Like most writers, Howard Jacobson has led a largely unremarkable life. That this lively memoir manages to make it so interesting is a testament to the humour that runs through its pages – and to the often captivating calibre of the prose.

Mother’s Boy: A Writer’s Beginnings
HOWARD JACOBSON
(JONATHAN CAPE, 288 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • tel 020 7799 4064

Like most writers, Howard Jacobson has led a largely unremarkable life. That this lively memoir manages to make it so interesting is a testament to the humour that runs through its pages – and to the often captivating calibre of the prose.

Jacobson was Manchester-born and bred, and his childhood was spent surrounded largely by women – a sister, an aunt and, always close by, an interventionist mother. He never felt close to his father, who could fix anything but his own business, and who ended up running a market stall. He was a man who, as Jacobson pithily notes, thought with his hands. He feared his son was being “feminised” by the women of his family, since from a young age the boy preferred books to tools.

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