Margins
Coming From Behind book cover
Coming From Behind
1984
First Published
3.43
Average Rating
256
Number of Pages
Sefton mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands; small, sweaty, lustful, defiantly unappreciative of beer, nature and organized games; gnawingly aware of being an urban Jew islanded in a sea of country-loving Anglo-Saxons. Obsessed by failure so much so that he plans to write a bestseller on the subject. In the meantime, he is uncomfortably aware of advancing years and atrophying achievement, and no amount of lofty rationalization can disguise the triumph of friends and colleagues, not only from Cambridge days but even within the despised walls of the Poly itself, or sweeten the bitter pill of another’s success.
Avg Rating
3.43
Number of Ratings
223
5 STARS
12%
4 STARS
39%
3 STARS
32%
2 STARS
12%
1 STARS
4%
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Author

Howard Jacobson
Howard Jacobson
Author · 23 books

Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester, England, and educated at Cambridge. His many novels include The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Who’s Sorry Now? and Kalooki Nights (both longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), and, most recently, The Act of Love. Jacobson is also a respected critic and broadcaster, and writes a weekly column for the Independent. He lives in London. Profile of Howard Jacobson in The New York Times. “The book's appeal to Jewish readers is obvious, but like all great Jewish art—the paintings of Marc Chagall, the books of Saul Bellow, the films of Woody Allen—it is Jacobson's use of the Jewish experience to explain the greater human one that sets it apart. Who among us is so certain of our identity? Who hasn't been asked, "What's your background" and hesitated, even for a split second, to answer their inquisitor? Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question forces us to ask that of ourselves, and that's why it's a must read, no matter what your background.”—-David Sax, NPR.

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