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 . . .

Originally published in 1963 and a celebrated cult classic, The Lowlife brilliantly evokes post-war East London – dog tracks, sandwich shops, tenements, prostitutes, 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.

‘A wholly authentic and compelling voice.’ William Boyd

'Terrific.' Sebastian Faulks

'The most perfectly proportioned London novel, capturing the grind of scheming, dreaming, struggle – and, of course, the city in all its grime and glory.' Benjamin Myers

'A visceral rendering of a city on the cusp between the Ration Book Fifties and the Swinging Sixties.' Cathi Unsworth

With an foreword by Ian Sinclair