J

Set in the future—a world where the past is a dangerous country, not to be talked about or visited—J is a love story of incomparable strangeness, both tender and terrifying. Howard Jacobson, one of Britain’s greatest novelists and winner of the 2010 Man Booker prize, has written a novel which “may well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times” (Guardian).

Two people fall in love, not yet knowing where they have come from or where they are going. Kevern doesn’t know why his father always drew two fingers across his lips when he said a word starting with a J. It wasn’t then, and isn’t now, the time or place to be asking questions. Ailinn too has grown up in the dark about who she was or where she came from. On their first date Kevern kisses the bruises under her eyes. He doesn’t ask who hurt her. Brutality has grown commonplace. They aren’t sure if they have fallen in love of their own accord, or whether they’ve been pushed into each other’s arms. But who would have pushed them, and why?

Hanging over the lives of all the characters in this novel is a momentous catastrophe—a past event shrouded in suspicion, denial, and apology, now referred to as What Happened, If It Happened.

J is a novel to be talked about in the same breath as 1984 and A Brave New World, thought-provoking and life-changing. It is like no other novel that Howard Jacobson has written.