About the book
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and together with Treslove they share a sweetly painful evening revisiting a time before they had loved and lost. It is that very evening, when Treslove hesitates a moment as he walks home, that he is attacked – and his whole sense of who and what he is slowly and ineluctably changes.
Reviewed by Andover Library Reading Group
On the whole the book was not enjoyed. No story and no conclusion. No sympathetic characters.
Star rating *
Reviewed by Jane and Nick’s Fleet Library Book Group
Apart from a couple of readers, our group found this title tedious, laborious, too philosophical. Majority did not complete the book. (Sorry!) There were some good parts, but overshadowed.
Star rating *
Reviewed by Enjoying Books Reading Group
This is a frustrating book in many ways. Self-indulgent – written in beautifully constructed prose – but inhabited by characters with which we could not identify. We did not really know more about Jewishness despite 400 pages.
Star rating **
Review by Better Book Club
We found this book really hard going. It was supposed to be “full of warmth and wit” but this just passed us by. The characters did not appeal to us although the women seemed more alive than the men. We are not keen to read any more by this author.
Star rating: **
Review by Happy Readers
We were not happy – none of us enjoyed it and few of us could bear to finish it. Not funny, very selfish and no story.
Star rating: no stars