Library Journal In tribute to his childhood pal, Samuel Finkler, Julian Treslove, a former BBC arts producer, has always privately thought of Jews as Finklers. Now in late middle age, Treslove and Finkler have remained friends and have also stayed close to their former history teacher and bon vivant, the nonagenarian Libor Sevick, another Jew. After a night out with his two old friends, Treslove is mugged by a female assailant who says something to him that sounds at first like, "Your jewels," but that he later interprets to be, "You Jew." This life-defining moment sparks an identity crisis, one in which Treslove, who has always been the envious outsider, comes to believe he might actually be Jewish. At the same time, Finkler, a widely regarded and well-known philosopher, joins the ranks of a group called "ASHamed," Jews who distance themselves from the Israeli cause in sympathy for the Palestinians. Just as an outbreak of violent anti-Semitic incidents causes Finkler to rethink his alliance with ASHamed, Treslove falls in love with Sevick's niece and becomes deeply immersed in Jewish studies. Verdict The novel's underlying question is: Can you choose to be Jewish or can you choose not to be? This Man Booker Prize nominee is as entertaining as it is provocative and will be essential reading for thoughtful readers on either side of the debate. Highly recommended.-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, Ont. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Book list Julian Treslove is plagued by the notion that his life lacks substance. He has had only the most superficial relationships with women, two of whom bore him sons he has hardly seen, and his career is at an impasse, for he now makes his living as a celebrity double. He longs for the tangible lives of his best friends, both Jewish widowers. Middle-aged Sam Finkler is a wildly successful TV personality and author whose wife succumbed to cancer, while octogenarian Libor Sevick has lost the woman he was happily married to for more than 50 years. Julian becomes obsessed with the idea of becoming Jewish as a way to give his life meaning and embarks on a personal odyssey in which he learns Yiddish, takes a Jewish lover, and becomes involved with the Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture. Jacobson uses Julian's transformation as a way of examining, often with a mordant wit reminiscent of comedian Larry David's, what it means to be Jewish. Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, this novel also offers poignant insights into the indignities of aging, the competitiveness of male friendship, and the yearning to belong.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Kirkus Elegiacbut also humorousmeditation on life's big questions: life, death, the nature of justice, whether to sleep with a German. The book won the 2010 Man Booker Prize.Nearing the end of his 60s, Jacobson, who has likened himself to a "Jewish Jane Austen," is a very funny man. His lead character, a London media type named Julian Treslove, is not Jewish, but he might as well be: He has a Woody Allensize complex of neuroses and worries, and "his life had been one mishap after another." Mugged by a woman who utters a mysterious syllable"Ju," Treslove thinkswhile going through his pockets, he finds himself about as angst-ridden as an angst-ridden person can be. His widower friends Finkler and Libor, great successes in their day, are no pikers in the angst department, though, lonely and full of the usual aches and veys; as Treslove notes, "A man without a wife can be lonely in a big black Mercedes, no matter how many readers he has." The three pass their days together gnawing various questions to the bone, not least whether, in the post-Holocaust days, it is possible to "contemplate having an affair with someone who looked German." (Consensus: No, even if that someone was Marlene Dietrich.) When Libor's great-niece, Hephzibah, sweeps into the picture, Treslove finds himself thinking much more about questions of the heart, even as Finkler, a writer of pop philosophy, is swept away in a flood of "ASHamed Jews" who "were not to blame for anything" but were in the thick of controversy all the samefor, Finkler sighs, the very word "Jew" (was that what Treslove's attacker was saying?) is "a password to madness...One little word with no hiding place for reason in it."Jacobson's gentle tale of urban crises of the soul slowly turns into an examination of anti-Semitism, of what it means to be Jewish in a time when "the Holocaust had become negotiable."At turns a romp and a disquisition worthy of Maimonides; elegantly written throughout, and with plenty of punchlines too.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly A brutal view of India's class struggles is cunningly presented in Adiga's debut about a racist, homicidal chauffer. Balram Halwai is from the "Darkness," born where India's downtrodden and unlucky are destined to rot. Balram manages to escape his village and move to Delhi after being hired as a driver for a rich landlord. Telling his story in retrospect, the novel is a piecemeal correspondence from Balram to the premier of China, who is expected to visit India and whom Balram believes could learn a lesson or two about India's entrepreneurial underbelly. Adiga's existential and crude prose animates the battle between India's wealthy and poor as Balram suffers degrading treatment at the hands of his employers (or, more appropriately, masters). His personal fortunes and luck improve dramatically after he kills his boss and decamps for Bangalore. Balram is a clever and resourceful narrator with a witty and sarcastic edge that endears him to readers, even as he rails about corruption, allows himself to be defiled by his bosses, spews coarse invective and eventually profits from moral ambiguity and outright criminality. It's the perfect antidote to lyrical India. