The Lowlife

De: Alexander Baron, Iain Sinclair - introduction

Narrado por: Phil Davis

The day they moved in was a memorable one for me. Not because of them, for I couldn't know what they were to bring into my life, but because of a dog.

Harryboy Boas is a gambling man. An independent Jewish bachelor, he lives in a Hackney boarding house: reading Zola, betting on the dogs at the track, womanising, philosophising, and repressing his tortured wartime past. Until, that is, a new family moves in. As his life dramatically unravels—financially, emotionally, and existentially—Harryboy descends into a murky criminal underworld where debts, violence, gangsters and revenge are the inevitable payback for those who can't pay up ...

'Extraordinary.' William Boyd

'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, London]' Iain Sinclair

'The greatest British novelist of the last war and among the finest, most underrated, of the postwar period . . .The Lowlife has acquired something of an underground cult.' Guardian

©2025 Alexander Baron (P)2025 Faber & Faber

Riveting

Loved this novel of a charming gambler and loner, a Jewish man, in post World War II London, and the family he reluctantly, gradually befriends in his boarding house. Haunted by the woman and child he believes he may have abandoned in France before the war.