Coming from Behind.

first edition inscribed by the author

This is a very good first edition of one of Howard Jacobson's most famous novels with an inscription to his dear friend. Coming from Behind takes place in a waning West Midlands polytechnic planning to merge facilities with a local football club, its protagonist a jealous and out-of-place professor, Sefton Goldberg. It takes pride of place in the dual literary lineages of 'the wry comedy of the English university novel and the Portnoy school of sardonically self-absorbed Jewish fiction...successor to Lucky Jim, Changing Places, and The History Man'.

This first edition is inscribed by the author to 'Clive', most likely Clive James FRSL (1939-2019), a literary critic, journalist, broadcaster, and friend of Jacobson. The week after James' death, Johnson published a deeply felt tribute to his late friend's personality and work, ending with this encapsulation of what he admired about James' career, 'he exceeded the brilliance of his early promise and demonstrated, in his own extraordinarily various career, that literature is never truer to itself than when it operates in the messy present, away from all ivory towers, down here among the unweeded passions of humanity'.

First edition, inscribed by the author in pen to front free endpaper; 8vo; some spotting on top edge; publisher's blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, a very good copy with pictorial dust-jacket faded on spine panel; 202pp.