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Library Journal This first novel by Indian writer Adiga depicts the awakening of a low-caste Indian man to the degradation of servitude. While the early tone of the book calls to mind the heartbreaking inequities of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, a better comparison is to Frederick Douglass's narrative about how he broke out of slavery. The protagonist, Balram Halwai, is initially delighted at the opportunity to become the driver for a wealthy man. But Balram grows increasingly angry at the ways he is excluded from society and looked down upon by the rich, and he murders his employer. He reveals this murder from the start, so the mystery is not what he did but why he would kill such a kind man. The climactic murder scene is wonderfully tense, and Balram's evolution from likable village boy to cold-blooded killer is fascinating and believable. Even more surprising is how well the narrative works in the way it's written as a letter to the Chinese premier, who's set to visit Bangalore, India. Recommended for all libraries.-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly This vast, vividly realistic historical novel follows the crew of a slave-trading vessel from its Liverpool shipyard through days at anchor bartering human cargo on the Guinea Coast, then on beyond the slaver's disease-ridden and mutinous Middle Passage. With an epic ambition that seems suited to its 18th-century setting, Unsworth ( Stone Virgin ) takes on a big theme--greed, the animating ``sacred hunger'' of the title--but at the same time fills his huge canvas with the alternately fascinating and horrifying details of shipboard life, colonial plunder and power struggles, the London clubs of absentee sugar lords, even a pidgin Utopia created by slaves and seamen on unclaimed Florida coast. Deftly utilizing a flood of period detail, Unsworth has written a book whose stately pace, like the scope of its meditations, seems accurately to evoke the age. Tackling here a central perversity of our history--the keeping of slaves in a land where ``all men are created equal''--Unsworth illuminates the barbaric cruelty of slavery, as well as the subtler habits of politics and character that it creates. As intricate as it is immense, this masterwork rewards every turn of its 640 pages. (July) one with a continuing fascination for readers and authors alike--Unsworth illuminates its cruel ties and miscarriages, its floggings and murders, as well as the subtler habits of politics and character that it creates. As intricate as it is immense, this masterwork rewards every turn of its 640 pages. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Library Journal With its graphic depiction of the 18th-century slave trade and a society driven by the desire to maximize profit regardless of the human cost, this new novel by the author of Pascali's Island (Penguin, 1988) offers a dark view of human nature clearly relevant to our own time. William Kemp hopes to recoup his losses in cotton speculation by entering the Triangular Trade. As ship's doctor, his nephew Matthew experiences firsthand the horrors of shipboard life, ultimately leading a revolt that lands the crew and remaining slaves on the southeastern coast of Florida. Here they try to establish ``a paradise place,'' but events force Matthew to conclude that ``nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way.'' Though the pace drags at times, taken as a whole this is a masterful effort that delivers an important message. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.-- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus A masterful, thoroughly engrossing tale from acclaimed historical novelist Unsworth (Pascali's Island, 1980; Stone Virgin, 1986)--about the British slave trade in the mid-18th century and a shipboard mutiny from which arose a community based on racial equality. Through the perspectives of Erasmus Kemp, son of the shipowner and an obsessive, insensitive youth; and Matthew Paris--his cousin, a doctor (and ship's physician) recently imprisoned for publishing his seditious views in favor of evolution--Unsworth contrasts imagery of a genteel life in England with an increasingly brutal, barbaric existence under the command of the maniacal Captain Thurso. As slaves are collected from traders along the African coast, the fortunes of the owner decline precipitously, with his suicide and the ruin of Erasmus's fanciful plans of empire-building and grandeur through a good marriage the result. Becalmed, the ship's human cargo begins to sicken and die, and an increasingly vexed Thurso opts to alleviate matters by throwing ailing slaves overboard--an act spurring Paris and the crew to kill him. After landing on the remote coast of Florida, ex-slaves and sailors live in freedom for 12 years--inspired by the utopian ideals of an itinerant artist picked up in Africa--until they are captured by soldiers under Erasmus, who, consumed by the same sacred hunger for wealth that made chattel of human beings, has spared no effort to hunt down the cousin whom he blames for the loss of his dream. Intense in its elaboration of two vastly different visions of destiny and cause-and-effect, more steeped in history than Charles Johnson's Middle Passage: a riveting, outstanding addition to an already impressive oeuvre.

Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Choice There are two main strands in Carey's novel; the relationship between the two compulsive gamblers named in the title and the realization of Lucinda's fantasy in the construction of a glass church. But the strands are only loosely connected, and we have essentially two novels or two long short stories swollen to unnecessary length. Carey is of interest as an Australian disciple of Jorge Luis Borges and John Barth, but he lacks Barth's fertile inventiveness and stylistic wit. As in a number of Barth's books, the story line operates toward failure, but Carey, unlike Barth, heightens this effect by a tendency to produce less in narrative surprise than he leads us to expect. The book has been carelessly proofread: there are well in excess of 100 errors. Recommended for libraries with Commonwealth collections. J. B. Beston Nazareth College of Rochester

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly If Illywhacker astounded us with its imaginative richness, this latest Carey novel does so again, with a masterly sureness of touched added. It's a story, in a sense the story, of mid-19th century England and Australia, narrated by a man of our time and therefore permeated with modern consciousness. Oscar is a shy, gawky, Oxford-educated Church of England minister with a tortured conscience; Lucinda is a willful, eccentric Australian who sinks her family inheritance into a glass factory; and the basis for the star-crossed love that develops between them is a shared passion for gambling. They meet on the boat to Sydney, Oscar becomes Lucinda's lodger after being defrocked for his ``vice'' and, finally, leaving a trail of scandal behind them, they construct a glass church in the Outback, their wildest gamble yet. The narrative techniques though which Carey dramatizes the effects of English religious beliefs and social mores upon frontier Australia smack of both Dickens and of Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman; but he doesn't lean upon his sources, he uses them, for his own subtle and controlled purposes. His prose (full of such flashes as ``A cormorant broke from the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dream and life'') is an almost constant source of surprise, and he is clearly in the forefront of that literary brilliance now flowing out of Australia. 30,000 first printing; $35,000 ad/promo. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Publishers Weekly ``If Illywhacker astounded us with its imaginative richness, this latest Carey novel does so again, with a masterly sureness of touch added. It's a story, in a sense the story, of mid-19th century England and Australia, narrated by a man of our time, and therefore permeated with modern consciousness,'' stated PW. The novel won the Booker Prize. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Book list Lively's Booker Prize-winning novel, in which an elderly historian reflects on her life and work, rekindles, even in the most jaded reader, awe for the power of words beautifully used and the wisdom earned by passionate observation. [BKL Ap 15 88]

From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Library Journal Lively recently won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for this deeply moving, elegantly structured novel. The heroine is Claudia Hampton, an unconventional historian and former war correspondent who lies in a hospital bed dying of cancer. Forced inward, Claudia moves randomly across time and place to reconstruct the strata of her life. But ``most lives have their core, their kernel, the vital centre''; Claudia's is the brief, tragic encounter she had in Egypt during the war with Tom Southern, a British tank officer on leave from battle. Tom's voice, along with those of her brother and daughter, joins Claudia's to shape a narrative that is a complex, intricately composed fugue. This haunting evocation of loss is Lively's finest achievement yet.Laurence Hull, Cannon Memorial Lib., Concord, N.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus Winner of the 1987 Booker Prize in England, this novel has at its center historian and journalist Claudia Hampton, a woman who lies in a hospital bed dying of old age but who uses the immobility to stratify, like an outcropping, all the layers of her life. In many of her fine works, Lively has written about history, its jokes and permutations, with the consistent knack of keeping personal scale while destiny goes blithely on--and Claudia is a good vehicle for this. Her incestuous relationship with brilliant brother Gordon, her marriage to shallow businessman Jasper, the mothering of her daughter (ambivalent at best), the great central affair of her life (with a British tank commander in North Africa during WW II)--they all illustrate the relative insignificance yet enormous pleasure of living consciously within time. Yet this isn't Lively's best work. Though rich and varied, it's a little too much the tone poem, too much the elegiac, rueful, amused retrospective. Claudia in the hospital is a flashback machine (multiplied by small additional flashbacks that narrate an incident in the voices and heads of its participants). A certain innocence born of forward-facing narrative (what'll happen next?) is thus lost to the reader; the book is frozen motionless by the snows of yesteryear. Textured and artful, but a touch too portentous also. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list Lively was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction, England's most prestigious literary award, for Moon Tiger-a fine, resounding novel that rekindles, even in the most jaded reader, awe for the power of words beautifully used and the wisdom earned by passionate observation. Elderly Claudia Hampton is dying, but she is also writing her last book-a history of the world. Hampton, elegant and sexy when younger, has lived an independent and willful life working as a war correspondent in Egypt during World War II and then as a bold and creative popular historian. She recalls her past in descriptions rich in sensual texture; her relationships are complex and memorable. But it is her sense of the world and each person's place in it that captivates. Her musings illuminate the chameleon qualities of time and the many forms history can take. This novel is a celebration of the vastness and beauty of thought and imagination. DK. [OCLC] 87-23798

