2016 review of a Book written
by an author whose family name starts with the letter
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

We all know – if not from own experience, then from what we see, hear and read every day – that the years of adolescence are an enormously formative period of life. Moreover, they can be a terribly confusing and difficult time for the youths. They are even harder for a boy who grows up surrounded mostly by women, moreover Jewish ones in 1950s England, and who happens to be so shy that he is blushing virtually for no reason and that he prefers to hide on the toilet for hours on end. As a woman in my mid-forties I can relate only to some of it, but this is the life that the scarcely teenage protagonist of the award-winning comic novel The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson has until an unexpected talent for table tennis opens a whole new world to him and eventually even allows him to study in Cambridge.