Mar 15, 2018
THE LAST SAMURAI - Helen DeWitt
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...

THE LAST SAMURAI - Helen DeWitt

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.

He’s grown up watching Kurosawa’s 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.

Ludo highlight’s words as he learns them in the books he reads and this struck us as an interesting way of filling the cover with text whilst distinguishing the title from the author name. Finally, having Ludo on there as just a small icon emphasises the enormity of language in his life.

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