Win a Le Creuset dish worth £225 and a signed copy of Howard Jacobson's new book
Live a Little is the irresistibly funny new novel about falling in love at the end of your life, from the Man Booker Prize-winning author, Howard Jacobson. To celebrate its release, we are giving one lucky gransnetter the chance to win a 24cm Le Creuset signature cast iron casserole dish worth £225, along with a signed copy of Live a Little. Five runners-up will also win a signed copy of the book.
At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Duinsbery is forgetting everything – including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two long-suffering carers, Nastya and Euphoria, with tangled stories of her husbands and love affairs.
Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without the aid of a frame and speaks without spitting. He is noted amongst the widows of North London as the last of the eligible bachelors. Unlike Beryl, he forgets nothing – especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has hung over him like an oppressive cloud ever since.
There’s very little life remaining for either of them, but perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way. Told with Jacobson’s trademark wit and style, Live a Little is in equal parts funny, irreverent and tender – a novel to make you consider all the paths not taken, and whether you could still change course.
As Howard himself said in a recent interview with The Big Issue: "Wouldn't it be a more interesting challenge to write about people in their nineties - an age not often tackled in novels - not as relics or footnotes to the main story, but as characters in their own right, still intensely alive, full of words and experience and mirth. I happen to know a number of people that age who defy the usual sentimentalities about the old, let alone the usual assumptions about their irrelevance."
Live a Little is available online and in all good book stores. You can read an extract of Howard Jacobson's new novel here.
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How to enter
Simply fill in the form below and answer the question by 11am 2 August for the chance to win a Le Creuset casserole dish worth £225 and a signed copy of Live a Little.
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