Paragot - vagabond, drunkard, violinist, once something else entirely - takes a boy out of a London gutter, names him Asticot, and teaches him the world from the roads of France. Locke was born in British Guiana and kept an architect's ledgers for a decade before his fiction took hold; the beloved vagabond was his invention and his fortune, and this is the book where the trick is done perfectly. Sixty plates by painters including Sickert and Munch, from the Old Bedford music hall to Dieppe under blue and grey skies, trace the wandering life the story tells.