Young Adam (International Writers)

Set on a canal linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, Young Adam was the first novel of one of the most important British post-war writers. 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. Tensions increase in cramped confines with the narrator's highly charged seduction of the skipper's wife. Compulsively readable, this is no ordinary thriller. Conventional morality is challenged. The certainty of events and their meaning is far from objective.