Howard Jacobson has written sixteen novels and five 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.
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.
A mighty novel.Remarkable… May well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its timesThrilling and enigmaticSnarling, effervescent and ambitious… Jacobson’s triumph is to craft a novel that is poignant as well as troublingJacobson…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 WorldMystifying, serious and blackly funny.
