The Finkler Question

Author(s): Howard Jacobson

Literary Fiction | Prize Winners

Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize. '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?


Product Information

Frequently compared with Philip Roth, Howard Jacobson is one of the greatest British novelists alive When Kalooki Nights was first published A.C. Grayling wrote in The Times: 'How is one to convey news of the arrival of a genius?'. The Independent called it 'a novel of genius', while the Telegraph said 'it stands toe-to-toe with the greats'.

Winner of Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010.

'Our funniest living writer ... No writer cherishes the language more' Allison Pearson, Telegraph Praise for The Act of Love:'It is an almost frighteningly brilliant achievement. Why did the Booker judges not recognise it? Scaredy-cats' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian 'Naked, haunting, unflinching. Its account of sexual obsession is frightening, painful and finally very moving. A tour de force' Harold Pinter 'Jacobson is frequently labelled the British Philip Roth: on this form, Roth should be known as the American Howard Jacobson' Guardian

An award-winning writer and broadcaster, Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester, brought up in Prestwich and was educated at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, and Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His novels include The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Kalooki Nights (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize) and, most recently, the highly acclaimed The Act of Love. Howard Jacobson lives in London.

General Fields

  • : 9781408809105
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : 0.426
  • : June 2010
  • : 234mm X 153mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Howard Jacobson
  • : Paperback
  • : Export and UK open market ed
  • : English
  • : 823/.914
  • : 320