We investigate a new natural class J of probability distributions modeling large claim sizes, motivated by the 'principle of one big jump'. Though significantly more general than the (sub-)class of subexponential distributions S, many important and desirable structural properties can still be derived. We establish relations to many other important large claim distribution classes (such as D, S, L, K, OS and OL), discuss the stability of J under tail-equivalence, convolution, convolution roots, random sums and mixture, and then apply these results to derive a partial analogue of the famous Pakes-Veraverbeke-Embrechts theorem from ruin theory for J . Finally, we discuss the (weak) tail-equivalence of infinitely-divisible distributions in J with their Lévy measure.