Fastovski's Tales of Hampstead: and significant reminiscences of misspent youth

Imagine that Isaac Babel's Cossacks wassail together with Runyonesque Liverpool Jews outside the plate-glass window of a Hampstead café where a Klezmer band is playing to a packed and tea-drinking congregation of jazzmen, Hasidic scholars, surrealists, old soldiers, and retired strippers; and you have the tone and temperature of this unique and unclassifiable memoir - no, not memoir, more a stream-of-consciousness novella - no, not a novella but a piece of autobiographical fiction - no, not...