How to Be Both
Ali Smith, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375424106
Summary
How to Be Both is a novel all about art's versatility.
Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s.
Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real—and all life's givens get given a second chance. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Inverness, Scotland, UK
• Education—University of Abderdeen; Cambridge University
• Awards—Whitbread Award
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, England
Ali Smith is a Scottish writer who won the Whitbread Award in 2005 for her novel, The Accidental. To date, she has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times and the Orange Prize twice.
She was born to working-class parents, raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD that she never finished.
She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She then became a full-time writer and now writes for The Guardian, Scotsman, and Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Cambridge, England, with her partner filmmaker Sarah Wood.
Works
Smith is the author of several works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World (2001), which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize in 2001. She won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002. ♦ The Accidental (2007) won the Whitbread Award and was also short-listed for both the Man Booker and Orange Prize. ♦ Her 2011 novel, There But For The, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize and named as a Best Book of the Year by both the Washington Post and Boston Globe. ♦ How to Be Both (2014) was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Her story collections include Free Love, which won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Whole Story and Other Stories.
In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 2009, she donated the short story "Last" (previously published in the Manchester Review Online) to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the "Fire" collection. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/20/2014.)
Book Reviews
Extraordinary.... Warm, funny, subtle, layered, intelligent.... Brilliant.
Spectator (UK)
Exuberant, rhapsodic.... Dizzyingly good and so clever that it makes you want to dance.
New Statesman (UK)
Dazzling indeed.... Smith has written a radical novel, one that becomes two novels, with discrete meanings . . . Those writers making doomy predictions about the death of the novel should read Smith’s re-imagined novel/s, and take note of the life it contains.
Independent (UK)
[A] rich, strong and moving novel.... Ingenious.... A triumph.
Financial Times (UK)
Immensely enjoyable.... Inventive and playful, compassionate and sagacious.... Explores the injustices of life but also its delights, including the pleasures of art and the redemptive power of love.
Express (UK)
An heir to Virginia Woolf, Ali Smith subtly but surely reinvents the novel.... How to Be Both brims with palpable joy, not only at language, literature and art’s transformative power but at the messy business of being human, of wanting to be more than one kind of person at once.
Telegraph (UK)
(Starred review.) British author Smith...a playful, highly imaginative literary iconoclast, surpasses her previous efforts in this inventive double novel that deals with gender issues, moral questions, the mystery of death, the value of art, the mutability of time.... Two books coexist under the same title, each presenting largely the same material arranged differently...a provocative reevaluation of the form.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) This adventurous, entertaining writer offers two distinctive takes on youth, art and death—and even two different editions of the book.... Both are remarkable depictions of the treasures of memory and the rich perceptions and creativity of youth, of how we see what's around us and within us. Comical, insightful and clever, Smith builds a thoughtful fun house with her many dualities.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
History of the Rain
Niall Williams, 2014
Bloomsbury, USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781620406472
Summary
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That’s how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.
So says Ruthie Swain.
The bedridden daughter of a dead poet, home from college after a collapse (Something Amiss, the doctors say), she is trying to find her father through stories—and through generations of family history in County Clare (the Swains have the written stories, from salmon-fishing journals to poems, and the maternal MacCarrolls have the oral) and through her own writing (with its Superabundance of Style).
Ruthie turns also to the books her father left behind, his library transposed to her bedroom and stacked on the floor, which she pledges to work her way through while she’s still living.
In her attic room, with the rain rushing down the windows, Ruthie writes Ireland, with its weather, its rivers, its lilts, and its lows. The stories she uncovers and recounts bring back to life multiple generations buried in this soil—and they might just bring her back into the world again, too. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1958
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—B.A., M.A., University College, Dublin
• Currently—Kiltumper, County Clare, Ireland
Niall Williams is an Irish author and playwright. He studied English and French literature at University College Dublin before graduating with a Master's degree in Modern American Literature.
