"How do you go on living knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?"
In many respects this is a love story. Not just for women that the main characters have loved and lost but for an idea, a hope, that after the terror of the holocaust the Jews were no longer going to be victims of anti-semitism and the horrors inflicted on them in the past.
But this is also a book asking some pretty weighty questions about what it means to be Jewish. Both sides of the for and against Zionism debate are covered and because of his ability to craft political questions with a great deal of humour Jacobson manages to pull it off.
What does it mean to be a Jew? For Julian Treslove, a failed BBC radio producer, failed father and failed lover it means a lot because his two best friends are Jewish. But as he seems to be intent on embracing Juadism his friends Libor and Sam Finkler are struggling to cope with what it means to be a Jew in the current age.
Things start with the three friends meeting after one of them, Libor, has suffered a recent bereavmenent after a marriage after a long marriage and Finkler has also lost his wife. But one was faithful and the other was not. Both have regrets but find a refuge in being and arguing about what it means to be a Jew. Treslove is a bystander as Sam and Libor argue about the rights and wrongs of Israel and he would have possibly have stayed on the sidelines until one night he is attacked when walking home and his attacker calls him a Jew.
His search for a justification in the attack and a growing envy and obsession with Judaism brings him into a relationship with a Jewish woman who is also setting up a cultural centre. As she finds the centre the target of attacks Treslove immerses himself in discovering the amount of hatred and antisemitism out there.
Just as Libor struggles to live a life alone, Finkler struggles to contemplate his guilt for infidelity and the prospect of growind old alone Treslove cannot cope with what it means to be a Jew.
His failure, which he is set up for at the very start, raises questions not just of understanding between different communities but what impact the amount of hate has one anyone who sits down long enough to compile a list and really think about it.
