The Last Samurai

Helen DeWitt

From Shelf: The 2001 Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist

'Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I've ever read' MARK HADDON'Original...witty...playful...a wonderfully funny book' JAMES WOOD'A triumph - a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form' A. Let loose on London, Ludo sets out on a secret quest to find the last samurai - the father he never knew.

'Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I've ever read' MARK HADDON'Original...witty...playful...a wonderfully funny book' JAMES WOOD'A triumph - a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form' A. S. BYATTEleven-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.