Brother of the More Famous Jack

A cult classic of British literature, this coming-of-age novel follows a young woman who is transformed by her connection with an idiosyncratic, academic family in London.

Eighteen-year-old Katherine Browne—middle-class and something of a bookworm—hardly expects to be offered a place to study philosophy at a London university. Even less does she expect to find herself embraced by the gregarious and idiosyncratic family of her academic mentor, Jacob Goldman.

Katherine is enchanted by Jacob’s acerbic wife, Jane, and by the younger Goldmans, but most of all she is enchanted by the family’s eldest son, Roger. The two embark on a love affair that ends in tears, and Katherine leaves for Rome, determined to put the Goldmans behind her. But she returns, ten years later, seasoned and assured, to discover that the past isn't dead, it isn’t even past.

Brother of the More Famous Jack is a book about the eroticism of the intellect, about falling in love with a family, and about breaking free of youthful binds. It bears comparison with Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, and it is a book that brings its readers into its own capacious, wise embrace.