Keep the aspidistra flying (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Gordon Comstock is a poor young man who works in a grubby London bookstore and spends his evenings shivering in a rented room, trying to write. He is determined to stay free of the "money world" of lucrative jobs, family responsibilities, and the kind of security symbolized aby the homely aspidistra plant that sits in every middle-class British window.