The Dog’s Last Walk: (and Other Pieces)

_______________ ‘[An] acutely observed collection of occasional pieces that pick at absurdist life and reveal him to be a quiz, a cultural critic gifted with precise comic timing’ – The Times The author’s prose is always a delight … a book that manages the high-wire act of being genuinely funny while dispensing genuine wisdom’ – Times Literary Supplement ‘Jacobson is one of the great sentence-builders of our time. I feel I have to raise my game, even just to praise … In short, he is one of the great guardians of language and culture – all of it. Long may he flourish’ – Nicholas Lezard, Guardian _______________ Week after week, for eighteen years, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson wrote a weekly column for the Independent, reflecting in inimitable style on the sacred and the profane in turn, the frivolous and the serious, the deeply personal and the most universal. The shame and humiliation inherent in death is explored with frank astuteness. Matisse, darts and the power of love are celebrated; while cyclists are very much censured. And meanwhile, a beloved old Labrador walks his last walk as life elsewhere hurtles on and away… The Dog’s Last Walk is a collection of wisdom and iconoclasm for our uncertain times, and one that reveals one of our greatest writers in all his humanity. _______________ ‘Sharp and playful, surreal and thoughtful, and occasionally … rather moving’ – New Statesman ‘Yes, Jacobson is an entertainer … And he does indeed entertain, but in a way that stimulates rather than simply amuses’ – Sunday Telegraph ‘His columns were always one of the best things in [the Independent] – funny, argumentative, contrary and stuffed with ideas as well as a big, sympathetic personality’ – Philip Hensher, Spectator