Howard Jacobson

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?

Frank Ritz is a television critic. Let him out of the house and his first instinct is to go looking for sex. Deviant sex, treacherous sex, even straight sex, so long as it's immoderate - he's never been choosy. But what happens when sex is all you know but no longer what you want?

In the aftermath of a massacre from which he doubts the world will ever recover, Ferdinand Draxler finds himself at the crossroads of history. Unless it’s just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy nature.The son of a Holocaust survivor who accuses him of cowardice and the father of a daughter who accuses him of genocide, Draxler longs to be a hero for his people or the comic scourge of their enemies, but does he have the mettle to be either? He isn’t even sure he has what it takes to go mad.He wades through protests and searches London for menacing graffiti, whilst dodging the warring staff in the primary school where he is headmaster and the pleas of his non-Jewish wife to seek 'mental health' support. But can't she see that the world is crumbling around them, and he is at the centre?A devastating psychological portrait filled with wit, dark humour and tragedy, Howl is the propulsive new novel from Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson.

Love can change your life. Can it survive marriage and middle age?‘Wonderfully wise, moving and heartfelt’ WILLIAM BOYD‘A tender love story’ DAILY TELEGRAPH*LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2025*Lily falls in love with Sam the minute she sets eyes on him. It takes Sam a day or two longer. Curious, because Lily has never quite believed in love, while Sam thought he understood it inside out.Lily, a documentary maker, and Sam, a playwright, are both in relationships that have quietly expired, and an affair takes hold that they are powerless to resist.Arriving in mid-life, their relationship opens unexpected new worlds. But what will happen to them when familiarity and age begin to take their toll? What will survive?‘Celebrates love in later life’HARPER’S BAZAAR‘Playful, knowing…a romping read in all senses’EVENING STANDARD‘Jacobson at his finest’LINDA GRANT

Love can change your life. Can it survive marriage and middle age?'A rare gift and one to be treasured' SUNDAY TIMES‘A profound and vital book’ WILLIAM BOYD'Equal parts funny and challenging' DAILY TELEGRAPH*LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2025*Lily falls in love with Sam the minute she sets eyes on him. It takes Sam a day or two longer. Curious, because Lily – independent, headstrong, rational – has never quite believed in love; while Sam – confident, passionate, romantic – thought he understood it inside out.Lily is an award-winning television documentary maker. Sam is an award-winning playwright. Both are in relationships that have quietly expired, but their encounter makes Lily and Sam come alive again. As they begin to work together on the page and on screen, an affair takes hold that they are powerless to resist.Arriving in mid-life, their relationship opens unexpected new worlds and, for Lily, offers her a surprising form of liberation. But what will happen to them when familiarity, illness and age begin to take their toll? What will survive? Taking us to the edge of desire, love and betrayal across a lifetime, What Will Survive of Us reveals what is left of us when we strip away every layer.

Hugely admired by artists and writers from Henri Cartier Bresson to the Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson, the extraordinary life and work of painter Dennis Creffield (1931-2018) are explored in this, the first major monograph on the artist. The narrative traces the artist's 'Dickensian' upbringing, his formative experiences as a teenager under the tutelage of David Bomberg, his conversion to Catholicism and his award-winning years at the Slade. Focus is given to Creffield's passions for the stories of England, not only in the Cathedral drawings, but in his expressive work on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, on Blake and in his paintings and drawings of London, the great Petworth House, Cornish tin mines and the eerie military buildings on Orford Ness. Complementing his work on England's sacred and profane identity is an equally audacious body of work on the human body, from tender paintings of mother and child to erotic paintings of women to his late paintings of men near death - Turner, Nelson and Rimbaud. To quote his fellow artist R.B. Kitaj, Creffield's cover has been 'well and truly blown.'

'A wonderful memoir, written with great linguistic brio. Candid, shrewd and moving - a classic of its kind,' William BoydHoward Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer.It's my theory that only the unhappy, the uncomfortable, the gauche, the badly put together, aspire to make art. Why would you seek to reshape the world unless you were ill-at-ease in it? And I came out of the womb in every sense the wrong way round. In Mother's Boy, Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson reveals how he became a writer. It is an exploration of belonging and not-belonging, of being an insider and outsider, both English and Jewish.Born to a working-class family in 1940s Manchester, the great-grandson of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants, Jacobson was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt Joyce. His father was a regimental tailor, as well as an upholsterer, a market-stall holder, a taxi driver, a balloonist, and a magician.Grappling always with his family's history and his Jewish identity, Jacobson takes us from the growing pains of childhood to studying at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis, and landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor on campus, through to his first marriage, the birth of his son and beyond.Full of Jacobson's trademark humour and infused with bittersweet memories of his parents, this is the story of a writer's beginnings.'Laugh-out-loud glorious and uproarious of course - but don't let the self-ribbing fool you; this is deep and poignant,' Simon Schama