He moved to New York in 1980 where he married Christine Breen, also a novelist, whom he had met while she was a Master's student also at UCD, and took his first job opening boxes of books in Fox and Sutherland's bookshop in Mount Kisco. He later worked as a copywriter for Avon Books in New York City before leaving America with Chris in 1985 to attempt to make a life as a writer.
Between 1985 and 1997, Niall cowrote four nonfiction books with his wife, recounting the couple's life together in Kiltumper in west Clare. In 1991 Niall's first play The Murphy Initiative was staged at The Abbey Theatre in Dublin. His second play, Little Like Paradise was produced on the Peacock stage of The Abbey Theatre in 1995. His third play, The Way You Look Tonight, was produced by Galway's Druid Theatre Company in 1999.
Novels
Niall's first novel, Four Letters of Love, published in 1997, went on to become an international bestseller and has been published in over twenty countries. ♦ His second novel, As it is in Heaven, published in 1999, was long listed for the Irish Times IMPAC Literary Award. ♦ His third novel, The Fall of Light, was released in Britain and Ireland, France, Italy and America. ♦ His fourth novel, Only Say The Word, came out in 2005 in several countries. ♦ His fifth novel, Boy in the World, published in 2007 was dedicated to his son Joseph. He wrote chapters and sent them to Joseph who was away at boarding school. ♦ Niall continued the story in the sequel, Boy and Man, his sixth novel. ♦ Niall's seventh novel, John, explores the life of John the apostle, who reportedly lived 100 years while awaiting Jesus's return. ♦ His 2014 novel, History of the Rain, has been long listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.
He is at work on several screenplays, including one on his novel Four Letters of Love.
Williams currently lives in west Clare with his wife and two children. He worked as a mentor for MFA students of Carlow University in Pittsburgh. He was also the writer-in-residence for County Sligo, in Ireland, for the previous two years. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/20/2014.)
Book Reviews
[A] unique voice and a droll, comic tone that takes a surprising, serious turn.... The energy, tone, and premise of the book work well; the decision to view Ruthie’s experiences through the lens of literature pays off.... Williams makes so many good stylistic and storytelling choices that his latest is well worth the read.
Publishers Weekly
History of the Rain is charming, wise and beautiful. It is a love letter to Ireland in all its contradictions, to literature and poetry and family. It acknowledges that faith itself is a paradox, both impossible and necessary. And faith carries this novel—faith that stories can save us, that love endures, that acceptance is within reach, and finally, that it is possible to get to the other side of grief.
Shelf Awareness
(Starred review.) Destined to be a classic, [History of the Rain] isn't just the elegy Ruthie offers to the departed but also a love letter to reading and its life-giving powers. [Ruthie's] voice and narrative remain utterly unique even as she invites comparisons to Jim Hawkins, Ishmael, and hosts of legendary literary narrators
Library Journal
(Starred review.) You can smell the peat burning and feel the ever-present mist in acclaimed Irish novelist Williams’ luscious paean to all who lose themselves in books. Williams captures the awe and all of Ireland—its myths and mysteries, miseries and magic—through the pitch-perfect voice of a saucily defiant young woman who has witnessed too much tragedy but who clings devotedly to those she’s lost.
Booklist
A rambling, soft-hearted Irish family saga stuffed with eccentricity, literature, anecdotes, mythology, humor and heartbreak.... [A] long, sentimental, affectionate poem to Irishness generally...and one quirky family in particular that insists on being read at its own erratic pace.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel
Marlon James, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
704 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594486005
Summary
Winner, 2015 Man Booker Prize
On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing.
The attack nearly killed the Reggae superstar, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to perform at the free concert on December 5, but he left the country the next day, not to return for two years.
Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters—assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts—A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the '70s, to the crack wars in ‘80s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the '90s.
