<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>Blueschild Baby takes place during the summer of 1967--the summer of race riots all across the nation; the Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury; the summer of Marines dying near Con Thien, across the world in Vietnam--but the novel illuminates the contours of a more private hell: the angry desperation of a heroin addict who returns to his home in Harlem after being in prison.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p><strong>A searing chronicle of the life of a young ex-convict and heroin addict in 1960's Harlem, an unsparing portrait of a man who couldn't free himself from the horrors of addiction </strong></p><p><em>Blueschild Baby</em> takes place during the summer of 1967--the summer of race riots all across the nation; the Summer of Love in the Haight Ashbury; the summer of Marines dying near Con Thien, across the world in Vietnam--but the novel illuminates the contours of a more private hell: the angry desperation of a heroin addict who returns to his home in Harlem after being in prison. </p><p>First published in 1970, this frankly autobiographical novel was a revelation, a stunning depiction of a marginal figure, marked literally and figuratively by his drug addiction and navigating a predatory underground of junkies and hustlers--and named George Cain, like his author. </p><p>Now with a new preface by acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison, this is an unvarnished conjuring of the tyranny of dependence: its desperation, its degradation, its rage and rebellion; the fragile, unsettled, occasional shards of hope it permits; the strange joys of being alive and young and lost and hooked and full of feverish determination anyway.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> From the Back Cover </b></p></br></br><p><strong>A searing chronicle of the life of a young ex-convict and heroin addict in 1960s Harlem, an unsparing portrait of a man who couldn't free himself from the horrors of addiction.</strong></p><p><em>Blueschild Baby</em> takes place during the summer of 1967-the summer of race riots all across the nation; the Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury; the summer of Marines dying near Con Thien, across the world in Vietnam-but the novel illuminates the contours of a more private hell: the angry desperation of a heroin addict who returns to his home in Harlem after being in prison.</p><p>First published in 1970, this frankly autobiographical novel was a revelation, a stunning depiction of a marginal figure, marked literally and figuratively by his drug addiction and navigating a predatory underground of junkies and hustlers-and named George Cain, like his author.</p><p>Now with a new introduction by acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison, this is an unvarnished conjuring of the tyranny of dependence: its desperation, its degradation, its rage and rebellion; the fragile, unsettled, occasional shards of hope it permits; the strange joys of being alive and young and lost and hooked and full of feverish determination anyway.</p>