Brother of the More Famous Jack: The 40th anniversary edition of a classic, with new introductions by Rachel Cusk & Maria Semple

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________________________ A JOYFUL 40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF A COMING-OF-AGE CLASSIC ________________________ 'There are few modern tales of first love and its disillusions that are as thoroughly realised, as brilliantly lewd, and as hilariously satisfying to men and women of all ages as this one' - Rachel Cusk Eighteen-year-old Katherine - bright, stylish, frustratedly suburban - doesn't know how her life will change when the brilliant Jacob Goldman first offers her a place at university. When she enters the Goldmans' rambling bohemian home, presided over by the beatific matriarch Jane, she realises that Jacob and his family are everything she has been waiting for. But when a romantic entanglement ends in tears, Katherine is forced into exile from the family she loves most. And her journey back into the fold, after more than a decade away, will yield all kinds of delightful surprises... ________________________ 'The perfect book' - Meg Mason 'The best possible company in this difficult world' - Ann Patchett 'A daisy bomb of joy' - Maria Semple 'Funny, charming, teeming with life, and real' - Nick Hornby 'I adored it ... Redolent of classics like The Constant Nymph with both its true voice and wonderfully sage and sanguine heroine' - Sophie Dahl 'One of those books that when people have read it, they just push it into your hands silently: "You have to read this book, you will love this book." There's no other book I love more' - Caroline O'Donoghue, Sentimental Garbage 'Reading it again is as comforting as eating toast and Marmite between clean, fresh sheets' - Rachel Cooke, Sunday Times 'Think Brideshead Revisited set in the 1970s, only sexier and much funnier. It kills me that I didn't read it at university, when I really needed it' - Meg Rosoff, New Statesman

Barbara Trapido was born in South Africa and is the author of seven novels - Brother of the More Famous Jack (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Fiction), Noah's Ark, Temples of Delight (shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award), Juggling, The Travelling Hornplayer (shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award), Frankie and Stankie (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award) and Dancing With Stravinsky. She lives in Oxford.

The fiction equivalent of a brisk walk followed by a hot buttered crumpet: fresh, invigorating, comforting and heartening * SUNDAY TELEGRAPH * Few writers give more pleasure and joy to their readers. Trapido has such a gift for seeing the world's weight so clearly and writing about it so lightly -- KAMILA SHAMSIE It is the perfect book. Beautiful, heartbreaking, funny, and utterly ageless. The first time I read it, I knew within pages that Brother of the More Famous Jack was going to become my favourite novel. The second time, that this brilliant, funny, intensely moving work is everything I aspire to as a writer. Every reading since, that devotion to Barbara Trapido is my only true requisite in a friend -- MEG MASON Can we talk about Barbara Trapido? I love those books so much ... So charming, they're absolutely gorgeous. For me, reading Barbara Trapido is like entering a entirely different world ... I'd recommend everyone read Brother of the More Famous Jack -- MARIAN KEYES Why did it take me so long to discover the singular joys of Barbara Trapido's novels? Why, for so many years, had I missed these witty, soulful, heartbreaking, expansive, brilliant tales? What have I been wasting my time doing? Reading books that AREN'T perfect? Never again! -- ELIZABETH GILBERT I am wildly jealous of anyone who hasn't yet read Barbara Trapido. They have yet to discover the joy of her often hilarious and always profound world; they are about to meet her intricate cast of recurring characters; they will soon have those glorious moments of Trapidean epiphany when they realise - oh! - the boy in this book is the child of a woman in that book. There is no-one like Barbara. Buy all her books, quick, and then sit back, crack the spines, and prepare to marvel -- MAGGIE O'FARRELL Brother of the More Famous Jack is the book we need right now: smart, funny, honest, painful and true. It is the best possible company as we make our way through this difficult world. I love it -- ANN PATCHETT A moving, intense, earthy and witty book, both illuminating and extraordinary as a first novel * THE TIMES * She is a writer I feel genuinely evangelical about, and I think she's criminally underread. I'd honestly go to Speaker's Corner and stand on a box and read out passages from Brother of the More Famous Jack, such is my love for it -- DAISY BUCHANAN The exuberance, the humour, the gritty toughness and the sadness ... I really love the way she writes -- MIRIAM TOEWS I adored Brother of the More Famous Jack. It is redolent of classics like The Constant Nymph with both its true voice and wonderfully sage and sanguine heroine -- SOPHIE DAHL Brother of the More Famous Jack is one of the funniest, warmest, sexiest, sharpest novels I've ever read. I must have read it a dozen times: I turn to it whenever the world seems drear, for it has such light and such joy in it -- KATHERINE RUNDELL Its high spirits are irresistible ... the heroine is unstoppable * SUNDAY TELEGRAPH * Perfect characters and dialogue - the most satisfying book I've ever read * RED * A story, like Mansfield Park, of falling in love with a whole family -- A N WILSON * SPECTATOR * The style is hectic and passionate, the jokes thick and fast, the emotions full and right, the humanity total and engulfing ... a first fruit to savour and exalt * THE TIMES * A very funny book ... A complex and highly polished work ... Barbara Trapido has that rare ability to make her characters respond to small misfortunes and irritations exactly as people do * NEW YORK TIMES * I've given ... Brother of the More Famous Jack to dozens of people, and like me, they fall rapturously in love with Trapido's breezy, raunchy and unsentimental style -- MARIA SEMPLE * NEW YORK TIMES * A sort of bohemian Brideshead Revisited * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT * Very funny, very English, very sad * DAILY TELEGRAPH * A highly promising debut - fast, inventive, funny * LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS * This is a first novel ... but if established writers could get this good on the seventh try, readers would be the richer for it ... What a lovely novel - charming, intelligent and a happy ending too. Barbara Trapido, where have you been? * USA TODAY * If you've been looking for a modern love story that shines with off-beat charm and sprightly intelligence - not to mention elegance of style - take heart ... This brief account cannot do justice to the wry, civilized tone and understated wit that lights up Trapido's writing * SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE * A pleasure ... full of excellent things, enormously exuberant, carried along for the most part on vivid dialogue for which Ms Trapido has an uncannily perceptive ear * EVENING STANDARD *