Young Adam
Book description
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…
Why read it?
1 author picked Young Adam as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
A Trocchi renaissance, including a film of Young Adam starring A-Listers Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, and Emily Mortimer, added to a growing reappraisal of Trocchi as a great Scottish writer, his reputation having been tarnished, fairly or unfairly, with drug use, indolence, and writer’s block.
Young Adam is a Scots crime novel the way James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a high-jinx picaresque, which is to say only technically, and on the understanding that Hogg and Trocchi sit head, shoulders and in fact a full body length above these genres. But moment of madness…
From Iain's list on Scottish reads about moments of madness.
Want books like Young Adam?
Our community of 11,000+ authors has personally recommended 83 books like Young Adam.
5 book lists we think you will like!
Interested in Scotland, Glasgow, and Edinburgh Scotland?
11,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them. Browse their picks for the best books about Scotland, Glasgow, and Edinburgh Scotland.