Writing advice: Tips from those who've learned the hard way

Main-Writing-Tips-1800×1200201.jpg

Features

Writing tips from our bestselling authors

Howard-Jacobson.jpg

Shelf Life: Howard Jacobson on five books that changed his life

dystopias20podcast20inline.jpg

Podcasts

Dystopias: Trump’s First 100 Days

vintage-podcast-logo.jpg

The Vintage Podcast: Hogarth Shakespeare with Jeanette Winterson and Howard Jacobson

What Will Survive of Us

A tender love story... Jacobson&rsquo;s sentences have always been things of beauty: ornate yet vigorous

A rare gift and one to be treasured

Something more subtle and melancholy than expected. In the best possible way, fans of Jacobson will not be disappointed

Essential human truths are conveyed through humour, melancholy and kinetic dialogue

Equal parts funny and challenging, this is a clear-eyed view of long-term love

A wonderfully wise, moving and heartfelt novel. A profound and vital book

Howard Jacobson at his finest. An intense expression of romantic love and sexual desire

Linda Grant, author of The Story of the Forest

Jacobson has lost none of his garrulity and ebullience&hellip; What Will Survive of Us powers along with stretches of nimble verbal exchange in which the opponents are equally matched. And you're never far from a profound reflection on life's challenges

Funny, self-knowing and floridly romantic

Howard Jacobson has written seventeen novels and six works of non-fiction. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question; he was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for J.

Love can change your life. Can it survive marriage and middle age? 
 
'A rare gift and one to be treasured' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
&lsquo;A profound and vital book&rsquo; WILLIAM BOYD 
 
'Equal parts funny and challenging' DAILY TELEGRAPH 
 
Lily falls in love with Sam the minute she sets eyes on him. It takes Sam a day or two longer. Curious, because Lily &ndash; independent, headstrong, rational &ndash; has never quite believed in love; while Sam &ndash; confident, passionate, romantic &ndash; thought he understood it inside out. 
 
Lily is an award-winning television documentary maker. Sam is an award-winning playwright. Both are in relationships that have quietly expired, but their encounter makes Lily and Sam come alive again. As they begin to work together on the page and on screen, an affair takes hold that they are powerless to resist. 
 
Arriving in mid-life, their relationship opens unexpected new worlds and, for Lily, offers her a surprising form of liberation. But what will happen to them when familiarity, illness and age begin to take their toll? What will survive? Taking us to the edge of desire, love and betrayal across a lifetime, What Will Survive of Us reveals what is left of us when we strip away every layer.

A Writer's Beginnings

Mother's Boy

A wonderful memoir, written with great linguistic brio. Candid, shrewd and moving - a classic of its kind.

Howard Jacobson has always been hilariously brilliant at writing fictional versions of his life. He can, it turns out, also tell the real story with all that brilliance and hilarity, with the added gain for the reader of finding out what - and who - made him that writer.

Side-splittingly funny and serious, too, Howard Jacobson has written one of the all-time great memoirs.

Mother's Boy is a synthesis of his life's work...as well as an original story... it is every bit as funny.

Laugh-out-loud glorious and uproarious of course - but don't let the self-ribbing fool you; this is deep and poignant.

Mining down to the roots of his creativity, Mother's Boy is very funny, profoundly serious and demonically fluent. If there is a better contemporary account of the cost of becoming a writer, I've yet to read it

Howard Jacobson meticulously chronicles his lifetime of failures. But with the rat-a-tat-tat delivery of a great stand-up, he brilliantly transforms calamity into rip-roaring comedy.

Pure delight. Witty, sometimes acid observations jostle with tender reminiscences and enduringly wise insights into what it is to be a Jew, a man, a human being. Its joys help explain why Howard Jacobson is rightly regarded as one of Britain's very greatest writers.

Utterly captivating... behind the comical grandiosity of Mother's Boy, there is a sense of something much graver and more sombre, to do with...lifelong struggle.

I was totally absorbed at every stage. . . It is a joy to read. . . I believe it will become a classic.

This memoir, at once hilarious and poignant, braids together a brilliant stand-up comedian's depiction of a Jewish child's coming-of age in mid-20th-century England with a subtle, nuanced account of the growth of a novelist's mind. Crafted in a vivid, resourceful English in which Yiddish repeatedly surfaces as the mot juste, Mother's Boy is a thrilling book, full of tenderness, rage, and sharp intelligence.

[A] wonderfully funny, moving memoir.

A wisecracking memoir about growing up in Jewish working-class Manchester.

