The Act of Love

(Paperback)

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'The Act of Love is naked, haunting, unflinching. Its account of sexual obsession is frightening, painful and finally very moving. A tour de force' - Harold Pinter No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else. Felix Quinn calls himself a happy man. He owns one of London's oldest antiquarian bookshops. He is married to and adores the beautiful Marisa. But a childhood experience has taught him that loss is intrinsic to love, and Felix realises that he can only be truly happy if his wife is sleeping with another man. Enter Marius into Marisa's affections. And now Felix must ask himself, is he really happy By the winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

Reviews

It's Jacobson's genius that he uses Felix's perversion as a torture garden in which a hundred interlinked images, theories, arguments, stories and literary allusions flourish and blossom... A startling achievement: shocking, argumentative, funny, rude, querulous, intellectually bracing * Independent *
A gloriously literary, highly wrought narrative as darkly transgressive, as savage in its brilliance, as anything Jacobson has written... Jacobson is a connoisseur of the harm lovers inflict on each other: he rolls their recriminations on his tongue, savours the bile, relishes the sticky sweetness of passion, and tastes the salty tears that can never quench the perpetual thirst for love * The Times *
The narrative is masterly. Entertaining as well as erudite, it prompts reflections upon art, obsession, masculinity, betrayal and the nature of the erotic... serves above all to confirm his creator's mighty individual talent. There surely cannot be a more vigorously intelligent novelist than Howard Jacobson writing in this country today * Sunday Telegraph *
Howard Jacobson injects a kind of molten energy into English that makes it move like another language altogether... Obsession, hidden desires and the salacious thrill of voyeurism all play their part in this brawny tale of love's flagellant * Daily Mail *
Intense, powerful, surprisingly funny, totally affecting and deeply touching * Observer *

Author Bio

Howard Jacobson has written fourteen novels and five 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 and was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for his most recent novel, J.