Synopses & Reviews
Set on a canal linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, Young Adam is the masterly literary debut by one of the most important post-war British novelists. Trocchi's narrator is an outsider, a drifter working for the skipper of a barge. Together they discover a young woman's corpse floating in the canal, and tensions increase further in cramped confines with the narrator's highly charged seduction of the skipper's wife. Conventional morality and the objective meaning of events are stripped away in a work that proves compulsively readable.
Review
"Everyone should read Young Adam." The Times Literary Supplement
Review
"The most brilliant man I've ever met." Allen Ginsberg
Review
"Alex Trocchi has the courage so essential to a writer. He writes about spirit, flesh, and death and the vision that comes through the flesh. He has been there and brought it back." William S. Burroughs
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"What Trocchi was about . . . was testing boundaries, the eradication of acceptable behavior in the name of something more engaged." The Bloomsbury Review
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"The Scottish George Best of the literary world." Irvine Welsh
About the Author
Alexander Trocchi (19251984) was a Scottish novelist and editor of the great Paris literary magazine Merlin, which published Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Pablo Neruda, and Jean-Paul Sartre among others.