The Lowlife (Faber Editions)

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