Young Adam

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

On a canal linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, an unnamed narrator drifts through work on a barge, an outsider employed by the skipper and living in the cramped, close quarters of someone else’s life. The routine is broken when they find a young woman’s corpse floating in the canal, an intrusion that cannot be scrubbed away.

The discovery sharpens the atmosphere on board. Tensions rise in the confined space, and in the narrator’s highly charged seduction of the skipper’s wife. Desire and suspicion begin to sit side by side, and the canal becomes a corridor of unease where every glance feels weighted.

As events unfold, conventional morality and any objective meaning begin to fall away. What remains is a stripped back account of impulse, consequence, and the stories people tell themselves to live with what they have done, or failed to do.