Kif

Demobilized and set adrift in post-war London, a young man named Kif finds himself without a map for civilian life. He slips into the city’s underworld, a shadow economy of petty schemes and quick margins, surviving on his charm and a sharp instinct for the hustle. He is looking for a foothold, something to believe in now that the war is won and over.

Moving through the black market and back alleys, Kif watches the society that cheered him in uniform close its doors to him in civilian clothes. He learns the rules of survival on the streets, dodging the police while trying to wring a living from the scraps of a broken economy.

Written before she turned to the detective fiction that defined her career, Josephine Tey’s early experiment in social realism documents the exact machinery of London's post-war poverty. It stands as a historical record of a generation of soldiers abandoned by the peace.