The Lowlife (Faber Editions) - by Alexander Baron (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

One man gambles on the dogs and his own life in this rediscovered Jewish post-war classic of London's seedy underbelly, introduced by Iain Sinclair.

"Terrific." --Sebastian Faulks

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, brag and beg to survive.

Review Quotes

"Terrific. Propulsive, funny and touching. It moves as fast as the dog in trap 1 at Harringay." --Sebastian Faulks, author of Devil May Care

"A wonderfully enduring novel about seedy post-war English criminal life. Rich characterisation underpinned by a wholly authentic and compelling voice. A great re-discovery." --William Boyd, author of Gabriel's Moon

"A subcultural classic."--Jon Savage, author of This Searing Light, the Sun, and Everything Else

"The most perfectly proportioned London novel, capturing the grind of scheming, dreaming, struggle - and, of course, the city in all its grime and glory." --Benjamin Myers, author of The Gallows Pole

"The wonder of The Lowlife is that it does justice to a place of so many contradictions ... One of the best fictions, the truest accounts of [Hackney]" --Iain Sinclair

"A beautifully observed, understated study of an East End Jewish gambler...something of an underground cult." --John L. Williams, Guardian

"A visceral rendering of a city on the cusp between the Ration Book Fifties and the Swinging Sixties." --Cathi Unsworth

"A short-odds favourite for the finest British novel about addiction." --Paul Willetts

"Emile Zola meets Patrick Hamilton in one of the great post-war London novels, a seedy but soulful study of bruised characters struggling to survive on the fringes of convention." --Peter Watts

"A reflective gem of London literature." --John King

"As a vivid depiction of a long-gone London that's still strangely familiar, The Lowlife is an essential novel of the city, its power undiminished."--Gary Budden

"Exquisitely depicting the changing face of post-war Britain, The Lowlife is a highly moving book, which, like Harryboy Boas, is also often very funny and never entirely without hope." --Lee Stuart Evans, author of Pleasantly Disturbed

"A fascinating snapshot of a lost London world, by a remarkable, unjustly neglected writer." --Sarah Waters

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