Jacob’s Folly is a rollicking, ingenious, saucy book, brimful of sparkling, unexpected characters, that takes on desire, faith, love, actingand reincarnation.

In eighteenth-century Paris, Jacob Cerf is a Jew, a peddler of knives, saltcellars, and snuffboxes. Despite a disastrous teenage marriage, he is determined to raise himself up in life, by whatever means he can. More than two hundred years later, Jacob is amazed to find himself reincarnated as a y in the Long Island suburbs of twenty-first-century America, his new life twisted in ways he could never have imagined. But even the tiniest of insects can influence the turning of the world, and thanks to his arrival, the lives of a reliable volunteer fireman and a young Orthodox Jewish woman nursing a secret ambition will never be the same.

Through the unique lens of Jacob’s consciousness, Rebecca Miller explores change in all its different guisespersonal, spiritual, literal. The hold of the past on the present, the power of private hopes and dreams, the collision of fate and free will: Miller’s worldwhich is our own, transfigured by her clear gaze and by her sharp, surprising witcomes brilliantly to life in the pages of this profoundly original novel.

Format: Hardcover
Published: in USA in 2013
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Pages: 371
Language: English
ISBN 13: 9780374178543
ISBN 10: 0374178542