Brilliantly inventive and stunningly ambitious, this novel is a revealing modern epic that will secure Marlon James' place among the great literary talents of his generation. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—Kingston, Jamaica
• Education—B.A., University of the West Indies; M.A., Wilkes University
• Awards—Man Booker Prize, Dayton Literary Peace Prize
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn New York City, New York
Marlon James is a Jamaican novelist, who taught English and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and currently is teaching at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York.
James's most recent novel, the 2019 epic fantasy, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, has been compared to an African Game of Thrones. His 2014 novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Seven Killings re-imagines the attempted murder of Bob Marley and a narrative of Jamaican history.
The Book of Night Women, his 2010 novel about a slave woman's revolt in a Jamaican plantation in the early 19th century, won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His earlier novel, John Crow’s Devil, written in 2005, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
James is a graduate of the University of the West Indies where he earned a degree in Literature (1991). Subsequently, he earned his Master's in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/20/2014.)
Book Reviews
How to describe Marlon James's monumental new novel A Brief History of Seven Killings? It's like a Tarantino remake of The Harder They Come but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner, with maybe a little creative boost from some primo ganja. It's epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex. It's also raw, dense, violent, scalding, darkly comic, exhilarating and exhausting—a testament to Mr. James's vaulting ambition and prodigious talent.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
There is always too much history to keep track of…and so a certain kind of novel has evolved to shape narratives out of such chaos, not to find answers, but to capture the way history feels, how it maims, bewilders, enmeshes us…[A Brief History of Seven Killings is] an epic of postcolonial fallout, in Jamaica and elsewhere, and America's participation in that history. In the end, the book is not only persuasive but tragic, though in its polyphony and scope it's more than that…Spoof, nightmare, blood bath, poem, A Brief History of Seven Killings eventually takes on a mesmerizing power. It makes its own kind of music, not like Marley's, but like the tumult he couldn't stop.
Zachary Lazar - New York Times Book Review
[A] tour de force… [an] audacious, demanding, inventive literary work.
Wall Street Journal
Exploding with violence and seething with arousal, the third novel by Marlon James cuts a swath across recent Jamaican history…This compelling, not-so-brief history brings off a social portrait worthy of Diego Rivera, antic and engagé, a fascinating tangle of the naked and the dead.
Washington Post
James has written a dangerous book, one full of lore and whispers and history… [a] great book... James nibbles at theories of who did what and why, and scripts Marley’s quest for revenge with the pace of a thriller. His achievement, however, goes far beyond opening up this terrible moment in the life of a great musician. He gives us the streets, the people, especially the desperate, the Jamaicans whom Marley exhorted to: "Open your eyes and look within:/ Are you satisfied with the life your living?"
Boston Globe
An impressive feat of storytelling: raw, uncompromising, panoramic yet meticulously detailed. The Jamaica portrayed here is one many people have heard songs about but have never seen rendered in such arresting specificity—and if they have, only briefly.
Chicago Tribune
Technically astounding… a wildly ambitious and brilliant book...this stunning counterfactual fiction evokes both the pungency of Faulkner’s Southern gothic Yoknapatawpha novels and the wild tabloid noir of James Ellroy’s White Jazz…[Marlon] James raises fiction's ante throughout this bravura novel.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Brilliantly executed… The novel makes no compromises, but is cruelly and consummately a work of art.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Thrilling, ambitious…Both intense and epic.
Los Angeles Times
A prismatic story of gang violence and Cold War politics in a turbulent post-independence Jamaica.
The New Yorker
Nothing short of awe-inspiring.
Entertainment Weekly
An excellent new work of historical fiction … part crime thriller, part oral history, part stream-of-consciousness monologue.
Rolling Stone
A strange and wonderful novel…Mr. James’s chronicle of late 20th-century Jamaican politics and gang wars manages consistently to shock and mesmerise at the same time.
Economist
The way James uses language is amazing….Vigorous, intricate and captivating, A Brief History of Seven Killings is hard to put down.
