Last Samurai

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.