YOUNG ADAM (PB)

Set on a canal linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, Young Adam is the masterly literary debut by beat novelist and (according to Hugh MacDiarmid) ‘cosmopolitan scum’ Alexander Trocchi. The 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.