts his vocabulary and Nazis lurk in his imagination. 
When his childhood friend Manny is released from prison, the tug of religion and history proves too strong to be ignored and Max must accept there is no refuge from the dead... 
 
 'Raging, contentious, hilarious, holy, deicidal, heart-breaking’ Sunday Telegraph

Howard Jacobson

One can howl, of course, with despair, or with laughter: brilliantly, this book combines the two

Bold and brilliant, Howl is Howard Jacobson at his finest. A challenging novel that demands to be read and talked about

Howard Jacobson’s Howl is fearless, furious and unbearably tender - a darkly comic reckoning with history, identity and what it means to stay sane when the world is coming apart. It's a rare novel that feels absolutely of this moment and is also destined to stand the test of time.

Historians can tell you why antisemitism happens, but it takes a great novelist to tease out all the ways it makes Jews feel, about the world and about themselves. Howard Jacobson has a unique eye for the combination of pain and absurdity that this ancient hatred brings to bear on Jewish sensibilities, and an irresistible, shocking wit in its telling.

Howard Jacobson’s appetite for fiction is insatiable. He just gets better and better

A tragicomic portrait of one man's unravelling in an absurd, twisted world, Howl is the propulsive new novel from Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson. 
 
'The undisputed British master of black comedies' Observer 
 
In the aftermath of October 7, Ferdinand Draxler walks the streets of London in despair. Everything has changed – the sights, the sound, the spirit. He too is not who he was. Is he at the crossroads of history or is it just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy nature? 
 
The son of a Holocaust survivor who accuses him of cowardice and the father of a daughter who sees him as complicit in genocide, Draxler fixates on bad news. He shouts at the television. He carries his own tin of paint to cover up graffiti. The staffroom at the primary school of which he is headmaster has become a battlefield of inflamed opinion he does nothing to quiet. 
 
His wife Charmian is a beacon of calm but even she isn't sure she can save Ferdie from himself. 'Don't worry about me,' he tells her. 'I don't have what it takes to go mad.' 
 
'Jacobson's writing is virtuoso. He is the master of shifting tones, from the satirical to the serious. His prose has the sort of elastic precision you only get from a writer who is truly in command' Independent

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