Best Selling Books by Howard Jacobson

Oliver Walzer is shy, bookish, Jewish. He doesn’t know how to talk to girls. But he can slice, flick and spin a ping pong ball better than any teenager in Manchester. Oliver channels his frustrated adolescent lust into the game he loves. That is until the heartbreaking Lorna Peachley and the prospect of a place at Cambridge take his eye off the ball.

Man Booker Prize–Winning Author of THE FINKLER QUESTION Swathed in his kimono, drinking tea from his samovar, Henry Nagle is temperamentally opposed to life in the 21st century. Preferring not to contemplate the great intellectual and worldly success of his best boyhood friend, he argues constantly with his father, an upholsterer turned fire-eater–and now dead for many years. When he goes out at all, Henry goes after other men’s wives. But when he mysteriously inherits a sumptuous apartment, Henry’s life changes, bringing on a slick descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson, an excitable red setter, and a wise-cracking waitress with a taste for danger. All of them demand his attention, even his love, a word which barely exists in Henry’s magisterial vocabulary, never mind his heart. From one of England’s most highly regarded writers, The Making of Henry is a ravishing novel, at once wise, tender and mordantly funny.

A collection of 2010 Man Booker winner Howard Jacobson''s most acclaimed journalism

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question went Down Under - and this is what he found... The Sunday Times bestseller - over 50,000 copies sold of the original edition

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER What happens when you eat an apple? The answer is vastly more complex than you imagine. Every apple contains thousands of antioxidants whose names, beyond a few like vitamin C, are unfamiliar to us, and each of these powerful chemicals has the potential to play an important role in supporting our health. They impact thousands upon thousands of metabolic reactions inside the human body. But calculating the specific influence of each of these chemicals isn''t nearly sufficient to explain the effect of the apple as a whole. Because almost every chemical can affect every other chemical, there is an almost infinite number of possible biological consequences. And that''s just from an apple. Nutritional science, long stuck in a reductionist mindset, is at the cusp of a revolution. The traditional “gold standard" of nutrition research has been to study one chemical at a time in an attempt to determine its particular impact on the human body. These sorts of studies are helpful to food companies trying to prove there is a chemical in milk or pre-packaged dinners that is “good" for us, but they provide little insight into the complexity of what actually happens in our bodies or how those chemicals contribute to our health. In The China Study, T. Colin Campbell (alongside his son, Thomas M. Campbell) revolutionized the way we think about our food with the evidence that a whole food, plant-based diet is the healthiest way to eat. Now, in Whole, he explains the science behind that evidence, the ways our current scientific paradigm ignores the fascinating complexity of the human body, and why, if we have such overwhelming evidence that everything we think we know about nutrition is wrong, our eating habits haven''t changed. Whole is an eye-opening, paradigm-changing journey through cutting-edge thinking on nutrition, a scientific tour de force with powerful implications for our health and for our world.

From a Booker Prize-winning author, an "informed and witty" travelogue exploring America, Israel, Lithuania, and the nature of Jewish identity ( Publishers Weekly). Howard Jacobson had been hoping to make a journey to Lithuania to search for his Jewish roots. So when the BBC offered to send him around the globe to report on a variety of Jewish communities, he accepted. The trip he recounts in this memoir takes him to New York City, where tension simmers between Jews and African Americans; to California, where he visits a gay synagogue; to Israel, where he encounters the spectrum of Jewishness from Orthodox right-wing hardliners to tolerant, peace-loving kibbutzniks. And ultimately, to Lithuania, the land of his forefathers, where he discovers that antisemitism still lurks. "A lively, irreverent but ultimately serious account of a British Jew''s search for his roots." —Elizabeth Benedict, The New York Times "Profound and moving." — Publishers Weekly

Julian Treslove, a radio producer, and Samuel Finkler, a Jewish philosopher, have been friends since childhood and, as they enter middle age, they reminisce over their struggles with self-identity, anti-Semitism, women, love, and the past.

