Brother of the More Famous Jack by Trapido, Barbara

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.

The Goldman home, anarchic, proudly carnal, and teeming with little children, could not be less like the stultifyingly respectable one Katherine Browne has just left. She enters university in search of an education--and she will find one, not in the classroom but among the Goldmans: Jacob, the Falstaffian philosophy professor; Jane, his earth-goddess wife; and their older sons, Roger, "gorgeous," and Jonathan, "equally gorgeous, but trouble."

Brother of the More Famous Jack is a book about the eroticism of the intellect, about falling in love with a family, and about refashioning the bonds of youth. It bears comparison with Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, and it is a book that welcomes readers into its own capacious, wise embrace.

Author: Barbara Trapido
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 10/06/2026
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.10w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9798896230779

About the Author
Barbara Trapido (b. 1941) was raised in South Africa and emigrated to England in 1963. She published her first novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack, at the age of forty, writing it while working on a never-to-be-completed dissertation on the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and raising two children. Of her seven published novels, two, The Travelling Hornplayer and Frankie & Stankie were short-listed for the Whitbread Prize, with Brother of the More Famous Jack receiving a Whitbread Special Prize for Fiction in 1982. Having worked as a schoolteacher before turning to writing full-time, Trapido in later years taught courses at the Arvon Foundation creative writing program. She lives in Oxford, England.

Mick Herron is the author of twenty-one books, including four in the Zoë Boehm mystery series and nine in the Slough House espionage series, both of which have been translated into many languages and adapted for television. He lives in Oxford, England.