Books by Alexander Trocchi

Written in America while Trocchi was working on a scow on the Hudson River, Cain's Book is an extraordinary autobiographical account about a junky's life, and an honest, raunchy, eye-opening trip through hell. Probably the most famous novel about drug addiction and the hazards and excitements of an addict's life after Burrough's Naked Lunch, this modern classic - which was prosecuted in Britain for obscenity in 1965 - still shocks in its frankness and is relevant to this day.

Written when the author of Cain's Book was at the height of his creative powers and enjoying an increasing reputation in avant-garde literary circles, `The Holy Man' is here presented with `A Being of Distances', `Peter Pierce' and `A Meeting', stories which similarly tackle themes of loneliness and disenfranchisement."

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. Tensions increase in cramped confines with the narrator's highly charged seduction of the skipper's wife.