The Lowlife (Faber Editions)

Authors: Alexander Baron & Iain Sinclair

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) | Crime & mystery

Published on 8^th May 2025 by Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom as part of the 'Faber Editions' series.

Paperback / softback | 256 pages
130mm x 198mm x 19mm | 222g

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