J: A Novel (Jacobson)

Book Reviews
A masterwork of imagination flavored with grief.
Jenni Laidman - Chicago Tribune


A fascinating cautionary tale about the paradoxical dangers of assimilation and tranquility.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal


Remarkable... Comparisons do not do full justice to Jacobson’s achievement in what may well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times.
John Burnside - Guardian


J is a snarling, effervescent, and ambitious philosophical work of fiction that poses unsettling questions about our sense of history, and our self-satisfied orthodoxies. Jacobson’s triumph is to craft a novel that is poignant as well as troubling from the debris.
Independent (UK)


J is a dystopia that invites comparison with George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Sunday Times (UK)


Mystifying, serious, and blackly funny... J shows that, for a writer working at the peak of his powers, with the themes of his imagined future very much part of our present, laughter in the dark is the only kind.
Independent on Sunday (UK)


Brilliant...J is a firework display of verbal invention, as entertaining as it is unsettling.
Jewish Chronicle


J is a remarkable achievement: an affecting, unsettling—and yes, darkly amusing—novel that offers a picture of the horror of a sanitized world whose dominant mode is elegiac, but where the possibility of elegy is everywhere collectively proscribed.
National (UK)


Contemporary literature is overloaded with millenarian visions of destroyed landscapes and societies in flames, but Jacobson has produced one that feels frighteningly new by turning the focus within: the ruins here are the ruins of language, imagination, love itself.
Telegraph (UK)


[J]’s success owes much to the fine texture of its dystopia... As a conspiracy yarn examining the manipulation of collective memory, J has legs, and it’s well worth its place on this year’s Man Booker longlist... Jacobson has crafted an immersive, complex experience with care and guile.
Observer (UK)


Jacobson...goes from strength to strength. This is a new departure: futuristic, dystopian, not, it seems, the world as we know it. But as we peer through the haze we see something take shape. It’s horrible. It’s monstrous. Read this for yourself and you’ll see what it is
Evening Standard (UK)


J is a rare combination of moral vision and subtle emotional intelligence...superb.
Lancet (UK)


A provocative dystopian fantasy to stack next to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, J has the kind of nightmarish twist which makes you want to turn back to page one immediately and read the whole thing again.
Sunday Express (UK)


Set in a quiet village after a global cataclysm.... Jacobson's fusion of village comedy and dystopian sci-fi is a tour de force.... The chilling sketch that finally coheres about the fate that has befallen humanity may make readers lament not having had a more straightforward approach.... [A] unique entry in the [dystopian] genre.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) J delivers a gut punch of a plot twist that rests somewhere between hope and devastation. This is a major novel, a rare work that makes readers think as much as feel.
Shelf Awareness


(Starred review.) Readers...will find plenty to think and talk about in Jacobson’s remarkable, disturbing book.
Booklist


(Starred review.) [A]n enigmatic tale of the near future....from angst-y comedy to dystopian darkness.... The laughs come fewer and farther between than in Jacobson's recent string of men-lost-in-middle-age yarns.... A pleasure, as reading Jacobson always is....
Kirkus Reviews