Een door zijn joodse afkomst gefrustreerde leraar Engels zet zich uit jaloezie af tegen collega''s en vrienden die het verder hebben gebracht dan hij

Marvin Kreitman, the luggage baron of South London, lives for sex. Or at least he lives for women. At present he loves four women--his mother, his wife Hazel, and his two daughters--and is in love with five more. Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, nice Charlie, loves just the one woman, also called Charlie, the wife with whom he has been writing children''s books and having nice sex for twenty years. Once a week the two friends meet for a Chinese lunch, contriving never quite to have the conversation they would like to have--about fidelity and womanizing, and which makes you happier. Until today. It is Charlie who takes the dangerous step of asking for a piece of Marvin''s disordered life, but what follows embroils them all, the wives no less than the husbands. And none of them will ever be the same again.

Longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and hailed by "The Times" (London) as Ra work of genius, S Jacobson''s exquisitely written, audaciously funny novel explores the countless questions of postwar Jewish identity.

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.”

Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head, contrary, highly strung and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence that destroys Guy''s peace of mind, suggesting the wildest stories but making it impossible for him to concentrate long enough to write any of them.Not that anyone reads Guy, anyway. Not that anyone is reading anything. Reading, Guy fears, is finished. His publisher, fearing the same, has committed suicide. His agent, like all agents, is in hiding. Vanessa, in the meantime, is writing a novel of her own. Guy doesn''t expect her to finish it, or even start it, but he dreads the consequences if she does.In flight from personal disappointment and universal despair, Guy wonders if it''s time to take his love for Poppy to another level. Fiction might be dead, but desire isn''t. And out of that desire he imagines squeezing one more great book.By turns angry, elegiac and rude, Zoo Time is a novel about love - love of women, love of literature, love of laughter. It shows our funniest writer at his brilliant best.

De overtuiging dat hij de reïncarnatie is van de 19e eeuwse auteur Thomas Hardy wordt voor een jonge man tot een obsessie die zijn leven gaat beheersen.

In a stunning follow-up to his much-heralded masterpiece, Kalooki Nights, acclaimed author Howard Jacobson has turned his mordant and uncanny sights on Felix Quinn, a rare-book dealer living in London, whose wife Marisa is unfaithful to him. All husbands, Felix maintains, secretly want their wives to be unfaithful to them. Felix hasn''t always thought this way. From the moment of his first boyhood rejection, surviving the shattering effects of love and jealousy had been the study of his life. But while he is honeymooning with Marisa in Florida an event occurs that changes everything. In a moment, he goes from dreading the thought of someone else''s hands on the woman he loves to thinking about nothing else. Enter Marius into Marisa''s affections. And now Felix must wonder if he really is a happy man. The Act of Love is a haunting novel of love and jealousy, with stylish prose that crackles and razor-sharp dialogue, praised by the London Times as "darkly transgressive, as savage in its brilliance, as anything Jacobson has written." It is a startlingly perceptive, subtle portrait of a marriage and an excruciatingly honest, provocative exploration of sexual obsession.

By now, the low-carb diet''s refrain is a familiar one: Bread is bad for you. Fat doesn''t matter. Carbs are the real reason you can''t lose weight. The low-carb universe Dr. Atkins brought into being continues to expand. Low-carb diets, from South Beach to the Zone and beyond, are still the go-to method for weight-loss for millions. These diets'' marketing may differ, but they all share two crucial components: the condemnation of “carbs" and an emphasis on meat and fat for calories. Even the latest diet trend, the Paleo diet, is—despite its increased focus on (some) whole foods—just another variation on the same carbohydrate fears. In The Low-Carb Fraud, longtime leader in the nutritional science field T. Colin Campbell (author of The China Study and Whole) outlines where (and how) the low-carb proponents get it wrong: where the belief that carbohydrates are bad came from, and why it persists despite all the evidence to the contrary. The foods we misleadingly refer to as “carbs" aren''t all created equal—and treating them that way has major consequences for our nutritional well-being. If you''re considering a low-carb diet, read this e-book first. It will change the way you think about what you eat—and how you should be eating, to lose weight and optimize your health, now and for the long term.

A provocatively entertaining, savagely funny satire on Donald Trump by Britain’s greatest comic novelist. Pussy is the story of Prince Fracassus, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its golden-gated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality shows on TV, imagining himself to be the Roman Emperor Nero, and fantasizing about hookers. He is idle, boastful, thin-skinned and egotistic; has no manners, no curiosity, no knowledge, no idea and no words in which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again?