Juan in America (Capuchin Classics)

Set in the year before the Wall Street crash, this book is a classic evocation of the final mania of prohibition, as seen through equally maverick British eyes. The character Eric Linklater devised to be his unreliable explorer was one capable of absorbing the enormity of the American experience without being overwhelmed by its incongruities. A blithe, bastard descendent of Byron’s Don Juan, Linklater's Juan is an antihero with a taste for the grotesque and the ridiculous, at once both dirty and deity whose response when faced either with sudden catastrophe or miraculous survival is simply to laugh. A novel in the mode of the picaresque, this is a story of erotic discovery in the sense, as Juan puts it, that “your trousers hide not only your nakedness but your kinship to the clown.”

Eric Linklater (1899–1974) was a leading British author of the 1930s and 1940s and a major figure in the Scottish literary renaissance of the period. He wrote 23 novels including The Dark of Summer, Magnus Merriman, The Men of Ness, and Private Angelo. Alexander Linklater is an associate editor of Prospect magazine.