Young Adam

A compelling existential thriller by the Beat-era writer: "Everyone should read Young Adam" (The Times Literary Supplement).

 

Young Adam tells the story of Joe, a drifter who works on a barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As the novel opens, Joe finds the corpse of a young woman floating in the water. Was it an accident, a suicide, or murder?


 


As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, it becomes clear that Joe knows far more than he's telling. Originally published in 1954, Young Adam was made into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton, and is now reissued with an introduction by PEN finalist and literary critic David L. Ulin.


 


This is a psychologically suspenseful novel and an absorbing portrait of a haunted man, from an iconoclastic Beat writer praised by the New Yorker for "prose that is always clean and sharp and often ferociously alive with poetry" and called "the most brilliant man I ever met" by Allen Ginsberg.


 


"Trocchi may be the greatest unknown writer in the world." —The Bloomsbury Review