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Novelist Howard Jacobson is returning to Jonathan Cape for his new novel, J, with editor Dan Franklin saying he has “very high hopes” for the novel when it comes to awards.
Jacobson published six novels with Franklin before moving to Bloomsbury, which published the 2010 Man Booker Prize-winning The Finkler Question.
Franklin was offered J by Jacobson's agent, Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown, and thought it was a “masterpiece” and “a tour de force of imaginative writing”.
“It’s totally unlike anything Howard has written before,” Franklin said. “Normally he does domestic Jewish comedy with lots of sex.This is set in a dystopian future where something awful has happened. It’s a really complex plot which works out at the end. It is a page turner, wonderful, amazing.” J will “cause this extraordinary novelist to be seen in an entirely new light”, he added.
The letter "J" in the title will be in unconventional font, featuring a double strike-through, which “becomes very significant when you read the book,” explained Franklin.
Jonathan Cape will publish in September this year, and the book will be submitted for the Man Booker Prize.
US rights have been acquired by Lindsay Sagnette at Hogarth, part of the Crown Publishing Group at Penguin Random House US.
Gellar said there was “no acrimony” with Bloomsbury behind the publisher switch. “From our point of view Dan was hugely keen on the novel. There was a sort of relationship there because of Howard working on 'The Merchant of Venice' for the Hogarth Shakespeare [series], and it was one of those things,” he said.
Jacobson’s books have sold a total of 373,957 via Nielsen BookScan's records, with The Finkler Question totalling 290,190 copies.
Bloomsbury also published Jacobson’s Zoo Time, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize last year and has sold 9,149 copies through BookScan.