Kalooki Nights

The biggest laugh and the biggest cry since Angela Carter's Small Children

Simon Schama, Books of the Year, Observer

In this age of lazy reviewing, facile judgment and inflated rhetoric, how is one to convey news of the arrival of a work of genius? This powerful, troubling, moving, profound novel is nothing less. Its architecture - more accurately: its engineering, the construction of it - is a feat of brilliance, so sustained and accurate is it, and yet this is the least of its merits. What really steals one's breath away is its sharpness and depth of insight - a sharpness that flays, and a depth almost too vertiginous to describe - and the remorseless tragedy it unfolds, even as it makes one laugh aloud, sometimes in shock. It is the most intelligent and important novel to appear in this country in years.

AC Grayling, The Times

This is turbocharged; someone has put a rocket under Jacobson and the result is scintillating....Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dream, with a complete mastery of technique...He can have you in stitches either with a long, beautifully timed paragraph or with a mere two words...

Nick Lezard, Evening Standard

Kalooki Nights is a book to laugh at, learn from and argue with

David Horspool, The Times

A wonderful surprise

Leo Robson, New Statesman

It is likely to be the funniest book published this year...prose sharper and brighter than any of his contemporaries...The jacket says Jacobson has won just one prize for his novels...[Kalooki Nights] deserves to redress the injustices meted out on its author

Observer

This is a welcome return to the bittersweet Yiddish-inspired humour at which Jacobson excels, and which has rightly earned him comparisons with Philip Roth...a gloriously pugnacious novel which, not unlike the fiction of Kingsley Amis in his pomp, wants to take on all-comers

Bryan Cheyette, Guardian

The raging, contentious, hilarious, holy, deicidal, heartbreaking Kalooki Nights is a novel that stands toe-to-toe with the greats

Christopher Cleave, Sunday Telegraph

Develops into a profound and despairing examination of modern life

David Annand, Scotland on Sunday

Kalooki Nights is far and away Jacobson's most ambitious, most fully realised and, above all, most entertaining novel. For its near reckless bravery it deserves some kind of literary VC

Tom Rosenthal, Independent on Sunday

Very funny...a rich, dense book...not so much like reading a novel as sharing a train carriage with its narrator...There is much to learn and a good deal to enjoy

Spectator

Broadsheet reviewers had praised it as a 'work of genius' - and they were right. The book is Jacobson's masterpiece. The writing is flawless, with the author's trademark blending of tragedy and comedy. A ferocious intelligence courses through it, reminiscent of Philip Roth at his 'Counterlife' best

Jonathan Freedland, Jewish Chronicle