Ebony
(Starred review.) Through more than a dozen voices.... [Bob Marley's attempted murder] is portrayed as the inevitable climax of a country shaken by gangs, poverty, and corruption.... [A]sweeping narrative....enables James to build an....indispensable and essential history of Jamaica’s troubled years. This novel should be required reading.
Publishers Weekly
James follows the violent 1976 invasion of Bob Marley's home and its aftermath: spanning countries, decades, and characters.
Library Journal
[T]he book is undeniably overstuffed, with...low-level thugs, CIA-agent banter and...ramblings about Jamaican culture.... [A] remarkable portrait of Jamaica in the 19th and 20th centuries, but the novel’s sprawl can be demanding. An ambitious and multivalent, if occasionally patience-testing, book.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
The Paris Winter
Imogen Robertson, 2014
St. Martin's Press
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250051837
Summary
There is but one Paris. —Vincent Van Gogh
Maud Heighton came to Lafond's famous Academie to paint, and to flee the constraints of her small English town. It took all her courage to escape, but Paris, she quickly realizes, is no place for a light purse.
While her fellow students enjoy the dazzling decadence of the Belle Epoque, Maud slips into poverty. Quietly starving, and dreading another cold Paris winter, she stumbles upon an opportunity when Christian Morel engages her as a live-in companion to his beautiful young sister, Sylvie.
Maud is overjoyed by her good fortune. With a clean room, hot meals, and an umbrella to keep her dry, she is able to hold her head high as she strolls the streets of Montmartre. No longer hostage to poverty and hunger, Maud can at last devote herself to her art.
But all is not as it seems. Christian and Sylvie, Maud soon discovers, are not quite the darlings they pretend to be. Sylvie has a secret addiction to opium and Christian has an ominous air of intrigue. As this dark and powerful tale progresses, Maud is drawn further into the Morels' world of elegant deception.
Their secrets become hers, and soon she is caught in a scheme of betrayal and revenge that will plunge her into the darkness that waits beneath this glittering city of light. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Darlington, England, UK
• Education—Oxford University
• Currently—lives in London, England
Imogen Robertson grew up in Darlington, studied Russian and German at Cambridge and now lives in London. She directed for film, TV and radio before becoming a full-time author and won the Telegraph’s "First thousand words of a novel" competition in 2007 with the opening of Instruments of Darkness, her first novel.
Her other novels also featuring the detective duo of Harriet Westerman and Gabriel Crowther are Anatomy of Murder, Island of Bones and Circle of Shadows. The Paris Winter, a story of betrayal and darkness set during the Belle Epoque is a stand-alone novel published in 2014. She has been short-listed for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger twice and is married to a freelance cheesemonger. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Set in Paris in 1909, this standalone from Robertson falls short of the high standard of her Westerman and Crowther historicals .... Robertson fans will miss her customary strong lead and supporting characters with depth. Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Once the seeds of intrigue are planted, the scope of the book is expanded to encompass murderous plots, shady Parisian undersides, upper-class dealings, gems of history and gems—as in jewels. The women are heartwarming as friends and delightfully effective as crime fighters. With a twisty, well-crafted plot, this novel is rich in historical detail and robust with personality.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How do you think the flooding of Paris in 1910 fits in to the narrative of Paris Winter? Why do you think the author choose this event as a backdrop to the story?
2. The city with its different areas, populations and architectures is almost a character in the story itself. Could the story have been set in any other city? What would have been the affect of setting it in a different period?
3. Maud in the first part of the book is something of an innocent. How is this shown and in what ways does she change in the second part of the book?
4. How does Maud’s work as an artist affect the way she sees the world? How does this affect the writing?
5. In Gertrude Stein’s salon, Tanya and Maud are confronted with the art of Picasso. How do you think you would have reacted in their place?
6. Do you think Maud should have taken the chance to go home quietly at the beginning of the second part of the book? Is her quest for revenge understandable or just destructive?
