The Act of Love

A gloriously literary, highly wrought narrative as darkly transgressive, as savage in its brilliance, as anything Jacobson has written... Jacobson is a connoisseur of the harm lovers inflict on each other: he rolls their recriminations on his tongue, savours the bile, relishes the sticky sweetness of passion, and tastes the salty tears that can never quench the perpetual thirst for love

The Times

The Act of Love is an ambitious and at times extremely uncomfortable novel

The Telegraph

The Act of Love, like Jacobson's other work, contains a rich vein of humour...Intelligent and erudite, Felix is a fascinating character

Financial Times

An impressively sustained, and unusually intense, literary experiment

Literary Review

Entertaining... Jacobson's prose is incisive and off-kilter, abrasive and often hilarious

The Times

Felix Quinn, the narrator of the book...explains it beautifully - and this is a very good novel... Feeling unsafe makes him feel alive. And loss, of course, is the wellspring of good storytelling

Evening Standard

He is a master of the comedy of social awkwardness... Jacobson is playing a sophisticated literary game, in this most literate of novels

Esquire

Howard Jacobson injects a kind of molten energy into English that makes it move like another language altogether... Obsession, hidden desires and the salacious thrill of voyeurism all play their part in this brawny tale of love's flagellant

Daily Mail

Intense, powerful, surprisingly funny, totally affecting and deeply touching

Observer

It is an almost frighteningly brilliant achievement. Why did the Booker judges not recognise it?

The Guardian

It's Jacobson's genius that he uses Felix's perversion as a torture garden in which a hundred interlinked images, theories, arguments, stories and literary allusions flourish and blossom... A startling achievement: shocking, argumentative, funny, rude, querulous, intellectually bracing

Independent

Jacobson's 10th novel is a moving, thought-provoking and darkly witty story of desire and love

Irish Times

Jacobson's page-turning account of sexual obsession is replete with erudite flourishes and sophisticated insight

Independent

Mesmerising...also as delightfully funny a novel as one would expect from Jacobson, who revels in language and in the perverse spell it can cast... The Act of Love is spellbinding, not just in its characterisation, or in its simplicity of plot, in the flirtatiousness with which Jacobson courts language, or the stylish sardonic humour that seems to come so easily, but in its entirety

Scotsman

One of the author's most affecting, honest and brilliant works. It is a searingly well written piece by a ridiculously underrated novelist

Sunday Telegraph

The narrative is masterly. Entertaining as well as erudite, it prompts reflections upon art, obsession, masculinity, betrayal and the nature of the erotic... serves above all to confirm his creator's mighty individual talent. There surely cannot be a more vigorously intelligent novelist than Howard Jacobson writing in this country today

Sunday Telegraph

This is a very good novel

Scotsman