YOUNG ADAM

Joe is a drifter who works as a hired hand on a barge traveling the Forth and Clyde Canal between Edinburgh and Glasgow. As the story opens, he finds the corpse of a young woman drifting downstream. Was it an accident? Suicide? Murder? As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, it becomes apparent that Joe knew the dead woman and has more information than he's telling. Meanwhile, an unspoken attraction has developed between Joe and the wife of the barge skipper. This first novel by Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi is an absorbing existential thriller - a lost gem of world literature reminiscent of Camus, Bukowski, and Burroughs."Everyone should read Young Adam." - The Times Literary Supplement"What Trocchi was about...was testing of boundaries, the eradication of acceptable behavior in the name of something more engaged." - The Bloomsbury Review

Alexander Trocchi (1925 1984) was a Scottish novelist whose numerous works include Cain’s Book. He resided mainly in Paris and New York throughout his life. He was an editor of the literary journal Merlin, which published works by Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others.

David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of the novel Ear to the Ground. His other books include Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he spent ten years as book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.