YOUNG ADAM

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, and tensions increase further in cramped confines with the narrator's highly charged seduction of the skipper's wife. Conventional morality and the objective meaning of events are stripped away in a work that proves compulsively readable.

ALEXANDER TROCCHI was a controversial Scottish novelist of the beat generation. A heroin addict, he is best known for Young Adam which was made into a film in 2003 starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton. Virtually forgotten by the time of his death in 1984, the first signs of a Trocchi renaissance came in the early 1990s as a new generation of Scottish writers began publishing in magazines such as Rebel Inc. "With books like Trainspotting, and writers like Alan Warner," says Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, who taught Trocchi at Glasgow University at the end of the 1940s, "there is a revival of interest in the figure of the exile, the rebel, the drug-taker. Irvine Welsh in particular made a revival of Trocchi possible."