Books about drugs

Reissue of a novel first published in the 1970s: Hunter S. Thompson's ether-fuelled, savage journey to the heart of the American Dream.

Trainspotting

Alice is 15 years old and appears a perfectly normal teenager; she diets, goes out with boys, and gets good marks at school. Without her parents being properly aware, she tries drugs and falls into addiction. The difference between Alice and a lot of other kids on drugs is that Alice keeps a diary.

Substance D is the most dangerous drug on the market. It destroys the link between the brain's two hemispheres, leading eventually to irreversible brain damage. Undercover narcotics agent Bob Arctor is trying to find a lead to the source of supply, but is soon as dependent as the other addicts.

The anarchic, phenomenally strong-selling classic from the godfather of the Beats, featuring for the first time the restored text, all the accompanying essays, and newly discovered material from the original manuscript. Revitalised with a new jacket and an anecdote filled P.S. section.

James Frey wakes up on a plane, with no memory of the preceding two weeks. His face is cut and his body is covered with bruises. He has abused alcohol and every drug he can lay his hands on for a decade - and he is aged only twenty-three. This work presents an account of a life destroyed and a life reconstructed.

In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything was transformed. Huxley described his experience in this book and its sequel Heaven and Hell .

Into the neatly programmed world of test-tube babies and drug-controlled happiness, misfit Bernard Marx bring the innocent Savage. Aldous Huxley's famous version of the future is also a chilling and witty comment on the present.

Explores three prominent and little understood features of globalisation: drugs, pornography and migrant labour. This work traces the history of the contemporary war on drugs from its origins in Reagan's social conservatism to its profound impact on civil society. It features tales such as An Empire of the Obscene and In the Strawberry Fields .

Clay comes home to LA for Christmas vacation and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and moral entropy. His holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs. This is a novel about the casual nihilism that comes with youth and money.

Features the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.

A modern day fable set in New York. Lonely widow Sara Goldfarb nurtures fanstasies about appearing on prime-time television, while her son Harry, along with his girlfriend plans his break into big-time drug dealing. Their eyes fixed on an impossible future, they move blindly onwards, contorting their lives into coils of self-deception as they struggle to keep their dreams alive.

The characters in this collection by the author of Trainspotting are often - on the surface - depraved, vicious, cowardly and manipulative, but their essential humanity is never undermined. Stereotypes are at once celebrated and destroyed, as the protagonists find themselves on unfamiliar ground.