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. Tensions increase in cramped confines with the narrator's highly charged seduction of the skipper's wife. Compulsively readable, this is no ordinary thriller. It challenges conventional morality. The certainty of events and their meaning is far from objective. Set on a canal linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, Young Adam is the masterly literary debut by one of the most important British post-war novelists. 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.