From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Publishers Weekly The winner of the 1984 Booker Prize, this novel tells the story of Edith Hope, 40, unmarried and distraught over a failed love, who is persuaded by friends to go to the quiet, respectable Hotel du Lac in Switzerland. A writer of romantic fiction, Hope becomes enmeshed in the lives of the other guests. Noting that the delivery was perhaps more important than specific events, PW called Brookner ``insidiously observant, so soft of voice the reader must listen closely for the wry wit and sly humor. She is poignantly moving.'' (March) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Edith Hope, 39, ""a writer of romantic fiction under a more thrusting name,"" has come to a small, quiet Swiss hotel in the off-season--to recover from (or atone for) some unspecified, scandalous ""lapse"" in her London behavior. As in Brookner's Look at Me (1983), this Jamesian, Woolfian heroine is unmarried, wary, cerebral--torn between involvement and detachment, self-dramatization and self-deprecation. At first, then, while writing letters to her married lover back home, Edith plays the role of the watcher, becoming the confidante to two hotel guests--each of whom represents one womanly approach to the problem of romance: regal widow Mrs. Pusey--gloriously well-preserved at 79, accompanied by her plumply sexy daughter--is ""completely preoccupied with the femininity which has always provided her with life's chief delights""; on the other hand, shrill Monica, rebellious and quasi-anorexic wife of a nobleman, offers ""the rueful world of defiance, of taunting, of teasing, of spoiling for a fight."" And a third alternative to Edith's own romanticism is provided by enigmatic guest Mr. Neville, who urges her to adopt an ""entirely selfish"" approach to life and love. Edith considers all these possibilities--while recalling (and revealing) the details of that London ""lapse"": not showing up for her scheduled wedding to a bland, safe suitor. She receives another, odder marriage proposal from elegantly creepy Mr. Neville. (""You are a lady. . . As my wife, you will do very well. Unmarried, I'm afraid you will soon look a bit of a fool."") But finally, after a few more revelations, Edith will return to her romantic one-true-love. . . even though she's quite aware that it's illusory, half-unrequited, doomed. In many ways, this sad little comedy is less subtle, more artificial than Brookner's three previous, similar character-portraits: the themes are laid on thick, starting right off with Edith's surname and occupation; the James/Woolf echoes are blatantly arranged; the players (including Edith herself) are more types than credible characters. Still, for readers who relish a blend of extra-dry humor, tartly wistful introspection, and literary self-consciousness, this small entertainment--winner of England's Booker Prize--will be a delicate, provocative pleasure. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Kirkus There is a faint smell of fire and brimstone when something of the past comes tearing to the surface vivid and complete."" So says 60-ish Charles--famed theater personality, an egotist who gives exquisite attention to life's small pleasures, and somewhat of a stinker--who is now a recluse in a curious old house on a wild English promontory breasting the sea. But obscenely arising from Charles' clean sea is a sea monster (an LSD trip rerun?), and there are other spectral matters hinting of demons abroad, as Charles ruminates his past, from a childhood Eden wriggling with jealousies and envy to an adulthood dotted incidentally with women. The older woman he did really love, now dead, partner in shuttlecock rounds of rows and reunions. Ferocious Rosina, whom Charles levered away from her husband, then refused to marry. And slavish Lizzie, always the good little girl for the asking. These women, among others, Charles niched in order of utility. But one relationship was on a different, pure plane. Hartley, ah Hartley, ""My first love and. . . my only love. . . my end and my beginning."" Hartley, when they were both young, refused Charles to marry another--and disappeared. Now, 40 years later, when Charles' world is about to quake, Hartley reappears, ""a stout, elderly woman. . . holding a shopping bag."" Charles, repossessed by a love that is ""absolute,"" sets out to shake Hartley from her husband in their tea-cosy cottage, with feverish avowals and labyrinthine scheming. Hartley sobs and rages within this vise of adoration, and a motley crew of Charles' ""friends"" attempts to head off Charles' manic pursuit. But there's a wind change as a young man is drowned, and Rosina's ex-husband makes an admirably forthright attempt to dispatch Charles. Then storms subside in criss-cross ripples of new unions and new bafflements. Although the metaphysical games can snarl a bit, this bright play with the demons that we unleash on one another is entertainment both sly and tantalizing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Kirkus An isolated British garrison falls prey to the 1857 Sepoy rebellion. The native Indian mutineers never really figure in this semicomic tapestry of colonial types: the image is rather that of black insects swarming over a white body. (When this literally happens to one Englishwoman her young rescuers are perplexed as to whether her pubic hair is human or verminous -- Farrell's idea of a stout anti-Victorian joke.) The besieged officials sustain a teatime bravado amidst cholera and stench and swelter; their leader is an outside rationalist called the Collector, a derisory, pontificating sponsor of the Queen's Progress. Farrell's refusal to romanticize teeming India is matched by his inability to mount the least of moving insights. Like his characters, he believes in phrenology, tracing the bumps and concavities of a singular time and place without penetrating its humanity. Farrell has an admiring audience in England -- he's a good writer if never able to overcome a certain aridity -- as in the earlier novels Troubles and A Girl in the Head. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.