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Brother of the More Famous Jack

Brother of the More Famous Jack

by Barbara Trapido, introduction by Mick Herron

$17.95
$17.95
Available as E-Book British & Irish Literature
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The November 2026 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club

Eighteen-year-old Katherine Browne—middle-class and something of a bookworm—hardly expects to be offered a place to study philosophy at a London university. Even less does she expect to find herself embraced by the gregarious and idiosyncratic family of her academic mentor, Jacob Goldman.

Katherine is enchanted by Jacob’s acerbic wife, Jane, and by the younger Goldmans, but most of all she is enchanted by the family’s eldest son, Roger. The two embark on a love affair that ends in tears, and Katherine leaves for Rome, determined to put the Goldmans behind her. But she returns, ten years later, seasoned and assured, to discover that the past isn't dead, it isn’t even past.

Brother of the More Famous Jack is a book about the eroticism of the intellect, about falling in love with a family, and about breaking free of youthful binds. It bears comparison with Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, and it is a book that brings its readers into its own capacious, wise embrace.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230779
Pages: 288
Publication Date:

Praise

A sort of Bohemian Brideshead Revisted.
—Times Literary Supplement

An unpretentious, very funny book … so goodhearted and innocent it makes you wish that somewhere life is like this.
—Dee Wells, The New York Times

I hope it is stocked by railway-station bookstalls. I hope railway-station bookstalls have to build extensions to house the necessary copies.
—Financial Times

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 savor and exalt.
—The Times (UK)

Its high spirits are irresistible. Like Moll Flanders, the heroine is unstoppable.
—Sunday Telegraph

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

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

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

Reading it again is as comforting as eating toast and Marmite between clean, fresh sheets.
—Rachel Cooke, Sunday Times

Brother of the More Famous Jack could be the book I recommended most often last year. It’s one of those magic finds . . . This gem captures a quick-witted woman’s coming-of-age. For fans of Helen Garner, Deborah Levy, Tessa Hadley, maybe Susie Boyt—all the brilliant bards of chosen mid-century squalor, in thrall to the erotic intellect.
—Brittany Allen, LitHub

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