The Last Samurai Reread

Considered by some to be the greatest novel of the twenty-first century, Helen DeWitt’s brilliant The Last Samurai tells the story of Sibylla, an Oxford-educated single mother raising a possible child prodigy, Ludo. Disappointed when he meets his biological father, the boy decides that he can do better. Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, he embarks on a quixotic, moving quest to find a suitable father. The novel’s cult-classic status did not come easy: it underwent a notoriously to...