From his childhood on the wild, windswept shores of Cornwall and his college days at Cambridge to his life as a lawyer in London and a fateful journey to the Mediterranean, Jacob Flanders’s story is told by the women in his life, whether through his mother’s correspondence, the conversations of a friend or the thoughts and remembrances of those who love him.

An extraordinary departure from traditional forms of the novel, Jacob’s Room is both an elegiac and experimental tale told in pieces and fragments and a paean to the slaughter and loss of the First World War.