Cain's Book

Fiction. CAIN'S BOOK is one of the most celebrated novels of the sixties, and after Burrough's NAKED LUNCH, probably the most famous and compelling book about drug addiction and the hazards and excitements of an addict's life. Trocchi left Glasgow University with the honours of a brilliant philosophy scholar, founded MERLIN, an oustanding literary magazine in Paris, wrote novels for OLYMPIA PRESS, experimented with heroin and became hooked. In America, working on a Husdson River scow, he wrote this extraordinary autobiographical novel about a junky's life, an honest, raunchy, eye-opening trip through hell, a sixties bestseller that underwent prosecution in Britain in 1964, but is now a modern classic, published in many languages. Jumps out of the dark alleys and rams a knife between the shoulder-blades of conventional criticism...it has a black, icy brilliance...by a man who has explored the deepest pothole of the human spirit -- Kenneth Allsopp.