The Lowlife

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

Alexander Baron (1917 - 1999) grew up in London's East End. The son of Jewish immigrants, he went to Hackney Downs school and campaigned in 1930s left-wing circles as an activist in the Labour League of Youth, opposing Mosley's Fascist blackshirts. He was converted to communism but became disillusioned by the Hitler-Stalin pact, and left to become assistant editor of Tribune. He joined the army in 1940, fighting across France from the Normandy D-Day beaches, inspiring his bestselling debut novel, From the City, From the Plough (1948), the first of his celebrated wartime trilogy. Later in life, he wrote major Hollywood screenplays and classic BBC literary adaptations.