Howard Jacobson – Jonathan Cape – £18.99 It is striking that one of our finest novelists didn’t publish his first novel until he was nearly forty, and characteristically, he was ticking off literature’s late starters as he passed them by. Reading Howard Jacobson, you would say that he was born to be a writer, and he would have concurred. Mother’s Boy is the account of the road to his realisation, taking in his childhood, his education, his wives and his travels. Wolverhampton does not come out of it well. If we observe that Mother’s Boy reads like one of Howard Jacobson’s novels that is only to its advantage. But this … Continue reading →