BFL23 - Howard Jacobson

Howl is Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson’s latest novel - a devastating psychological portrait of a primary school head teacher who believes the world is crumbling around him.

In the aftermath of a massacre from which he doubts the world will ever recover, Ferdinand Draxler finds himself at the crossroads of history…unless it’s just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy nature. The son of a Holocaust survivor who accuses him of cowardice and the father of a daughter who accuses him of genocide, Draxler longs to be a hero for his people or the comic scourge of their enemies, but does he have the mettle to be either? He isn’t even sure he has what it takes to go mad.

Howl is a pitch-black novel of obsession and pain about a man grappling with world events and existential despair

Howard Jacobson has written 18 novels and six works of non-fiction. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question; he was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for J.