The surprise winner of this year’s £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is British author Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury), a comic novel exploring Jewish identity. Jacobson, a London-based journalist and author of Kalooki Nights (longlisted for the Booker in 2006) and Who’s Sorry Now (longlisted in 2002), beat out Canadian favourite Emma Donoghue (Room) and Tom McCarthy (C). From the official press release:

Said to have “some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language,” The Finkler Question has been described as “wonderful” and “richly satisfying” and as a novel of “full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding.”