The Beginners

Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

First published Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1966 Published in Penguin Books 1968 Copyright © Dan Jacobson, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966

Sections of this novel appeared originally in the New Yorker, Commentary, American Judaism and Quest

The lines from ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ by W. B. Yeats on pp. 163-4 are reproduced by kind permission of Mr M. B. Yeats and Messrs Macmillan & Co. Ltd

Made and printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks Set in Linotype Times

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser