Shylock is My Name

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 tragicomic portrait of one man's unravelling in an absurd, twisted world, Howl is the propulsive new novel from Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson.<BR><BR>'A howling comic masterpiece' Patrick Marber<BR><BR>'Boils with fury and fizzes with life' Jonathan Freedland<BR><BR>In the aftermath of October 7, Ferdinand Draxler walks the streets of London in despair. Everything has changed - the sights, the sound, the spirit. He too is not who he was. Is he at the crossroads of history or is it just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy nature?<BR><BR>The son of a Holocaust survivor who accuses him of cowardice and the father of a daughter who sees him as complicit in genocide, Draxler fixates on bad news. He shouts at the television. He carries his own tin of paint to cover up graffiti. The staffroom at the primary school of which he is headmaster has become a battlefield of inflamed opinion he does nothing to quiet.<BR><BR>His wife Charmian is a beacon of calm but even she isn't sure she can save Ferdie from himself. 'Don't worry about me,' he tells her. 'I don't have what it takes to go mad.'<BR><BR>'He just gets better and better' Giles Coren

'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>