Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton

A lonely young man working in a Euston bar falls in love with a prostitute. Several years previously, she was 'in service' before one night stumbling into a tangle of male attention, drink and recklessness from which she never emerges. A woman working in the same bar is confused by the advances of an older man. I was so impressed and fascinated by the understated and at the same time touching and even poetic style. It feels like Hamilton managed to do what every American ex-pat writer of the 20s and 30s tried and couldn't quite achieve; that paradoxical combination of detachment and apathy, squalour and romanticism. The first 'book' of the three, The Midnight Bell, was probably my favourite. Incidentally, I found this book due to my predilection for the Libertines, Carl Barat named it as one of his favourites and a good description of it is that it reads like the Libertines sound; hopeless and hopeful.