Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido

From New York Review of Books

A cult classic of British literature, this coming-of-age novel follows a young woman who is transformed by her connection with an idiosyncratic, academic family in London.

The Goldman home, anarchic, proudly carnal, and teeming with little children, could not be less like the stultifyingly respectable one Katherine Browne has just left. She enters university in search of an education--and she will find one, not in the classroom but among the Goldmans: Jacob, the Falstaffian philosophy professor; Jane, his earth-goddess wife; and their older sons, Roger, "gorgeous," and Jonathan, "equally gorgeous, but trouble."

Brother of the More Famous Jack is a book about the eroticism of the intellect, about falling in love with a family, and about refashioning the bonds of youth. It bears comparison with Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, and it is a book that welcomes readers into its own capacious, wise embrace.

The Goldman home, anarchic, proudly carnal, and teeming with little children, could not be less like the stultifyingly respectable one Katherine Browne has just left. She enters university in search of an education--and she will find one, not in the classroom but among the Goldmans: Jacob, the Falstaffian philosophy professor; Jane, his earth-goddess wife; and their older sons, Roger, "gorgeous," and Jonathan, "equally gorgeous, but trouble."

Brother of the More Famous Jack is a book about the eroticism of the intellect, about falling in love with a family, and about refashioning the bonds of youth. It bears comparison with Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, and it is a book that welcomes readers into its own capacious, wise embrace.