Live a Little

Live a Little

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

From Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question and J, and one of 'our funniest writers alive' (Allison Pearson): a wickedly observed novel of old age and new love. 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 long-suffering carers, Nastya and Euphoria, with tangled stories of her husbands and love affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without the aid of a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. Unlike Beryl, he forgets nothing – especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has hung over him ever since. There's very little life 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....
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Pussy

Pussy

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

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 idea and no words in which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again?
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Zoo Time

Zoo Time

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, beautiful but contrary, highly strung and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. Their provocative presence fills Guy's head with stories so wild he can't concentrate to write them.Not that anyone reads anymore, anyway. Reading, Guy fears, is finished. His publisher, fearing the same, has committed suicide. His agent, like all agents, is in hiding. Vanessa, however, is writing her own novel. Guy dreads the consequences...Our funniest writer at his brilliant best, Zoo Time is a novel about love - love of women, love of literature, love of laughter.
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Shylock Is My Name

Shylock Is My Name

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson brings his singular brilliance to this modern re-imagining of one of Shakespeare's most unforgettable characters: Shylock Winter, a cemetery, Shylock. In this provocative and profound interpretation of "The Merchant of Venice," Shylock is juxtaposed against his present-day counterpart in the character of art dealer and conflicted father Simon Strulovitch. With characteristic irony, Jacobson presents Shylock as a man of incisive wit and passion, concerned still with questions of identity, parenthood, anti-Semitism and revenge. While Strulovich struggles to reconcile himself to his daughter Beatrice's "betrayal" of her family and heritage -- as she is carried away by the excitement of Manchester high society, and into the arms of a footballer notorious for giving a Nazi salute on the field -- Shylock alternates grief for his beloved wife with rage against his own daughter's rejection of her Jewish upbringing. Culminating in a...
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The Dog's Last Walk

The Dog's Last Walk

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Hilarious, heartbreaking, provocative and affecting - Howard Jacobson's irresistible journalism reveals the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist in all his humanity. From the tiniest absurdities to the most universal joys and desolations, Jacobson writes with a thunder, passion and wit unmatched. Just as did his previous volume, Whatever It Is I Don't Like It, this glorious, unputdownable collection will delight, entertain, challenge and move.
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Who's Sorry Now?

Who's Sorry Now?

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

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 womanizing, 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.
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Whatever it is, I Don't Like it

Whatever it is, I Don't Like it

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

It takes a particular kind of man to want an embroidered polo player astride his left nipple. Occasionally, when I am tired and emotional, or consumed with self-dislike, I try to imagine myself as someone else, a wearer of Yarmouth shirts and fleecy sweats, of windbreakers and rugged Tyler shorts, of baseball caps with polo players where the section of the brain that concerns itself with aesthetics is supposed to be. But the hour passes. Good men return from fighting Satan in the wilderness the stronger for their struggle, and so do I.The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson, brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and desolation of Wagner's tragedies, Jacobson writes with all the thunder and joy of a man possessed. Absurdity piles upon...
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The Making of Henry

The Making of Henry

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Man Booker Prize--Winning Author of THE FINKLER QUESTIONSwathed 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...
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