This memoir, full of the bittersweet and the humorous, relates vividly, touchingly, and often self-flagellatingly his [Jacobson's] experiences of childhood...school...jobs...and, along the way, two marriages.

Exquisite elegance... Few Jewish writers, except possibly for Isaac Bashevis Singer or Bernard Malamud, document so well the paradoxes of Jewish life in a Western society.

[An] enjoyable memoir...[Jacobson] makes a powerful case for a wider and deeper array of Jewish stories.

Instantly engaging and sublimely intelligent.

Moving... at the end of the book in a breathtaking scene, one of the best Jacobson has written.

The vivid prose and comic episodes make the book a marvellously entertaining read throughout.

A laugh-out-loud funny, yet sentimental, memoir... Like all great memoirs, Mother's Boy is equal parts acerbic, tender, and indiscreet.

It is said that fiction writers' autobiographies reveal much less about themselves than their fiction does. But this is certainly not the case with Howard Jacobson. Be it in Manchester or Melbourne, Cambridge or London, his recollections are forensic. In Mother's Boy, he has exposed his family, his faults and his failings. And it is still funny.

'One of the all-time great memoirs' Daily Telegraph 
'Wonderful...candid, shrewd and moving' William Boyd 
'Laugh-out-loud glorious and uproarious' Simon Schama 
 
Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer. 
 
Howard Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother's Boy, he traces the life that brought him there. Born into a working-class Jewish family in 1940s Manchester, he did not lack encouragement or subject matter. Jacobson takes us from childhood and studying at Cambridge, through landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor, and on to his first marriage and the birth of his son. Later, he begins new - and often surprising - ventures in places as disparate as London, Wolverhampton, Boscastle and Melbourne. 
 
Infused with bittersweet memories of Jacobson's parents and friends, this is the story of a writer's beginnings, and of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be. 
 
'Hilariously brilliant' David Baddiel 
 
'Howard Jacobson brilliantly transforms calamity into rip-roaring comedy' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Live a Little

A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question

A joyous new novel… A life-affirming tale of late-flowering love… if we manage to live a little longer, we might have the privilege of enjoying more novels such as this one.

Let’s pause to consider [Howard Jacobson’s] comic elegance and precision… Just look at the way he makes the English language dance for us… the characters, as they converse, striking sparks off one another.

Brilliantly observed… No other novelist writing in Britain could dramatise this nonagenarian love story with greater verve and tenderness, while never forgetting that this is a resplendently comedic form.

[Howard Jacobson] is not one to let the catastrophe of old age get in the way of a good laugh, or a surprisingly tender love story… [Live a Little is] merrily bonkers… This book is alive. It pulses with warmth and intelligence, and, unusually for a novel about old age, it has a lot of style.

A master of the slightly dark comedy… Jacobson brings this little pocket of North London to life superbly, and his two ageing protagonists are wonderful creations, depicted with wit and compassion.

A thoroughly enjoyable read. For a literature snob and a language obsessive… there is a lot to feast on… for someone looking for an emotionally honest storyline, the book also delivers.

Howard Jacobson is a rather rare bird among contemporary novelists, for he devotes himself to what Arnold Bennett called the great cause of cheering us all up. So one opens a new Jacobson novel in the expectation of pleasure… Jacobson’s observations are as acute and funny as ever.

This is a soft-hearted novel, warm and optimistic… [with] nimble, chewy sentences… there is writing to relish on every page.

With effortless precision… [Jacobson’s] exceedingly funny and discursive prose style often belies more serious observations on life… There are opportunities for humour, redemption and hope regardless of how close the end is.

A meander of a novel that nonetheless feels urgent… it’s rarely less than bitterly funny in its determination to face up to the obliteration that awaits us all.

Witty and razor sharp… Almost forty years after the publication of his first novel, Jacobson shows that he has lost none of his verve, insight or ability to write dark comedy.

A tender story of unlikely love… Wise, witty, and deftly crafted.

As vigorous and darkly mirthful as it is tender… [Live a Little has] unparalleled linguistic verve. Vintage Jacobson.

A darkly funny geriatric love story… Jacobson is nearing eighty, and Live a Little is one of those late-life novels full of such wisdom and insight that it makes you wonder why anyone ever bothers reading – or watching – the young at all.

A joyful excess of invention… Here love is a grave matter, but then skulls are famous for their grins.

Jacobson's familiar wit and whimsy combine with verve and tenderness in this narrative of nonagenarian love found along Finchley Road… witty banter and enjoyment of conversation is at the very heart of the novel.

