Zoo Time (48 page)

The
Sunday Times
bestseller

On what he calls ‘the adventure of his life’, Howard Jacobson travels around Australia, never entirely sure where he is heading next or whether he has the courage to tackle the wild life of the bush, the wild men of the outback, or the even wilder women of the seaboard cities.

In pursuit of the best of Australian good times, he joins revelers at Uluru, argues with racists in the Kimberleys, parties with wine-growers in the Barossa and falls for  ballet dancers in Perth. And even as vexed questions of national identity and Aboriginal land rights present themselves, his love for Australia and Australians never falters.

‘A marvellous read ... he is a comic explorer in the grandest mould’

Financial Times

‘The most successful attempt I know to grip the great dreaming Australian enigma by the throat and make it gargle’

Evening Standard

‘A wildly funny account of his travels; abounding in sharp characterization, crunching dialogue and self-parody, it actually is a book which makes you laugh out loud on almost every page’

Literary Review

The Finkler Question

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2010

Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and together with Treslove they share a sweetly painful evening revisiting a time before they had loved and lost. It is that very evening, when Treslove hesitates a moment as he walks home, that he is attacked – and his whole sense of who and what he is slowly and ineluctably changes.

‘Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding’

Observer

‘I don’t know a funnier writer alive’

Jonathan Safran Foer

‘How is it possible to read Howard Jacobson and not lose oneself in admiration

for the music of his language, the power of his characterisation and the

penetration of his insight?’

The Times

Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It

‘Nobody does it better’
Observer

Howard Jacobson brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and the desolation of Wagner's tragedies, Jacobson writes with all the thunder and joy of a man possessed. Absurdity piles upon absurdity, and glorious sentences weave together to create a hilarious, heartbreaking and uniquely human collection.

‘The driest wit in print today; he is also the wisest man I know as anyone reading this book will confirm’ Philip Kerr,
Scotsman
Books of the Year

‘At his best, he's Orwellian .... At his least best, he's still in the top five newspaper columnists around’
Observer

‘When he applies his wit and rich, creative firepower, the most serious subjects can take off into the most successful flights of fancy’
Independent

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First published in Great Britain 2012

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 2012 by Howard Jacobson

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Extract from Women by Charles Bukowski reproduced

by kind permission of David Grossman Literary Agency

All rights reserved

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publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408829141

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