Zoo Time

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''Comedy is never as clever as when Howard Jacobson is on a roll and this book finds him barrelling'' - Independent on Sunday

''Brilliantly composed ... crackling with Jacobson''s wit, superb wordplay and boundless exuberance'' - Times Literary Supplement

''Seriously funny'' - Alexei Sayle, Daily Telegraph
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A sharp, witty novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question

Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head, contrary, highly strung and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence that destroys Guy''s peace of mind, suggesting the wildest stories but making it impossible for him to concentrate long enough to write any of them.

Not that anyone reads Guy, anyway. Not that anyone is reading anything. Reading, Guy fears, is finished. His publisher, fearing the same, has committed suicide. His agent, like all agents, is in hiding. Vanessa, in the meantime, is writing a novel of her own. Guy doesn''t expect her to finish it, or even start it, but he dreads the consequences if she does.

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.

By turns angry, elegiac and rude, Zoo Time is a novel about love - love of women, love of literature, love of laughter. It shows our funniest writer at his brilliant best.
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''All the trademark Jacobson qualities - waspish comedy, transgressive sex, wry riffs on Jewishness, prose so scintillating you might miss its underlying artistry - are here in spades *****'' - The Mail on Sunday

''Once again, Jacobson shows that the true humorist is among the best kinds of novelist. His humour is neither cheap nor chirpy but addresses fundamental mysteries'' - Sunday Telegraph