Jacob's Advice: A Novel
By Jude Cook
Two cousins search for their Jewish identity in the Paris of 2015
Publication date: August 2020
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Jacob’s Advice is the story of Larry Frost, a British doctor living in Paris, who is convinced he is Jewish. The tale is told through the eyes of his sceptical cousin, Nick Newman, who listens and laughs, suffers and waits, as he tries to understand his own place in the world.
Following the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket in January 2015, Paris appears to be back to business-as-usual. Yet tensions run deep and the two cousins are about to get drawn into the slipstream . . . Larry’s quest for his true identity, through the fractured, uneasy, magical streets of Paris, reaches its climax in Amsterdam, where the mysterious Jacob Bloom reveals a family secret linked to the dark days of WWII that will change both cousins’ lives forever.
Set against a backdrop of increased extremism, nationalism, and the resurgence of antisemitism, Jacob’s Advice is an urgent and topical exploration of identity, race, family, modern Europe, and the inescapable nature of the past. It’s also a love letter to Paris and a reflection on its recent tragedy.
Nick, a historian specialising in revolutionary France, is divorced, missing his seven-year-old son, and struggling with the after-effects of an adverse reaction to an antibiotic, which has left him with extensive nerve damage. When the Sorbonne offers him a research fellowship, he is thrilled. He hopes that his cousin, Larry, a neuro-pharmacologist who lives in Paris and campaigns against Big Pharma, will help him get legal revenge on the drugs company that has wrecked his health.
However, once in the 5th arrondissement, Nick finds Larry preoccupied by his own great mission to prove that he – and therefore Nick – is Jewish. An exuberant philosemite, Larry has long had his suspicions (and hopes). Now he’s dating a Jewish woman, Ariel Levine, and living with her family in the Marais, he has even more reason to try to prove it.
As Nick, Larry and Ariel weave through the cool spring evenings in the bars and bistros of the Latin Quarter, they talk about life, love, ethnicity, Je Suis Charlie, and how Paris is changing. Nick is troubled by his inability to sustain a relationship with his son, but Larry feels he has met the love of his life, and is also getting closer to claiming the ethnicity he has always wanted.
It is only when Larry proposes to Ariel that her secular, cosmopolitan parents firmly reject him: their daughter will never marry out. At the same time, Nick’s ex-wife threatens to take their son out of his reach. And then disaster strikes Paris, with the terrorist attacks of November 13th. With both cousins in emotional disarray, and the city in trauma, they finally hear from an old man in Amsterdam, Jacob Bloom, who wants to tell them a secret. As they set off for a long weekend, where Nick will also meet his ex-wife and son, the stage is set for a tense denouement, with everything riding on Jacob’s long-hoped-for advice.
This is not the final cover and is subject to change.
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Jude Cook
Jude Cook lives in London and studied English literature at UCL. He writes for the Guardian, the Spectator, Literary Review, New Statesman, TLS and the i-Paper. His essays and short fiction have appeared in The Stockholm Review, The Moth, The Tangerine and The Honest Ulsterman, among other publications.
His first novel, Byron Easy, was published by Heinemann in 2013. In 2017, he was longlisted for the Pin Drop RA short story award, and in 2018 shortlisted for Leicester Writes Short Story Prize, and longlisted for the Colm Tóibín International Short Story Award.
He is an editor for The Literary Consultancy and teaches creative writing at the University of Westminster.
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My cousin, the well-known pharmacologist Larry Frost, always maintained his three favourite Americans were Jewish men: Bob Dylan, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen. Out of a nation of 300 million, it was this triumvirate with which he most identified. ‘Of course,’ I counselled him, being older by seven years, ‘liking them doesn’t make you Jewish too.’ But he was convinced somewhere, deep down, he had to be. There had to be a reason for his strong sense of empathy. He loved the output of all three unreservedly, even the later, unfunny, unlistenable or unreadable works. By some accident or mix-up in our family lineage, he insisted, there had to be a reason for his overwhelming feeling of consanguinity. He was a philosemite extraordinaire, if not one of the Chosen People. Obsessed with the notion. Absolutely in thrall to it; which was, and is, his nature. This conviction reached an apex of what I considered almost mystical grandeur and absurdity when he moved to Paris in the autumn of last year and found himself a Jewish girlfriend. Ariel, almost twenty years his junior, and so pretty she broke men’s hearts at thirty paces as she approached them on the dust-blessed, pollen-laden Parisian streets. Where has she been all my life? they would ask their secret souls – me included, when I finally met her. On the kind of sunny morning when the air still breathes Flaubert’s famous exhalations of ‘love and intelligence’, Ariel was unstoppable. Her tiny, luminous mouse-face, with its languorous red gouge of a mouth, often peeking from under a beret clamped to a crown of shimmering black hair, was an engine of attraction. Add to this a formidable mind and an even stronger will, and she was devastating. But I’m getting carried away . . . I must first let you meet Larry, and explain how and why I came to be living in Paris myself.
