Author: Baron, Alexander
Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Published on 8 May 2025 by FABER & FABER in the United Kingdom as part of 'the Faber Editions' series.
Paperback | 256 pages
130 x 198 x 19 | 220g
Never give up hope before the dogs have crossed the finishing-line.
Harryboy Boas is a lowlife gambler. When he's not at the track, he lives in a Hackney boarding house, reading Zola, eating salt beef, pressing trousers and repressing wartime memories. But when a new family moves into the apartment downstairs, his life starts to unravel and Harryboy soon finds himself sinking into a murky East End underworld where violence, guilt and gangsters are the inevitable result for those who cannot pay their dues.
A celebrated cult classic, The Lowlife brilliantly evokes post-war East London - dog tracks, sandwich shops, tenements, sex workers, newly arrived West Indians and Jews leaving for Finchley - all seen through the tragicomic eyes of Harryboy, our picaresque rogue hero suffering from 'existential burn-out in the shadow of the Holocaust' (Iain Sinclair) and driven to bet, brad and beg to survive.
'Terrific.' Sebastian Faulks