Taking the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as their starting point, five new essays look at how Jewish culture has changed over the past two decades. Covering music (Vanessa Paloma Elbaz), art (Monica Bohm Duchen), literature (Bryan Cheyette), theatre (Judi Herman) and film (Nathan Abrams), the essays explore the role of confidence in the cultural output of minority communities, and ask whether the trends identified look set to continue over the coming years.Commissioned to mark the twentieth anniversary of Jewish Renaissance magazine, the book includes a foreword by Howard Jacobson and is interspersed with a selection of the best articles from the magazine’s archive, including pieces by the director Mike Leigh, author Linda Grant and sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris.

'A . It pulses with warmth and intelligence' The TimesA wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything â?? including her own children.

If you're obese, you probably don't see yourself as an athlete. You may think that you're lazy, unmotivated, and undisciplined - and beat yourself up for not having the strength of will to lose the weight. I'm here to tell you that the opposite is true; despite what the naysayers have been telling you for years, you are actually working much harder than any of your skinny friends. You've been carrying a human weight vest, and it's made you strong. But you've also been carrying the unkind and destructive words that people have hurt you with, and they have made you weak. I was a fat guy - 420 pounds or more at my heaviest (that's an estimate - you know fat people don't step on scales ), and I had lost and regained a hundred pounds at least five times before I finally figured out what was missing. Before I embraced both weights - the physical and the psychological - and used them to build the body and mind that I could be proud of.This book is my attempt to give you the uncensored straight talk about how to lose a lot of weight, and what it's actually like. I was shocked to discover that not everything got better or felt better when I grew lean. I discovered that many of the strategies I used to lose the weight didn't work to keep it off. I found that focusing on positivity all the time was a bad idea; that I could embrace the anger at how I'd been treated as a fat person to transform myself. If you're squeamish about frank and vulgar language, put the book down now. It's not for you.But if you're ready to hear the rough, unvarnished, and ultimately liberating truth, I'll hold nothing back.You'll discover how to use the weight to lose the weight - and gain your life.

A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. *SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020*At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children.

If you're overweight or obese...If you're constantly tired, bloated, constipated, achy, sluggish, depressed, or anxious...If you're diabetic or pre-diabetic...If your doctor keeps warning you about the risk of cancer, heart disease, or other lifestyle- reversible calamity...If you're constantly worried about your blood pressure, weight, insomnia, eating habits... But you still find it next to impossible to stick to a healthy diet, exercise, and lifestyle plan... Then you might be going about things the wrong way.Let's face it - despite a flood of information and advice, we're getting sicker and fatter all the time. That's because the vast majority of "conventional" advice is outdated, wrong-headed, and just plain ineffective.Within this storm of bad news and bad advice, there's a growing tribe of outliers who have managed to lose hundreds of pounds, reverse "impossible to cure" diseases, and even - to their own shock and delight - become fit and high-performing athletes.Their stories don't get a lot of media attention, because they aren't selling anything. No pills, powders, or potions. No expensive workout gadgets. No late night informercial magic formulas.They simply rediscovered some basic, natural truths about the human animal. What we're designed to eat. How we're designed to move. And how we're meant to think and feel.When we get away from our natural heritage, we suffer. When we return to it, we thrive.Read Sick To Fit to discover how Josh LaJaunie went from a 420-pound food addict to the cover of Runner's World magazine, as well as live appearances on Good Morning America and The Today Show.Discover the simple secrets for a healthy life that have transformed dozens of members of the Missing Chins Run Club and clients of WellStart Health from sick and sad to fit and fulfilled.In Sick To Fit, you'll learn: - the one food rule that banishes confusion, eliminates the need to count calories or restrict portion size, and makes you impervious to the marketing and clickbait BS perpetrated by the food industry- how to honor your culture and heritage without suffering from the diseases that are killing your people (coming from the Bayou of South Louisiana, Josh knows a thing or two about being a foodie)- how to use social and family pressure to get stronger and more committed- how to prevent self-sabotage after initial success- how to start exercising safely if you're overweight (by 20 or 200 pounds)- the four-question FAST Assessment (the "Swiss Army Knife" of sustainable behavior change)- how to master life's stressors so they don't turn into binges- how to never "fall off the wagon" again - even if you've failed at dozens of diets before- and much more...Written with behavioral health expert Howard Jacobson, PhD, Sick To Fit combines Josh's journey with cutting edge nutritional, exercise, neurological, and habit science.Sick To Fit is your roadmap to better health and a more joyful life."Sick To Fit is a captivating, inspiring and practical story of an epic transformation. And don't be deceived by how entertaining this page-turner of a book is. What you're about to have fun reading is scientifically proven, and it just might change your life."Ocean Robbins, Author, 31-Day Food Revolution CEO, Food Revolution Network http: //foodrevolution.org"A diet book with lots of information leaves you with lots of information. But a book that teaches you how to change your dietary and lifestyle habits - and do it in a way that is compelling, engaging, and eminently practical - a book like that can change your life."Sick to Fit takes everything that we know about what makes people change in business and life, and applies it to eating and lifestyle habits. I've read a tremendous number of books on diet, fitness, and health - and this one is the best."Peter Bregman, Author, Leading with Emotional Courage, CEO, Bregman Partners http: //peterbregman.com

