The Last Samurai Helen Dewitt by Helen Dewitt 9781784707965, 1784707961 instant download after payment.

Helen DeWitt's extraordinary debut, The Last Samurai, centres on the relationship between Sibylla, a single mother of precocious and rigorous intelligence, and her son, who, owing to his mother's singular attitude to education, develops into a prodigy of learning. 

"Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read."  -  Mark Haddon 

"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.

"Ask a set of writers and critics to select books for a new canon, and it shouldn't come as a shock that the one most of them name is a novel about the nature of genius. It is also, more precisely, a novel about universal human potential."  -  Vulture

The Last Samurai is about the pleasure of ideas, the rich varieties of human thought, the possibilities that life offers us, and, ultimately, the balance between the structures we make of the world and the chaos that it proffers in return.