Alexander Baron Bücher

January 1944, the south coast of England. The Fifth Battalion, Wessex Regiment wait patiently and nervously for the order to embark. From The City, From The Plough is a vivid and moving account of the fate of these men as they set off for Normandy and advance into France.

With Hope, Farewell was Alexander Baron's first novel to explore Jewish working class life in fiction, and predated his The Lowlife, being published first in 1952. Mark Strong endures petty anti-Semitism but achieves his wartime ambition to become a fighter pilot. After the war, blighted by injury and a desolation brought on by conflict, Mark and his wife, Ruth, seek to set up home in Hackney. ‘The bombing of the East End during the war had sent thousands of homeless Jews outwards in wave after wave,’ Baron asserts in this novel. ‘They had penetrated to every corner of Hackney.’ They face organised anti-Semitism, and the climax of the novel comes amid a rally in Dalston by British Nazis, still not cowed by their co-thinkers’ war defeat. About the Author: Alexander Baron was born Joseph Alexander Bernstein in 1917 to Jewish parents. His first novel, From the City, From the Plough, a fictionalised account of the D-Day landings, was published in 1948 and sold over a quarter of a million copies. Prior to World War II Baron was politically active on the left. While he continued to write novels he was also a successful screenwriter, writing scripts for Hollywood and for the BBC. Since Baron died in 1999 his novels have been republished several times, testifying to a strong resurgence of interest in his work among the reading public as well as among critics and academics.

In August 1943, Sergeant Craddock leads his battle-weary platoon down Via Garibaldi in Catania, Sicily. The next few weeks take on a dreamlike quality as newfound relationships flourish and the war itself recedes into the distance. Against this backdrop, the second book of Alexander Baron's War Trilogy meditates upon friendship, loyalty and love.

Harryboy Boas is a gambling man who loves the dogs. He lives in the quietly respectable streets of Hackney and keeps himself to himself. Until, that is, a new family moves into his building. Step by step, the ordered - if faintly disreputable and financially rackety - life he has led begins to unravel. He is drawn into a murky underworld where violence and revenge are the inevitable payback for those who can't come up with the money. A brilliant portrayal of a way of life in its last days in the 1960s.

Spanning the Sicilian countryside to the brothels of Ostend, and the final book in Alexander Baron's War Trilogy, The Human Kind is a series of pithy vignettes reflective of the author's own wartime experiences. This is a brand new edition in IWM's Wartime Classic series.

In the spring of 1949, Jack Agass belatedly returns from the war to the working class street in Islington where he grew up. A proud, supportive community - with a pub and a barber shop, and a common love of the Arsenal. But the street has changed. Jack eventually finds his footing but he's haunted by a yearning for his old childhood friend Rosie Hogarth, and for the pre-war security and certainties she represents. Rosie has moved out and up - living bohemian-style in Bloomsbury. He thinks she's selling sex, but is he right?

Baron wrote this as a prequel to Franco is Dying. It was revised and ready for publication - but never appeared. The novel came out for the first time in 2019, courtesy of Five Leaves, some forty years or more after it was written. The War Baby is a compelling account of bravery and betrayal in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Amid the last, faltering, steps to repulse General Franco's fascists, a young British Communist, Frank Brendan, heads to Barcelona on behalf of the Party. He becomes part of a hedonistic elite at the helm of what's left of Republican Spain before being sent to the battle front during the ill-fated Ebro offensive of 1938 - Republican Spain's last stand against the advancing falangists. He is a political commissar to the British troops among the International Brigades; his task is to 'expose the bad elements'. Eventually, Brendan picks up a gun and joins an increasingly brutal and unequal battle alongside ill-equipped Volunteers. Few of the British Brigaders make it out alive; none are unscathed. The War Baby is a blistering account of the corrupting of the struggle against fascism. It is deeply critical of international Communism while compassionate and generous towards those who enrolled under that flag.