Kirjahaku

It's 24 December, 1999. Byron Easy, a poverty-stricken poet - half-cut and suicidal - sits on a stationary train at King's Cross waiting to depart. In his lap is a bag containing his remaining worldly goods: an empty bottle of red wine, a few books, a handful of crumpled banknotes. He is on the run.

'Astute, funny, elegant meditation on identity . . . full of energy with an alluring Parisian glow’ Diana Evans, author of Ordinary People 'Generous, urbane, zestful . . . a Francophile's feast' Rob Doyle, author of ThresholdLarry Frost, a British pharmacologist living in Paris, is exuberant, charismatic, wildly opinionated. He’s also convinced he’s Jewish – or at least he’s long had his hopes. But his search for what he believes is his true identity produces more questions than answers.In early 2015, following the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, Larry is joined by his sceptical older cousin, Nick Newman. Divorced, separated from his son and desperately trying to understand his own place in the world, Nick is drawn inextricably into Larry’s slipstream as they walk the fractured, uneasy, magical streets of Paris.Then, in November, terrorism strikes the city again. With Paris and the cousins still reeling from the trauma, Larry receives the information he’s urgently been seeking: a long-held family secret that will change both their lives forever.Set against a backdrop of extremism, nationalism and the resurgence of antisemitism, Jacob’s Advice is a timely exploration of identity, race, family and the inescapable nature of the past.

It's 24 December 1999, Byron Easy, a poverty-stricken poet, half-cut and suicidal, sits on a stationary train at King's Cross waiting to depart. He has in his lap a bin-liner containing his remaining worldly goods - an empty wine bottle, a few books, a handful of crumpled banknotes. As the journey commences he conjures memories (painful and euphoric alike) of the recent past, of his rollercoaster London life, and, most distressingly, of Mandy - his half-Spanish Amazonian wife - in an attempt to make sense of his terrible, and ordinary, predicament...So what has led him to this point? Where are his friends, his family, his wife? What happened to his dreams. And what awaits him at the end of his journey?Byron Easy is an epic, baroque sprawling monster of a novel, and a unique portrait of love and marriage, of the flux of memory, and of England in the dying days of the twentieth century from a young British writer of exceptional promise.