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  • Published: 13 June 2023
  • ISBN: 9781529115673
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $24.99

Mother's Boy

A Writer's Beginnings



Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer

'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

  • Published: 13 June 2023
  • ISBN: 9781529115673
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson has written sixteen novels and five 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.

Also by Howard Jacobson

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Praise for Mother's Boy

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

William Boyd

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.

David Baddiel

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

Melvyn Bragg

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.

Stephen Greenblatt

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.

Steven Berkoff

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

Simon Schama

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.

Jonathan Freedland

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

Spectator

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.

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

[A] brilliantly funny memoir.

Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Times

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

Moshenska, Observer

Instantly engaging and sublimely intelligent.

Prospect

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

David Herman, Jewish Chronicle

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

Nicholas Lezard, Daily Telegraph

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

Andrew Rosenhein, Tablet

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.

Alex Clark, Guardian

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

UK Press Syndication

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

Toby Lichtig, Times Literary Supplement

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.

Gerald Jacobs, Critic

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.

New Statesman

[A] wonderfully funny, moving memoir.

Daily Telegraph, *Summer Reads of 2022*

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

Daily Telegraph, *Books of the Year*