Novels
- Young Adam (1957)
- Sappho of Lesbos (1960)
- Cain’s Book (1961)
Collections
- Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds (1991)
- The Holy Man and Other Stories (2019)
Non fiction
- A Life in Pieces (1997)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Alexander Trocchi Books Overview
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 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. Soon to be released as a film, 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.
Cain’s Book
This is the journal of Joe Necchi, a junkie living on a barge that plies the rivers and bays of New York. Joe’s world is the half world of drugs and addicts the world of furtive fixes in sordid Harlem apartments, of police pursuits down deserted subway stations. Junk for Necchi, however, is a tool, freely chosen and fully justified; he is Cain, the malcontent, the profligate, the rebel who lives by no one’s rules but his own. Like DeQuincey and Baudelaire before him, Trocchi’s muse was drugs. But unlike his literary predecessors, in his roman a clef, Trocchi never romanticizes the source of his inspiration. If the experience of hero*in, of the ‘fix,’ is central to Cain’s Book, both its destructive force and the possibilities for creativity it creates are recognized and accepted without apology. Cain’s Book is the classic late 1950s account of hero*in addiction…
. An un self forgiving existentialism, rendered with writerly exactness and muscularity, set this novel apart from all others of the genre. William S. Burroughs
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