The Act of Love

Name: The Act of Love
ISBN: 9781416594246

A Novel

Howard Jacobson

In a stunning follow-up to his much-heralded masterpiece, Kalooki Nights, acclaimed author Howard Jacobson has turned his mordant and uncanny sights on Felix Quinn, a rare-book dealer living in London, whose wife Marisa is unfaithful to him.

All husbands, Felix maintains, secretly want their wives to be unfaithful to them. Felix hasn't always thought this way. From the moment of his first boyhood rejection, surviving the shattering effects of love and jealousy had been the study of his life. But while he is honeymooning with Marisa in Florida an event occurs that changes everything. In a moment, he goes from dreading the thought of someone else's hands on the woman he loves to thinking about nothing else. Enter Marius into Marisa's affections. And now Felix must wonder if he really is a happy man.

The Act of Love is a haunting novel of love and jealousy, with stylish prose that crackles and razor-sharp dialogue, praised by the London Times as "darkly transgressive, as savage in its brilliance, as anything Jacobson has written." It is a startlingly perceptive, subtle portrait of a marriage and an excruciatingly honest, provocative exploration of sexual obsession.

About the Author

Howard Jacobson (born 1942 in Manchester, England) is a British novelist, critic, and broadcaster known for comic fiction that explores Jewish identity and experience in contemporary Britain. Raised in the Manchester suburb of Prestwich, he studied English at Downing College, Cambridge, under the influential critic F. R. Leavis. After graduating, he lectured at the University of Sydney before returning to Britain, where he taught at Cambridge's Selwyn College and later at Wolverhampton Polytechnic — an experience that inspired his debut novel, Coming from Behind (1983).

Jacobson went on to write more than a dozen novels, including The Mighty Walzer (1999) and Zoo Time (2012), both winners of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing — a distinction no other author has achieved twice — as well as Kalooki Nights and Who's Sorry Now?, both longlisted for the Booker Prize. He won the Man Booker Prize outright in 2010 for The Finkler Question, a novel about male friendship, loss, and the meaning of Jewish identity, described by critics for its mastery of humor and its ability to inhabit the personal and moral worlds of its characters.

Often compared to Philip Roth, Jacobson has preferred to describe himself instead as "a Jewish Jane Austen." Alongside his fiction, he built a long career as a columnist and critic, and lives in London.