Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other — or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and together with Treslove they share a sweetly painful evening revisiting a time before they had loved and lost. It is that very evening, when Treslove hesitates a moment as he walks home, that he is attacked — and his whole sense of who and what he is slowly and ineluctably changes.

It takes a particular kind of man to want an embroidered polo player astride his left nipple. Occasionally, when I am tired and emotional, or consumed with self-dislike, I try to imagine myself as someone else, a wearer of Yarmouth shirts and fleecy sweats, of windbreakers and rugged Tyler shorts, of baseball caps with polo players where the section of the brain that concerns itself with aesthetics is supposed to be. But the hour passes. Good men return from fighting Satan in the wilderness the stronger for their struggle, and so do I. Man Booker Prize-winning Howard Jacobson shimmers with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and desolation of Wagner's tragedies, Jacobson writes with all the hostility and joy of a man possessed. Absurdity piles upon absurdity, and glorious sentences weave together to create a hilarious, hearty, heartbreaking and uniquely human collection. You will laugh, you will cry, and you will read it again and again.

Fixated on the crimes which have been committed against his people, but unable to live among them, Max moves away, and draws cartoon histories of Jewish suffering in which no one is much interested. He is drawn into the Holocaust obsessions from which he realises there can be, and should be, no release. This book is a comedy of cataclysm.

Marvin Kreitman lives for sex, or at least he lives for women. Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, loves just the one woman, also called Charlie. Once a week, the two friends meet for a Chinese lunch, contriving never quite to have the conversation they would like to have — about fidelity and womanising, and which makes happier.

Sefton Goldberg: mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands; small, sweaty, lustful, definatly unappreciative of beer, nature and organised games; gnawingly aware of being an urban Jew islanded in a sea of country-loving Anglo-Saxons. Obsessed by failure — morbidly, in his own case, gloatingly, in that of his contemporaries — so much so that he plans to write a bestseller on the subject. In the meantime he is uncomfortably aware of advancing years and atrophying achievement, and no amount of lofty rationalisation can disguise the triumph of friends and colleagues, not only from Cambridge days but even within the despised walls of the Poly itself, or sweeten the bitter pill of another's success...