The Last Samurai

A brilliant, funny novel about a child prodigy, his formidable mother and the search for a father worthy of the name.

Sibylla raises her son Ludo alone in London, with little money and an education unlike any other. By four, he reads Greek, Arabic, Japanese and Hebrew. On the Circle Line, in museums and in rented rooms, she gives him Homer, mathematics, music and Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai as a set of possible models for courage.

But Ludo wants what Sibylla refuses to give him: his father’s name. At eleven, he begins testing possible candidates, searching not just for biology but for character, talent and a form of honour that might withstand his scrutiny.

The Last Samurai is a dazzling, funny and formally inventive literary novel about single motherhood, genius, poverty, language, fatherhood and self-invention. For readers seeking experimental fiction that remains emotionally alive, Helen DeWitt’s cult classic feels as strange, brilliant and necessary as ever.

‘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