The Finkler Question

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2010

Julian Treslove, a former BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a Jewish philosopher, writer, and television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different lives, they've never lost touch with each other, or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, a Czech more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.

At dinner one night at Sevcik's apartment, the men share a sweetly painful evening, reminiscing on a time before they had loved and lost, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. But as Treslove makes his way home, he is attacked and mugged outside a violin dealer's window. Treslove is convinced the crime was a misdirected act of anti-Semitism, and in its aftermath, his whole sense of self will ineluctably change.