A tender and insightful portrait of unlikely love blossoming in old age.

We can forgive Mr Jacobson anything for the sake of his wit and wisdom… Readers would be ungrateful not to allow themselves an occasional smile or chortle.

You will be hard pushed to find a more enjoyable novel to get stuck into… Thanks to its warmth, humanity and humour, Live a Little feels like the ideal book for these autumnal months.

Jacobson has a wonderful ear for language…he is compassionate, funny and occasionally very profound.

'A . . . tender love story . . . This book is alive. It pulses with warmth and intelligence' The Times 
 
A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. 
 
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 carers with tangled tales of her husbands and affairs. 
 
Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he’s whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. He forgets nothing –especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has long hung over him. There's very little left 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. 
 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020*

The Merchant of Venice Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare)

Shylock is My Name

The Merchant of Venice, Retold

A re-envisaging of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, from the Man Booker Prize-winner and our great chronicler of Jewish life.

Inspired...It does what any good literary subversion should do: deepens and enhances one's appreciation of the original.

Jacobson’s writing is virtuoso.  He is the master of shifting tones, from the satirical to the serious. His 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

A brilliant conceit… A powerful reimagining and reinvention of Shakespeare’s character.

Howard Jacobson’s reworking of The Merchant of Venice is a sly success… Irascible, eloquent Shylock is a man transplanted from the play to today.

Shylock is My Name has much to tell us about loss, identity and modern antisemitism ... Simon's debates with Shylock, snapshots of a man haranguing his literary Creator, are the heart of this book, knowing and humane

Jacobson is clearly enjoying himself, savouring the play’s puzzles like a connoisseur with a complex wine, luxuriating in its themes of love, vengeance, forgiveness and justice, exploring what it means to be Jewish, then and now… Provocative, caustic and bold.

An unusually engaged form of literary criticism ... Jacobson treats Shylock less as a product of Shakespeare's culture and imagination than as a real historical figure emblematic of Jewish experience

Supremely stylish, probing and unsettling… Jacobson's writing is virtuoso. He is a master of shifting tones, from the satirical to the serious. His prose has the sort of elastic precision you only get from a writer who is truly in command.

A shrewd and powerful examination of what is means to be a father, a Jew and a merciful human being, this is another witty and thought-provoking tale from Jacobson.

Howard Jacobson, the undisputed British master of black comedies featuring Jewish characters… [Shylock is My Name] is a provocative interrogation of Shakespeare’s play… [Written] with empathy and affection. Sharp-edged and bitterly funny verbal fencing matches between the two men, the modern and eternal versions of each other, are the engine of the novel, as they pursue the questions of what it means to call oneself a Jew, or to be called one by others.

Jacobson takes the play's themes - justice, revenge, mercy, Jews and Christians, Jew-hatred, fathers and daughters - and works away at them with dark humour and rare intelligence… This is Jacobson at his best. There is no funnier writer in English today.

A bold retelling of The Merchant of Venice…subverts and enhances an appreciation of the original… There are passages…that have a wit and punch reminiscent of Roth at his best, rendering the mutually defining paranoias of Jews and Gentiles with merciless clarity.

Shylock is My Name is witty and astute.

A bracing read. It explores the meaning of Shakespeare’s play, uses its enduring relevance to examine the contemporary world and challenges us to interrogate our prejudices… Thought-provoking.

I tend to resist modern versions of the classics. What is added to a great work in the rewriting? Do we need the argot of the 21st century because the original is now intimidatingly remote? However, reading Shylock Is My Name undid me, reminding me of the irrefutable otherness that still manifests itself. It is a moving, disturbing and compelling riposte to the blithe resolution offered in the urtext.

It's here, in [the] juicy, intemperate, wisecracking squabbles, that Jacobson really communicates with Shakespeare's play, teasing out the lacunae, quietly adjusting its emphases…and making startlingly creative use of the centuries-old playscript.

[Jacobson] has delivered with authority and style… offering witty twists to a play long experienced by many as a racial tragedy

A fascinating and stimulating retelling of a familiar story.

[Jacobson] is a deft satirist, a genuinely funny writer…a beautifully written and fascinating novel.

Darkly comic new novel… A gripping tale of love, death, art and a pound of flesh – as well as plastic surgery… Jacobson examines contemporary issues of Jewish identity with his sharp, biting, northern humour. He asks what it means to be a father, a Jew and a merciful human being in today’s modern world.  He is the first author brave enough to take up the challenge of re-imagining the Bard’s most controversial tragedy, in a bid to tackle its much-debated tones of anti-Semitism.

