Howard Jacobson

Former BBC radio producer Julian Treslove and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, are old school friends who have never lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick. Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed. When the three dine at Libor's apartment, it's a bittersweet evening of reminiscence. Man Booker Prize Winner.

Kevern doesn't know why his father always drew two fingers across his lips when he said a word starting with a J. Ailinn too has grown up in the dark about where she came from. Hanging over the lives of everyone is a past event shrouded in suspicion, now referred to as 'What Happened, If It Happened'. X rated, contains graphic violence and explicit sex.

At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two long-suffering carers, Nastya and Euphoria, with tangled stories of her husbands and love affairs. 

Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without the aid of a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. Unlike Beryl, he forgets nothing - especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has hung over him like an oppressive cloud ever since.

There's very little life remaining for either of them, but perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left. Told with Jacobson's trademark wit and style, Live a Little is in equal parts funny, irreverent and tender - a novel to make you consider all the paths not taken, and whether you could still change course.

The life of the temperamental, acerbic Henry Nagle is turned upside down when he mysteriously inherits a lavish apartment and several offbeat new acquaintances, including a red setter named Agnus, a dyspeptic descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson, and a top-sided waitress, who demand his attention. Contains some offensive language.

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.

Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother's Boy he traces the life that brought him there. 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. After his first marriage and the birth of his son, he lived in places as disparate as London, Wolverhampton, Boscastle and Melbourne, and worked many different jobs to make ends meet, from selling handbags on a market stall, to teaching English in schools, universities and sometimes football stadiums, and even helping to run an Australian-inspired restaurant in the middle of Cornwall.

Full of Jacobson's trademark humour and infused with bittersweet memories of his parents, this is the story of a writer's beginnings - as well as the twists and turns that life takes - and of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be.

Jewish author travels across the world in search of his roots.

Philosophers note that the burden of guilt is as difficult as the burden of obligation, and irritation with this burden can quickly turn to resentment. So should Jews therefore be careful not to present themselves as victims? Does the same law apply to anti-Semitism? Howard Jacobson wonders if this chain of animosity can ever be broken.

Struggling novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa and her alluring mother, Poppy. 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.