Howl

Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is brilliantly reinvented by Howard Jacobson, in his merciless, sharp and funny story of revenge, justice and antisemitism. <BR><BR>With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire's Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It's the beginning of a remarkable friendship...<BR><BR>Howard Jacobson's version of The Merchant of Venice bends time to its own advantage as it asks what it means to be a father, a Jew and a merciful human being in the modern world.<BR><BR>'Inspired...It does what any good literary subversion should do: deepens and enhances one's appreciation of the original' Guardian<BR><BR>'Jacobson's prose has the sort of elastic precision you only get from a writer who is truly in command... There's also deep and sincere soul-searching going on here' Independent<BR><BR>SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you've never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

A re-envisaging of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, from the Man Booker Prize-winner and our great chronicler of Jewish life. <BR><BR>'Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?' <BR><BR>With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire's Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It's the beginning of a remarkable friendship ...<BR><BR>'Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dream' Evening Standard<BR><BR>'The funniest British novelist since Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe' Mail on Sunday

'A wonderful memoir, written with great linguistic brio. Candid, shrewd and moving - a classic of its kind,' William Boyd<BR><BR>Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer.<BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>Full of Jacobson's trademark humour and infused with bittersweet memories of his parents, this is the story of a writer's beginnings.<BR><BR>'Laugh-out-loud glorious and uproarious of course - but don't let the self-ribbing fool you; this is deep and poignant,' Simon Schama

Julian and Sam are old friends. They've never lost touch with each other, or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. One night, they shared a sweetly painful evening, reminiscing on a time they had loved and lost. Making his way home, he is mugged. The crime was an act of anti-Semitism, and his whole sense of self will ineluctably change.<BR>