Shylock is My Name

by Howard Jacobson

Published 4 February 2016

A re-envisaging of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, from the Man Booker Prize-winner and our great chronicler of Jewish life.

‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’

With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It’s the beginning of a remarkable friendship ...

Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dreamEvening Standard

'The funniest British novelist since Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe' Mail on Sunday