Author of the Month: Alexander Baron
Selected by the Bookshop
Our Author of the Month for May is the novelist Alexander Baron (1917 – 1999). Baron drew on his traumatic wartime experiences in Italy and Normandy for a trilogy of novels, beginning with From the City, From the Plough, described by V.S. Pritchett on its publication as ‘the only war book that has conveyed any sense of reality to me’. He followed these up with a string of London novels, including cult classic The Lowlife, just reissued by Faber – a sign of Baron’s burgeoning posthumous reputation.
From the publisher:
One man gambles on not only the racing dogs but his life in this charismatic rediscovered Jewish post-war classic of London’s seedy underbelly, introduced by Iain Sinclair.Never give up hope before the dogs have crossed the…
From the publisher:
Battle has its own strange chemistry. The courage and endurance of a group of men is greater than the sum total of the courage and endurance of the individuals in the group; for, when most of the group have reached the limits of human…
From the publisher:
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…
From the publisher:
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…
From the publisher:
Alexander Baron ... was the greatest British novelist of [World War II] and among the finest, most underrated, of the postwar period.John Williams, The Guardian‘We have waited a long time for this war’s All Quiet on the…
From the publisher:
The War Baby is a compelling account of bravery and betrayal in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Amid the last, faltering, steps to repulse General Franco's fascists, a young British Communist, Frank Brendan, heads to Barcelona on…
From the publisher:
The novelist Alexander Baron (1917-1999) was born into a working class Jewish home in Hackney, joined the Communist Party as a young man, saw the thick of battle in Sicily and Normandy, and became one of the most admired writers of post-war…
Latest booklists
Latest booklists
