The Lowlife Main

Baron, Alexander

ISBN 10: 0571393470 / ISBN 13: 9780571393473

Published by Faber & Faber, 2026

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 49539736-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Lowlife Main
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571393470
• ISBN 13: 9780571393473
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

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.

"A novel and author richly deserving of renewed attention."—Kirkus starred review ⭐

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.

About the Authors

Alexander Baron (1917 - 1999) grew up in in Hackney, East London. The son of Jewish parents, he was drawn into the anti-fascist struggle, confronting Mosley’s blackshirts on the streets of Whitechapel. He became assistant editor of Tribune before enlisting in the army in 1940 and fighting in Italy, Sicily and across France from the Normandy D-Day beaches. His experiences during the Second World War gave him the material for his first novel, From the City, From the Plough (1948), the first in his celebrated wartime trilogy. He wrote several novels set in London’s East End as well as Hollywood screenplays and BBC adaptations of classic novels. Carl Foreman’s great war film The Victors (1963) was adapted from Baron’s The Human Kind (1953). He died in 1999.

Iain Sinclair has lived in Hackney since 1968. He is the award-winning author of numerous critically acclaimed books about London, including The Last London, Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire and London Overground. He won the Encore Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Downriver.