This complex book challenges all assumptions, never shying away from controversy… For every bitter take on human shortcomings here decried, there is a counterbalancing acknowledgment of the grace inherent in human nature. The novel captures the essence of the original.

Howard Jacobson’s masterful retelling of The Merchant of Venice celebrates the play but speaks for itself about being Jewish… Jacobson [is] a skilful craftsman as well as an artist of rare individuality… He has written a comic novel which poses serious questions. He has been both inventive and faithful to Shakespeare. And as a bonus, he gives us a good many excellent Jewish jokes.

Jacobson preserves the sense of ambiguity and uncertainty…that gives Shakespeare’s play much of its unsettling force… [My Name is Shylock] is the product of deep thought, deep feeling, deep scholarship. But this book is never leaden or lenten. It is fresh, exuberant, funny, almost preposterously entertaining and engaging. It is also possessed of an irony, wit and restless addiction to exploring conflicting arguments that leaves you feeling enriched… Jacobson’s prose is…vibrant, inventive, precise, arresting and full of memorable cadences and elegant modulations… A stunning achievement.

My Name is Shylock does ample justice to the legacy of Shakespeare’s classic story… Jacobson has proved that his command of the art of storytelling is worthy of renewed praise.

Jacobson’s Mancunian Jewish voice (last seen to splendid effect in The Mighty Walzer) is rare enough. But when this voice is combined with high culture and rude comedy it is, despite its abject subject matter, utterly life-affirming.

Expect …The kind of comic intelligence that has made his name

Set in a world of unimaginable wealth, football player celebrity, cosmetic surgery and reality TV, My Name Is Shylock does ample justice to the legacy of Shakespeare's classic story of honouring a debt with perhaps the ultimate sacrifice.

The winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question pulls off a neat trick in this almost perversely serious comic novel, creating a parallel world to Shakespeare's Venice in the wealthy, cultured Golden Triangle of Cheshire, and peopling it with parallel-ish characters...The author shows full power and ingenuity putting Strulovitch and Shylock in the same place and time.

Explores the meaning of Shakespeare's play, uses its enduring relevance to examine the contemporary world and challenges us to interrogate our prejudices...Energetic, authentic and biting.

That Shylock should thus materialise for a present-day Jewish protagonist, and become...a confidant, an exemplar...an advisor is a brilliant conceit...a powerful reimagining and reinvention.

Alive with humanity and fierce debate, the book offers a nice twist on that notorious pound of flesh.

Funny and dark by turns… A gripping tale of love, plastic surgery and that notorious pound of flesh… This warm, witty and brilliantly written book provides a challenging feast for the imagination.

A master of serious-minded comedy, Jacobson is one of the greats of his generation.

A crackling dialectic on fatherhood, faith and what it means to be merciful… The echoes of Shakespeare’s story in Strulovitch’s are obvious…But the quips and the characters are pure Jacobson… It’s a treat.

Hilarious reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

Offering witty twists to a play long experienced by many as a racial tragedy.

Affectionate retelling… At the heart of the novel is the profound question of whether obligation…should be tempered by mercy.

Even those familiar with that book will be surprised by the twists now composed by Jacobson, whose most idle words have purpose, as well as point… Clever mockery and racial self-depreciation give the novel its provocative brilliance… Jacobson pours the quality of mercy through a large strainer, but Shylock’s fortitude and unswerving tribal fidelity are offered as a kind of redemption, a way, if you like, of forgiving Shakespeare. And of sending you back to him, not only just to check

As characteristically ingenious, witty and dark as his musings on what it means to be Jewish.

I don’t think any other author writes as well about the experience of Jewishness and he manages to be serious but with that laconic humour.

An intelligent, funny and enjoyable novel.

For my favourite novel I’m choosing Shylock is my Name… It’s a dark, witty, provocative re-imagine of Shakespeare…seriously brilliant on many levels.

A re-envisaging of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, from the Man Booker Prize-winner and our great chronicler of Jewish life. 
 
‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’ 
 
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 ... 
 
‘Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dream’ Evening Standard 
 
'The funniest British novelist since Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe' Mail on Sunday

Shakespeare's Magnanimity

Lively, free-ranging and entertaining essays on four tragic heroes that bring something fresh and unfamiliar to the field of Shakespearean studies - co-authored by Wilbur Sanders and the Man Booker prizewinning novelist Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson (Author) Howard Jacobson has written seventeen novels and six works of non-fiction. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question; he was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for J.

