Young Adam

Joe is a drifter who works as a hired hand on a barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As the story opens, he finds the corpse of a young woman floating in the water. Was it an accident? Suicide? Murder? As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, we discover that Joe knows more than he's telling. Confined in the claustrophobic space of the barge, an unspoken tension develops between Joe and his wife, Ella, and her business partner, Leslie. Originally published in 1954, this first novel by Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi is an absorbing existential thriller — a lost gem of world literature. [From the back cover.]