First Ever English Translation of an unpublished work by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the author of Journey to the End of the Night

Céline’s recently rediscovered novel, London, centres on Ferdinand, the protagonist of War, a shell-shocked French soldier with a severe wound to his ear suffering from vertigo and chronic tinnitus. Having earned a reprieve as well as a medal, Ferdinand has left France to join his prostitute friend Angèle in London. Despite his decoration, he fears being sent back to the front and holes up in an attic room from where his pal, the pimp Cantaloup, runs a flourishing sex-trafficking operation.

Populated by unforgettable characters such as the generous Jewish doctor Yugenbitz, the corrupt cop Bijou, an eccentric English aristocrat, a slew of pimps, a rich variety of whores and the revolutionary Borokrom, a former bomb maker, London is a sweeping narrative that deserved to be numbered among Céline’s greatest works, and which is informed, like his masterpiece Journey to the End of the Night, by his own experiences in the British capital and as a young doctor in a working-class suburb of Paris.

‘I feel called by his voice… my Proust is Celine’ – Philip Roth

‘Anyone can do the nastiness of life; it’s the rendering of the look and feel of the tumultuous that takes genius.’ – Howard Jacobson

‘He discovered a higher and more awful order of literary truth by ignoring the crippled vocabularies of ladies and gentlemen and by using, instead, the more comprehensive language of shrewd and tormented guttersnipes.’ – Kurt Vonnegut

‘It could be said that without Céline there would have been no Henry Miller, no Jack Kerouac, no Charles Bukowski, no Beat poets’ – John Banville