Awards

• Short-listed for WH Smith Annual Literary Award 2000
• Short-listed for WH Smith Literary Prize 2000
• Shortlisted for W H Smith Annual Literary Award 2000.
• Shortlisted for WH Smith Annual Literary Award 2000.
• Shortlisted for WH Smith Literary Prize 2000.
• Winner of HH Wingate/Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize 2000.

Overview

'Poignant, moving, hilarious...laugh-out-loud funny...the sort of book that might change your life' - Observer From the beginning Oliver Walzer is a natural - at ping-pong. Even with his improvised bat (the Collins Classic edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) he can chop, flick, half-volley like a champion. At sex he is not so adept, but with tuition from Sheeny Waxman, fellow member of the Akiva Social Club Table Tennis Team and stalwart of the Kardomah coffee bar, his game improves. Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

Full Product Details

9780099274728

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Reviews

Jacobson is a great storyteller: phrases, anecdotes and atmosphere roll off the page with the ease and sublime, scary grace of drunken eels...he is unsurpassable The Times This mature novel has the sustained exuberance and passion of his youthful writing...an achingly funny book...an amazing acheivement... There are few novelists today who can imbue the trifles of life with such poetry Independent Marvellous. Jacobson has not just written the first great novel about ping-pong. He has written one of the greatest sporting novels ever...a towering work of authority Sunday Telegraph Jacobson's humour is unashamedly savage and his jokes as sharp as a switch-blade...comic vitriol worthy of Evelyn Waugh Sunday Express

Jacobson is a great storyteller: phrases, anecdotes and atmosphere roll off the page with the ease and sublime, scary grace of drunken eels...he is unsurpassable * The Times * This mature novel has the sustained exuberance and passion of his youthful writing...an achingly funny book...an amazing acheivement... There are few novelists today who can imbue the trifles of life with such poetry * Independent * Marvellous. Jacobson has not just written the first great novel about ping-pong. He has written one of the greatest sporting novels ever...a towering work of authority * Sunday Telegraph * Jacobson's humour is unashamedly savage and his jokes as sharp as a switch-blade...comic vitriol worthy of Evelyn Waugh * Sunday Express *

The most dangerously funny writer in the English language. - Sunday Times

Jacobson's humour is unashamedly savage and his jokes as sharp as a switch-blade...comic vitriol worthy of Evelyn Waugh * Sunday Express * Marvellous. Jacobson has not just written the first great novel about ping-pong. He has written one of the greatest sporting novels ever...a towering work of authority * Sunday Telegraph * This mature novel has the sustained exuberance and passion of his youthful writing...an achingly funny book...an amazing acheivement... There are few novelists today who can imbue the trifles of life with such poetry * Independent * Jacobson is a great storyteller: phrases, anecdotes and atmosphere roll off the page with the ease and sublime, scary grace of drunken eels...he is unsurpassable * The Times *

Howard Jacobson's latest, and brazenly autobiographical book is a savagely funny, bittersweet homage to growing up Jewish in 1950s Manchester. The contradictory central character - Oliver Walzer, is, at the outset, a chronically shy but relentlessly filthy-minded teen, good for nothing except ping-pong at which he excels. A misogynistic mummy's (or rather, aunties') boy he struggles to get a grip in the macho world of his market trader father and the Kardomah - coffeehouse and mecca of sin for randy teenagers. He eventually escapes to Cambridge and further humiliations only to return years later finally proving that home really is where the heart is no matter how much you think you hate it. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

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.

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