Young Adam

The corpse of a young woman is found floating in a canal by a drifter working on a barge traveling between Glasgow and Edinburgh. His relationship with the dead woman gradually unfolds as claustrophobic tensions develop between him and the couple with whom he shares the cramped barge. Slowly but inexorably the reader is sucked into the disturbed psyche of Trocchi's rootless antihero. Originally published in 1954, this first novel by Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi is an absorbing existential thriller—a lost gem of world literature that has not been available in North America for over a decade. "He was an individual ... that's it. They don't make 'em like that any more." — William S. Burroughs "A very fine writer." — Norman Mailer