The Finkler Question

Author: Howard Jacobson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608196127
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
"He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one..." Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor's grand, central London apartment. It's a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends' losses. And it's that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change. The Finkler Question is a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, ageing, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.

The Finkler Question

Author: Howard Jacobson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408812045
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Book Description
______________ WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE ______________ 'Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding. It is also beautifully written with that sophisticated and near invisible skill of the authentic writer' - Observer 'Wonderful ... Jacobson is seriously on form' - Evening Standard ______________ Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and together with Treslove they share a sweetly painful evening revisiting a time before they had loved and lost. It is that very evening, when Treslove hesitates a moment as he walks home, that he is attacked - and his whole sense of who and what he is slowly and ineluctably changes. ______________ 'How is it possible to read Howard Jacobson and not lose oneself in admiration for the music of his language, the power of his characterisation and the penetration of his insight? ... The Finkler Question is further proof, if any was needed, of Jacobson's mastery of humour' - The Times 'There are few writers who exhibit the same unawed respect for language or such a relentless commitment to re-examining even the most seemingly unobjectionable of received wisdoms' - Daily Telegraph

Kalooki Nights

Author: Howard Jacobson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416543430
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 467

Book Description
Longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and hailed by "The Times" (London) as Ra work of genius, S Jacobson's exquisitely written, audaciously funny novel explores the countless questions of postwar Jewish identity.

Live a Little

Author: Howard Jacobson
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473563801
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
'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*

The Mighty Walzer

Author: Howard Jacobson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1783198354
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 125

Book Description
Oliver Walzer is shy, bookish, Jewish. He doesn’t know how to talk to girls. But he can slice, flick and spin a ping pong ball better than any teenager in Manchester. Oliver channels his frustrated adolescent lust into the game he loves. That is until the heartbreaking Lorna Peachley and the prospect of a place at Cambridge take his eye off the ball.

The Making of Henry

Author: Howard Jacobson
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307428966
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
Man Booker Prize–Winning Author of THE FINKLER QUESTION Swathed in his kimono, drinking tea from his samovar, Henry Nagle is temperamentally opposed to life in the 21st century. Preferring not to contemplate the great intellectual and worldly success of his best boyhood friend, he argues constantly with his father, an upholsterer turned fire-eater–and now dead for many years. When he goes out at all, Henry goes after other men’s wives. But when he mysteriously inherits a sumptuous apartment, Henry’s life changes, bringing on a slick descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson, an excitable red setter, and a wise-cracking waitress with a taste for danger. All of them demand his attention, even his love, a word which barely exists in Henry’s magisterial vocabulary, never mind his heart. From one of England’s most highly regarded writers, The Making of Henry is a ravishing novel, at once wise, tender and mordantly funny.

Coming From Behind

Author: Howard Jacobson
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446412997
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
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...

Running with Light

Author: Luke Davies
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1952533252
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 85

Book Description
With his collection Absolute Event Horizon and the novel Candy, Luke Davies has quickly established himself as one of Australia's most thoughtful and unflinching writers. Running With Light sees him delivering on the promise of his earlier work, as well as branching out in rich new directions, as he wrestles vigorously with ways of appreciating the physical and emotional worlds in all their complexity. Balancing on the dividing line between the colloquial and the formal, Davies presents himself and the universe around him in a way that makes the familiar disconcertingly foreign, and the foreign strangely familiar. In doing so, he causes us to look again at the world and ourselves through surprising, provoking filters. Confronting in its exploration of love, mortality and our aloneness, Running With Light is a volume that encourages us to engage with the sanctity of our elemental surroundings, and to recognize ourselves there.

Roots Schmoots

Author: Howard Jacobson
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1468305794
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
When fast-breaking political events forced British novelist Jacobson (Peeping Tom) to put off a trip to Lithuania planned as a search for his Jewish roots, he accepted an offer from the BBC to visit Jewish communities around the globe instead. This informed and witty account of his experiences deals with the wide variety of contemporary Jewish life, as well as with how Jacobson's observations affected his own concept of what it means to be a Jew. Riding an emotional roller coaster, he witnessed the hostility between Jews and African Americans in New York City, attended services in a gay synagogue in California and found his basic cynicism about religion reinforced after he spent time with Orthodox Jews in Israel, although his spirits were lifted by a visit to an idealistic, tolerant Israeli kibbutz. His journey concluded with the postponed trip to Lithuania, where the author found virulent anti-Semitism.

Trials of the Diaspora

Author: Anthony Julius
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199600724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 870

Book Description
The first ever comprehensive history of anti-Semitism in England, from medieval murder and expulsion through to contemporary forms of anti-Zionism in the 21st century.