The Last Samurai

Originally published in 2000 to international acclaim, The Last Samurai is a paean to the power of language and learning - dazzling, delighting and inspiring a legion of readers

‘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. BYATT

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.