Helen DeWitt

'Original...witty...playful...a wonderfully funny book' James Wood ‘Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read’ Mark Haddon 'A triumph – a genuinely new story' A. S. Byatt ‘Destined to become a classic’ Garth Risk Hallberg Eleven-year-old Ludo is in search of a father. Raised singlehandedly by his mother Sibylla, Ludo’s been reading Greek, Arabic, Japanese and a little Hebrew since the age of four; but reading Homer in the original whilst riding the Circle Line on the London Underground isn’t enough to satisfy the boy’s boundless curiosity. Is he a genius? A real-life child prodigy? He’s grown up watching Seven Samurai on a hypnotising loop – his mother’s strategy to give him not one but seven male role models. And yet Ludo remains obsessed with the one thing his mother refuses to tell him: his real father’s name. Let loose on London, Ludo sets out on a secret quest to find the last samurai – the father he never knew.

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