7. How important is the Countess in the story? Do you feel she is fair or unfair in her treatment of the girls? Are they fair or unfair to her?
8. What do you think Maud’s feelings are for Sylvie at the end of the book?
9. The book tells the stories of a number of women trying to find out how to survive and how to exist in the world. Do you feel women are facing the same problems as Maud, Tanya and Yvette today?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
J: A Novel
Howard Jacobson, 2014
Crown Publishing
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553419559
Summary
Finalist, 2014 Man Booker
Man Booker Prize–winner Howard Jacobson’s brilliant and profound new novel, J, "invites comparison with George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World" (Sunday Times, London). Set in a world where collective memory has vanished and the past is a dangerous country, not to be talked about or visited, J is a boldly inventive love story, both tender and terrifying.
Kevern Cohen doesn’t know why his father always drew two fingers across his lips when he said a word starting with a J. It wasn’t then, and isn’t now, the time or place to be asking questions.
When the extravagantly beautiful Ailinn Solomons arrives in his village by a sea that laps no other shore, Kevern is instantly drawn to her. Although mistrustful by nature, the two become linked as if they were meant for each other. Together, they form a refuge from the commonplace brutality that is the legacy of a historic catastrophe shrouded in suspicion, denial, and apology, simply referred to as WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED.
To Esme Nussbaum, Ailinn’s guardian, Ailinn and Kevern are fragile shoots of hopefulness. As this unusual pair’s actions draw them into ever-increasing danger, Esme is determined to keep them together—whatever the cost.
In this stunning, evocative, and terribly heartbreaking work, where one couple’s love affair could have shattering consequences for the human race, Howard Jacobson gathers his prodigious gifts for the crowning achievement of a remarkable career. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 25, 1942
• Where—Manchester, England, UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Awards—Man Booker Prize
• Currently—lives in London, England
Howard Jacobson is a British author and journalist, best known for his comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters. Born in Manchester, Jacobson was brought up in Prestwich and was educated at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, before going on to study English at Downing College, Cambridge under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to England to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His later teaching posts included a stint at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the 1970s.
Although Jacobson has described himself as "a Jewish Jane Austen" (in response to being described as "the English Phillip Roth"), he also states, "I'm not by any means conventionally Jewish. I don't go to shul. What I feel is that I have a Jewish mind, I have a Jewish intelligence. I feel linked to previous Jewish minds of the past. I don't know what kind of trouble this gets somebody into, a disputatious mind. What a Jew is has been made by the experience of 5,000 years, that's what shapes the Jewish sense of humour, that's what shaped Jewish pugnacity or tenaciousness." He maintains that "comedy is a very important part of what I do."
Writing
His time at Wolverhampton was to form the basis of his first novel, Coming from Behind, a campus comedy about a failing polytechnic that plans to merge facilities with a local football club. The episode of teaching in a football stadium in the novel is, according to Jacobson in a 1985 BBC interview, the only portion of the novel based on a true incident. He also wrote a travel book in 1987, titled In the Land of Oz, which was researched during his time as a visiting academic in Sydney.
His fiction, particularly in the novels he has published since 1998, is characterised chiefly by a discursive and humorous style. Recurring subjects in his work include male–female relations and the Jewish experience in Britain in the mid- to late-20th century. He has been compared to prominent Jewish-American novelists such as Philip Roth, in particular for his habit of creating doppelgängers of himself in his fiction. Jacobson has been called "the English Philip Roth", although he calls himself the "Jewish Jane Austen."
His 1999 novel The Mighty Walzer, about a teenage table tennis champion, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. It is set in the Manchester of the 1950s and Jacobson, himself a table tennis fan in his teenage years, admits that there is more than an element of autobiography in it. His 2002 novel Who's Sorry Now?—the central character of which is a Jewish luggage baron of South London—and his 2006 novel Kalooki Nights were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Jacobson described Kalooki Nights as "the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere."
