Lowlife — Alexander Baron

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