he author 's prose is always a delight - a book that manages the high-wire act of being genuinely funny while dispensing genuine wisdom ' Times Literary Supplement

Week after week, for eighteen years, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson wrote a weekly column for the Independent, reflecting in inimitable style on the sacred and the profane in turn, the frivolous and the serious, the deeply personal and the most universal.

The shame and humiliation inherent in death is explored with frank astuteness. Matisse, darts and the power of love are celebrated; while cyclists are very much censured. And meanwhile, a beloved old Labrador walks his last walk as life elsewhere hurtles on and away -

The Dog 's Last Walk is a collection of wisdom and iconoclasm for our uncertain times, and one that reveals one of our greatest writers in all his humanity.