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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

The Goldman home, anarchic, proudly carnal, and teeming with little children, could not be less like the stultifyingly respectable one Katherine Browne has just left. She enters university in search of an education—and she will find one, not in the classroom but among the Goldmans: Jacob, the Falstaffian philosophy professor; Jane, his earth-goddess wife; and their older sons, Roger, "gorgeous," and Jonathan, "equally gorgeous, but trouble."

Brother of the More Famous Jack is a book about the eroticism of the intellect, about falling in love with a family, and about refashioning the bonds of youth. It bears comparison with Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, and it is a book that welcomes readers into its own capacious, wise embrace.

Additional Book Information

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

Praise

There are few modern tales of first love and its disillusions that are as thoroughly realised, as brilliantly lewd, and as hilariously satisfying.
—Rachel Cusk

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.
—Maggie O'Farrell

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, The New York Times

I consider literary comfort food: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido.
—Lily King, Elle

The best possible company in this difficult world.
—Ann Patchett

The style is ... passionate, the jokes thick and fast, the emotions full and right, the humanity total and engulfing.
—Andrew Sinclair, The Times

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

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

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

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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