I should establish straight away that we are both doctors, but of different kinds. Larry to his new colleagues is Dr Lawrence Frost, a visiting neuropharmacologist at the Institut Pasteur on the rue de Vaugirard. And I, to my students back home at Birkbeck, am Dr Newman – Nicholas Newman, a Research Fellow specialising in the History of Revolutionary France and the Napoleonic era. I’ve published widely on the First Republic and the Jacobin cause, and was once asked to be historical advisor on a romantic comedy set at the time of the Terror – not much of either genre to be found there, I argued; so in the end I said no. I’m only Nick to my closest friends (and Dad to my son, whom I won’t be seeing for a while now I’m resident here). Larry, by contrast, is Larry to everyone after a first encounter. He’s even Larry to the directrice-générale of the Institut. He has that kind of effect on people. In fact, I’ve always thought there was something Promethean about Larry – not in his suffering, I rarely see any of that, but in his daring; his intrepid, principled force. Though nicely berthed at the Department of Neuroscience since October (and at the palatial Place des Vosges apartment of Ariel’s parents, no less), he has always held adversarial positions. Against everything, it seems. A true contrarian. Ever since I’ve known him as a ‘grown-up’ he’s been something of a crusader against the monstrous $600bn pharmaceutical industry, with its shabby regulation, its market-driven misdemeanours, its academics sucking at the lucrative teat of the drugs manufacturers. After graduating as a med doctor, followed by a stunning MSc in cellular function from King’s, Larry seems to have made a career from his Cassandra voice, penning articles everywhere from the BMJ to the broadsheets. Maybe I should revise ‘well-known’ pharmacologist to ‘notorious’. He’s a one-man revolution; a corrector of consciousnesses, and conscience.
- 2nd March 2020 Cover reveal
Here it is! The glorious sunlit cover for JACOB'S ADVICE by Mecob design. Very Parisian. Out on Aug 20th 2020.
4th November 2019 Pub date & salonSo Jacob's Advice has a publication date! Expect it to arrive in all good bookshops on August 20th 2020... For those 20 generous subscribers who are coming to the Parisian salon in Central London, the date was initially pencilled for December, but this is now going to take place next spring. Which should give everyone time to read some Badiou or Robbe-Grillet in advance. Till then, Jude x
9th August 2019 Looks like we might have made it (Jusqu'à la fin)Good news for a Friday morning. Jacob's Advice is now 100% funded with Unbound. Thanks to everyone who so generously supported the book. See you all at the salon (and/ or) at the launch!...Jude x
30th July 2019 Final PushHello all, so Jacob's Advice is a healthy 83% funded. Thanks to one and all for your generous support! Please do pass on the project to anyone who you think might like to pledge to help it over the line... If you pre-ordered the hardback and want to upgrade your pledge, there are still x5 places left on the Parisian literary salon (which will be taking place in December at a central London location…
9th July 2019 Glass Half FullThe foothills have been conquered, and the summit is in sight! Jacob's Advice is over 50% funded. There's still a fair way to go, but - to mangle my metaphors - I like to think the glass is now half full... A huge thank you to all who've supported (and I'll be seeing some of you at the Salon Night to thank you personally). Do please tell your friends about the book and encourage them to pledge. In…
19th June 2019 A Quarter of the Way ThereSo my new novel JACOB'S ADVICE is 25% funded after only two weeks (hurrah!). A huge thank you to everyone who's supported so far...I hope you enjoy reading it when it arrives. Please do spread the word with friends & on social media (if you haven't already - thanks to everyone who has!) In the meantime, here's something I wrote for the Jewish Chronicle about how I came to write the book:
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12th June 2019 Seems like a week agoSo, a week after launching my new novel JACOB'S ADVICE with the good people at Unbound we are 15% funded with almost 60 supporters. All the Early Bird hardbacks have been snapped up, and seven of you are joining me for a Salon Night of heavy literary yak and good red wine... A fine start! A massive thank you to all who have backed the book so far... It means a great deal to me that you've dug deep…
These people are helping to fund Jacob's Advice: A Novel.
Stephanie Volk
Alison Hobro
Mark Philp
Camilla Pallesen
Mike Grenville
Jason Ballinger
John Doyle
Hazel Slavin
Carlo Navato
Fleur Smithwick
Terry Stiastny
Yvonne Enright
Linda Martin
Samantha Ellis
An anonymous donor
Rachael Smart
Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown
James Cook
Rebecca Ellis
Mick Paulusma
Cari Rosen
Caroline Franks
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