David Flusfeder – författare

Problem: Best friends keep giving extremely generous giftsSolution: Give better ones in returnPhilip has a lot on his mind. At home, in his unnecessarily large, excessively expensive house in south London, he is attempting to become a Taoist master of love with his wife Alice, but his quest is forever being interrupted by the requests of his twin daughters: Can we have a pony – please? I want to go to boarding school – please? At work, in his shed/office at the bottom of the garden, between countless games of Minesweep and FreeCell, Philip is trying to pay the mortgage by writing instruction manuals for Korean bread-making machines. And, at parties where he is concerned that he is not taken seriously (he has been variously mistaken as a doctor/waiter and sinologist) Philip tells the world he is a scriptwriter, even though all he has managed to pen is a story he calls Wang the Unlucky Scholar.But, above all, Philip is worrying about his best friends Sean and Barry. The problem is simple: they give great presents. Their gifts are exquisite: a full set of Italian crockery, a handmade corkscrew from Venice. They give them indiscriminately: on birthdays, at parties and quite often for no reason whatsoever. And, most distressingly, these presents break all bounds of generosity: two FA Cup Final tickets beside the royal box, a skiing holiday for Philip's entire family. These are gifts that hurt a man's pride, these are gifts that can never be matched.

A hilarious and heartbreaking father-son road movie of a novel.Spencer Ludwig, idealist and filmmaker, is making one of his regular duty visits from London to New York City to tend to his declining but still fearsome father. Driving back from one of their doctors' appointments, Spencer decides not to take the turn to his father’s apartment: instead, they hit the road. Ahead of them will be an emotional ride taking in police and prostitutes, film festivals and gambling in Atlantic City, as father and son try to make sense of each other’s lives and hearts, and their own. To reach, Spencer hopes, a suitably cinematic conclusion.

The extraordinary new novel from David Flusfeder.‘John the Pupil’ is a medieval road movie, Umberto Eco seen through the eyes of Quentin Tarrantino, recounting the journey taken from Oxford to Viterbo in 1267 by John and his two companions, at the behest of the friar and magus Roger Bacon, carrying a secret burden to His Holiness Clement IV. As well as having to fight off ambushes from thieves hungry for the thing of power they are carrying, the holy trio are tried and tempted by all sorts of sins: ambition, pride, lust – and by the sheer hell and heaven of medieval life.Erudite and earthy, horrifying, comic, humane, David Flusfeder’s extraordinary novel reveals to the reader a world very different and all too like the one we live in now.

‘A joy’ Philippe Sands‘Glorious’ David Spiegelhalter A fascinating, enchanting and personal look at the meaning of luck, and the way in which it has shaped our shared history and continues to inflect our day to day lives. What does it mean to be lucky? How might we mitigate the effects of bad luck and maximise those of good? Is there really such a thing as ‘luck’ at all? To answer these questions, David Flusfeder sets out on a quest that will take him across the world and through history. Travelling from Siberia to Versailles, from his father’s life in war-time Poland to Nietzsche on the slopes of Vesuvius, Flusfeder investigates some victors of luck and those who were defeated by it. In following him, we find ourselves confronting who we are and how we might choose to live. ‘Thrilling, intelligent and wilfully unique … I loved it’ James Runcie, author of The Great Passion ‘Ruminative … page-turning’ TLS ‘Fascinating … An eminently enjoyable and engrossing page-turner’ The Jewish Chronicle

”This is Flusfeder’s masterpiece.” —Julie MyersonNew York City 1970: Emma Hoffman is the great party-giver of the Upper West Side. She’s a writer, wife, mother, hostess, guest, trying to excel and trying to find a way through the agonies and complacencies of it all – because at any moment something might fall, perhaps herself. Four years later, her son is going out alone into the streets of Manhattan on his eleventh birthday, to make himself new, and prove to be worthy of the birthday letters he continues to receive from his lost, soaring mother.Something Might Fall is a kind of historical fiction, set in a moment when women’s literary voices were being heard in a new, confessional, intimate way, but the conditions of those writers’ relationships and their domestic obligations were not so different from those of their mothers. The first part, which swoops and stutters between Emma Hoffman and her husband, Dr Nicholas Sawyer, is about a woman at the edge of herself and is also an account of a marriage, embodying two consciousnesses in a mutual misunderstanding and disappointment and hope and sometimes magic. The second part is limited to just one point of view, of their son Nicky, the living in aftermath, exploring Manhattan on his own on the occasion of his eleventh birthday.