Kirjahaku

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

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January 1944, the south coast of England. The Fifth Battalion, Wessex Regiment wait patiently and nervously for the order to embark. There is boredom and fear, comedy and pathos as the men - all drawn from different walks of life - await the order to move. From The City, From The Plough is a vivid and moving account of the fate of these men as they set off for Normandy and advance into France.

In August 1943, Sergeant Craddock leads his battle-weary platoon down Via Garibaldi in Catania, Sicily. Struck by the oppressive heat and the alien new surroundings, the men soon settle into this lull in their combat experience. The next few weeks take on a dreamlike quality as newfound relationships flourish and the war itself - let alone homelife in Britain - recedes into the distance. Against this backdrop, the second book of Alexander Baron's War Trilogy meditates upon friendship, loyalty and love. Based on Baron's own experiences with the Eighth Army in Italy, this new edition of a 1950 classic includes an introduction from IWM which puts the novel in historical context and shines a light on this unique experience of the Second World War.

Spanning the Sicilian countryside to the brothels of Ostend, and the final book in Alexander Baron's War Trilogy, The Human Kind is a series of pithy vignettes reflective of the author's own wartime experiences. From the interminable days of training in Britain to brutal combat across Northwest Europe, the book depicts many of the men, women - and, in some cases, children - affected by the widespread reach of the Second World War. In his trademark spare prose, Baron's work provides an emotive and incisive snapshot into the lives of myriad characters during this tumultuous period in history. Based on Alexander Baron's own wartime experiences, this new edition of a 1953 classic includes an introduction from IWM which puts the work in historical context, and concludes the author's War Trilogy.

‘We have waited a long time for this war’s All Quiet on the Western Front’, wrote the critic V.S. Pritchett. ‘Here It is.’ He was reviewing the 1948 novel From the City From the Plough by Alexander Baron (1917-1999). With its success, Baron became a full-time writer. His best-known later novels include The Human Kind (1953), The Lowlife (1963) and King Dido (1969). Between the 1950s and 1980s he also wrote many film and television scripts. Here Baron recounts the experiences of his childhood and youth that shaped him as a writer and provided subject matter for his novels. He evokes the sights, sounds and aromas surrounding him growing up in a Jewish family in Hackney, East London, in the 1920s. Later, aware of the rising fascist threat, Baron was drawn to left-wing politics, becoming a leader of Labour’s youth organisation. Although not formally a member, he also worked secretly for the Communist Party as an organiser and propagandist. With World War Two his life changed again. A keen solider, he fought with the Pioneer Corps in Sicily, Italy, and northern France. After a hard transition to post-war life, he worked at Unity Theatre in London while writing his breakthrough novel.