An elliptical, impressionistic portrait of young Jacob Flanders, assembled from fragments as he moves toward the Great War.
Books mentioned in Jacob's Room (6)
Phaedrus by Plato: “Jacob, who was reading the Phaedrus, heard people vociferating round the lamp-post”
Hamlet by William Shakespeare: “And Hamlet utters his soliloquy.”
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding: “the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebuked Fanny Elmer... She bought Tom Jones.”
Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “What with Shakespeare and Adonais, Mozart and Bishop Berkeley--choose whom you like”
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser: “the works of Dickens; the Faery Queen; a Greek dictionary with the petals of poppies pressed to silk between the pages”
A History of the Byzantine Empire by George Finlay: “Only Jacob, carrying in his hand Finlay's Byzantine Empire, which he had bought in Ludgate Hill”