_______________'[An] acutely observed collection of occasional pieces that pick at absurdist life and reveal him to be a quiz, a cultural critic gifted with precise comic timing' - The Times‘The author’s prose is always a delight … a book that manages the high-wire act of being genuinely funny while dispensing genuine wisdom’ - Times Literary Supplement'Jacobson is one of the great sentence-builders of our time. I feel I have to raise my game, even just to praise ... In short, he is one of the great guardians of language and culture - all of it. Long may he flourish' - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian_______________Week after week, for eighteen years, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson wrote a weekly column for the Independent, reflecting in inimitable style on the sacred and the profane in turn, the frivolous and the serious, the deeply personal and the most universal.The shame and humiliation inherent in death is explored with frank astuteness. Matisse, darts and the power of love are celebrated; while cyclists are very much censured. And meanwhile, a beloved old Labrador walks his last walk as life elsewhere hurtles on and away…The Dog’s Last Walk is a collection of wisdom and iconoclasm for our uncertain times, and one that reveals one of our greatest writers in all his humanity._______________'Sharp and playful, surreal and thoughtful, and occasionally … rather moving' - New Statesman'Yes, Jacobson is an entertainer ... And he does indeed entertain, but in a way that stimulates rather than simply amuses' - Sunday Telegraph'His columns were always one of the best things in [the Independent] – funny, argumentative, contrary and stuffed with ideas as well as a big, sympathetic personality' - Philip Hensher, Spectator

An acclaimed surgeon specializing in weight loss delivers a paradigm-shifting examination of the diet and health industry's focus on protein, explaining why it is detrimental to our health, and can prevent us from losing weight. Whether you are seeing a doctor, nutritionist, or a trainer, all of them advise to eat more protein. Foods, drinks, and supplements are loaded with extra protein. Many people use protein for weight control, to gain or lose pounds, while others believe it gives them more energy and is essential for a longer, healthier life. Now, Dr. Garth Davis, an expert in weight loss asks, "Is all this protein making us healthier?" The answer, he emphatically argues, is NO. Too much protein is actually making us sick, fat, and tired, according to Dr. Davis. If you are getting adequate calories in your diet, there is no such thing as protein deficiency. The healthiest countries in the world eat far less protein than we do and yet we have an entire nation on a protein binge getting sicker by the day. As a surgeon treating obese patients, Dr. Davis was frustrated by the ever-increasing number of sick and overweight patients, but it wasn't until his own health scare that he realized he could do something about it. Combining cutting-edge research, with his hands-on patient experience and his years dedicated to analyzing studies of the world's longest-lived populations, this explosive, groundbreaking book reveals the truth about the dangers of protein and shares a proven approach to weight loss, health, and longevity.

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 shocking twist on Shylock's demand for the infamous pound of flesh, Jacobson's insightful retelling examines contemporary, acutely relevant questions of Jewish identity while maintaining a poignant sympathy for its characters and a genuine spiritual kinship with its antecedent--a drama which Jacobson himself considers to be "the most troubling of Shakespeare's plays for anyone, but, for an English novelist who happens to be Jewish, also the most challenging."