The field of Shakespearean studies is cluttered with the fossils of past discussion, and somehow we have to pick our way around them. In the opening scene to this unusual book, these obstructive entities are brought to life and engage in lively argument. Four essays on Hamlet, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus follow, all of which freshen the air: unfamiliar, unspecialised, free-ranging and openly argumentative, but tied at all points to the original text. Shakespeare wrote out of, and about, a common humanity, and it is with humanity, common and uncommon, that we must read or watch him. This book is accordingly addressed to the academic or the new student.

J: A Novel

A life-changing novel by one of Britain's greatest novelists, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2010

Remarkable… May well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times

Snarling, effervescent and ambitious… Jacobson’s triumph is to craft a novel that is poignant as well as troubling

Jacobson…goes from strength to strength.

Very little about Jacobson’s circuitous romance-cum-murder mystery is straightforward – other than its originality and its devastating brilliance.

A dystopia that invites comparison with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

To say J is unlike any other novel Jacobson has written would be misleading: the same ferocious wit runs throughout… That said, comparisons do not do full justice to Jacobson’s achievement in what may well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times.

A snarling, effervescent and ambitious philosophical work of fiction… Jacobson’s triumph is to craft a novel that is poignant as well as troubling.

Jacobson once jokingly referred to himself as a Jewish Jane Austen. Here he reinvents himself as a Jewish Aldous Huxley – and displays mastery in the role.

Jacobson has crafted an immersive, complex experience with care and guile.

J is a remarkable achievement: an affecting, unsettling – and yes, darkly amusing – novel.

A provocatively dystopian novel that depicts a disturbingly nice world.

Sufficient testament to a writer who is…producing some of his most powerful work.

A subtle, topical, thought-provoking and painfully uncomfortable novel.

You can’t help feeling that this is an important book, and it’s hugely compelling… Worthy of its status as a Booker long-listee.

Jacobson’s most significantly Jewish book and quite possibly his masterpiece.

The persistent reader will be duly rewarded, as the denouement reveals a hidden logic and the book climaxes with a brilliant literary (and philosophical) coup.

Contemporary literature is overloaded with millenarian visions of destroyed landscapes and societies in flames, but Jacobson has produced one that feels frighteningly new by turning the focus within: the ruins here are the ruins of language, imagination, love itself.

The savagery of his imagery and his conclusions are impossible to forget, and maybe even to deny.

Confounds expectations but confirms Jacobson’s reputation.

I loved this book. A compelling tale that is bound to be a hot contender for the Booker.

Impressive, disturbingly timely – a massive step aside and a noticeable step up from most of his other fiction.

A pivotal – and impressive change of direction for [Jacobson].

Sentence by sentence, he remains perhaps the best British author around.

This is Jacobson at his provocative, surprising, brilliant best.

Thrilling written and the most ambitious work on the shortlist… Once you’ve worked out what’s going on, you’ll be gripped by its hints of an anti-Semitic armageddon.

A brilliant conspiracy yarn examining the manipulation of collective memory.

It's not just the subject of this book that will shock Jacobson fans, its distinct narrative style also comes as a surprise. A pleasant one at that.

A dystopian vision, haunting and memorable

It’s a triumph of creative writing. I finished it and started it again

Jacobson has written a subtle, topical, thought-provoking and painfully uncomfortable novel

chilling and provocative, Jacobson is at the height of his powers here

A thought-provoking prescient novel from the Booker-prize winning author of The Finkler Question. 
 
‘Remarkable…May well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times’ Guardian 
 
Two people fall in love, not yet knowing where they have come from or where they are going. 
 
 They aren’t sure if they have fallen in love of their own accord, or whether they’ve been pushed into each other’s arms. But who would have pushed them, and why? 
 
 Hanging over their lives is a momentous catastrophe – a past event shrouded in suspicion, denial and apology, now referred to as What Happened, If It Happened. 
 
 Set in the future – a world where the past is a dangerous country, not to be talked about or visited – J is a love story of incomparable strangeness, both tender and terrifying. 
 
 Shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize and Longlisted for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize.

Howard Jacobson

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 ideas and no words in which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again? 
 
'Deliciously laugh-aloud nasty about not just the making of this rough beast but what in the American character enabled it to go slouching into the White House' Mail on Sunday 
 
'Undigested rage, whip-smart wit devastating fluency and an aim as straight as an arrow… This is the story, savagely well told by our greatest comic novelist, of how we got in the state we’re in' Oldie

Howard Jacobson

Pussy

Select a format:

Retailers:

Summary

More books from this author