The Finkler Question (First U.S. Hardcover Edition)

Jacobson, Howard

ISBN 10: 1608196429 / ISBN 13: 9781608196425

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York, 2010

About this Item

Bloomsbury, New York, 2010. First U.S. Hardcover edition. First printing. Hardbound. Fine in a fine jacket. A clean tight copy, with price ($25) intact on front jacket flap. Comes with archival-quality mylar jacket protector. This is the first hardcover edition in the U.S., originally published by same publisher in a trade paperback edition. They released the hardcover edition after the author won the Booker Prize for this novel.

Seller Inventory # Fiction-J-02

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Finkler Question (First U.S. Hardcover Edition)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, New York
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1608196429
• ISBN 13: 9781608196425
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Booker Prize

About this title

Synopsis

"He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one..."
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.

Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor's grand, central London apartment.

It's a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends' losses.

And it's that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.

The Finkler Question is a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, aging, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.

About the Author

Howard Jacobson