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 one of Virginia Woolf 's most poignant stories. Jacob, of whom people speak, of whom they think... is never shown. And yet that denial of presence on the part of the author makes of him one of the most living presences in world literature. - MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM