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Howard Jacobson
Jonathan Cape, 336pp, £18.99
Most people, if they know nothing else about Howard Jacobson, know perhaps that he’s that funny Jewish novelist: the English Philip Roth. This is the man, after all, whose first novel, Coming from Behind (1983), opened with its anti-hero, a despairing academic named Sefton Goldberg, “knees and elbows glued with the perspiration of effort and anxiety to the polytechnic linoleum, as naked as Noah but for the academic gown and hood”, was deep in embrace with one of his mature students on graduation day, yet able to think of “nothing but the position of the little metal nipple on his Yale lock”.
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