A lifelong East Ender who fought in gangs as a boy and whose mother was killed when a German bomb dropped on their house, 45-year-old Harryboy Boas resides in a small room in a scruffy boardinghouse, sleeps with prostitutes, and prides himself on his reading acumen (“This Zola is a terrific writer. He can be tougher than Mickey Spillane, and when he gets on to sex he’s red hot”). He sometimes works in a laundry but mostly gets by on his winnings at the dog track—despite his hopeless tendency to gamble them away. When a quarreling couple moves in downstairs with their demanding 4-year-old son, Gregory, it’s only a matter of time before the father, Vic Deaner, impressed with Harry’s cool detachment, accompanies him to the track. A bookkeeper, he hopes he can win enough to soothe his wife, Evelyn, who flays him for not being able to afford better circumstances—ones that don’t include living near Black immigrants. But those hopes are quickly dashed, leaving Vic in debt from which a guilty Harry must save him—at his own peril. It’s also left for Harry to save Gregory, who latches onto him for attention, from neglect. Soon after a scary incident involving the unattended boy that Harry might have prevented, Harry finds himself thinking of the son or daughter he himself might have had he not, on the eve of the Nazi occupation, abandoned his pregnant Jewish girlfriend in Paris. Coming from a writer as relaxed and lightly satirical as Baron, Harry’s reckoning with memories he has spent his life avoiding couldn’t be more powerful.