Getting Your Hands on The Finkler Question

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (Aug 2, 2010)
ISBN-10: 1408808870
ISBN-13: 978-1408808870
Average Rating: 4 stars


Shortlisted for the 2010 Man-Booker Prize, this book was released in Canada and the U.K. in early August. There is, however, no release date for the U.S. as of yet - although Amazon Kindle owners can currently buy & download the digital version. 
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 former BBC radio producer, 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 Czech 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 have 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 11:30 pm, as Treslove, walking home, hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country, that he is attacked. And after this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change. "The Finkler Question" is a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best. [Product Description]
Amazon.ca has several new and used copies available, anywhere from $27 - $112 CDN (approx. $25 - $106 US)
Amazon.co.uk has new and used copies from £12 - £45 (approx. $18 - $70 US)
ABEbooks.com has three signed, first U.K. editions listing for between $32 - $72.


Amazon.co.uk readers give it 4 1/2 stars
Goodreads readers give it 3 1/2 stars

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