Shylock is My Name

Winner of the Booker Prize

‘The funniest British novelist since Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe’ Mail on Sunday

AS SEEN ON BBC IMAGINE

Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?

With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshires Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house.

Its the beginning of a remarkable friendship. Elsewhere in the Golden Triangle, the rich, manipulative Plurabelle (aka Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever Christine) is the face of her own TV series, existing in a bubble of plastic surgery and lavish parties. She shares prejudices and a barbed sense of humour with her loyal friend DAnton, whose attempts to play Cupid involve Strulovitchs daughter and put a pound of flesh on the line.

Howard Jacobsons version of The Merchant of Venice bends time to its own advantage as it asks what it means to be a father, a Jew and a merciful human being in the modern world.

‘Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dream’ Evening Standard