As well as writing fiction, he also contributes a weekly column for The Independent newspaper as an op-ed writer. In recent times, he has, on several occasions, attacked anti-Israel boycotts, and for this reason has been labelled a "liberal Zionist."
In October 2010 Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question, which was the first comic novel to win the prize since Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils in 1986. The book, published by Bloomsbury, explores what it means to be Jewish today and is also about "love, loss and male friendship." Andrew Motion, the chair of the judges, said: "The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize." Jacobson—at the age of 68—was the oldest winner since William Golding in 1980.
Jacobson's 2014 dystopian novel, J, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Broadcasting
He has also worked as a broadcaster. Two recent television programmes include Channel 4's Howard Jacobson Takes on the Turner, in 2000, and The South Bank Show in 2002 featured an edition entitled "Why the Novel Matters." An earlier profile went out in the series in 1999 and a television documentary entitled "My Son the Novelist" preceded it as part of the Arena series in 1985. His two non-fiction books—Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews (1993) and Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (1997—were turned into television series.
In 2010 Jacobson presented "Creation," the first part of the Channel 4 series The Bible: A History. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
A masterwork of imagination flavored with grief.
Jenni Laidman - Chicago Tribune
A fascinating cautionary tale about the paradoxical dangers of assimilation and tranquility.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Remarkable... 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.
John Burnside - Guardian
J is a snarling, effervescent, and ambitious philosophical work of fiction that poses unsettling questions about our sense of history, and our self-satisfied orthodoxies. Jacobson’s triumph is to craft a novel that is poignant as well as troubling from the debris.
Independent (UK)
J is a dystopia that invites comparison with George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Sunday Times (UK)
Mystifying, serious, and blackly funny... J shows that, for a writer working at the peak of his powers, with the themes of his imagined future very much part of our present, laughter in the dark is the only kind.
Independent on Sunday (UK)
Brilliant...J is a firework display of verbal invention, as entertaining as it is unsettling.
Jewish Chronicle
J is a remarkable achievement: an affecting, unsettling—and yes, darkly amusing—novel that offers a picture of the horror of a sanitized world whose dominant mode is elegiac, but where the possibility of elegy is everywhere collectively proscribed.
National (UK)
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.
Telegraph (UK)
[J]’s success owes much to the fine texture of its dystopia... As a conspiracy yarn examining the manipulation of collective memory, J has legs, and it’s well worth its place on this year’s Man Booker longlist... Jacobson has crafted an immersive, complex experience with care and guile.
Observer (UK)
Jacobson...goes from strength to strength. This is a new departure: futuristic, dystopian, not, it seems, the world as we know it. But as we peer through the haze we see something take shape. It’s horrible. It’s monstrous. Read this for yourself and you’ll see what it is
Evening Standard (UK)
J is a rare combination of moral vision and subtle emotional intelligence...superb.
Lancet (UK)
A provocative dystopian fantasy to stack next to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, J has the kind of nightmarish twist which makes you want to turn back to page one immediately and read the whole thing again.
Sunday Express (UK)
Set in a quiet village after a global cataclysm.... Jacobson's fusion of village comedy and dystopian sci-fi is a tour de force.... The chilling sketch that finally coheres about the fate that has befallen humanity may make readers lament not having had a more straightforward approach.... [A] unique entry in the [dystopian] genre.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) J delivers a gut punch of a plot twist that rests somewhere between hope and devastation. This is a major novel, a rare work that makes readers think as much as feel.
Shelf Awareness
(Starred review.) Readers...will find plenty to think and talk about in Jacobson’s remarkable, disturbing book.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [A]n enigmatic tale of the near future....from angst-y comedy to dystopian darkness.... The laughs come fewer and farther between than in Jacobson's recent string of men-lost-in-middle-age yarns.... A pleasure, as reading Jacobson always is....
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)