Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

A beautifully written and elegantly frank memoir... A lyrical, funny and shattering narration of a long, hard path.

AL Kennedy, Guardian Summer Reading

A gripping, graphic memoir that pounds relentlessly to a climax.

Tim Teeman, The Times

A gripping, graphic memoir that pounds relentlessly to its climax

The Times

A short book that pulls you in and spits you back out... He can certainly write

Dwight Garner, Scotland on Sunday

A very, very good book...told in perfect, beautifully clear, Bret Easton Ellis-type prose

William Leith, Literary Review

Addictive, and strangely beautiful

Maggie Fergusson, Intelligent Life

Audacious

Rose Tremain, Guardian Summer Reading

Beautifully measured and adroitly paced ... mixing a matter-of-fact eye for detail with just enough emotion to unsettle and engross ... Addictive and masterful

Julian Hall, The Independent

Beautifully written and elegantly frank... lyrical, funny and shattering

A.L.Kennedy

Bill Clegg's Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man stands up to Frederick Exley's great memoir of alcoholism, A Fan's Notes. It is perhaps even higher praise to think of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man as Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye on crack. But really, finally, forget the comparisons. Read the book

Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

Dark, engrossing...proves that addiction stories do not have to be gratuitous and unashamedly confessional

Fiona Atherton, Scotsman

It has the power and precision of the best contemporary fiction. It does what the best writing always does, which is to make Clegg's experience part of your own

Andrew O'Hagan

It's a remarkable achievement when a writer can evoke the most desperate episodes of addiction with the unflinching honesty required to make such a memoir worth reading, yet somehow manage to completely transcend sleaze, sordidness and vapid self-justification. Bill Clegg's story of a man - largely locked in hotel rooms, engaged in a desperate, heart-wrenching battle with himself - is destined to become a cult classic of writing on drug addiction

Irvine Welsh

It's an honest and wonderfully crafted book by a man as intoxicated by language as he was by crack.

AL Kennedy, Guardian, Christmas round up

Loved A Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

William Leith, Spectator, Christmas round up

Mesmerising: as well as being beautifully written, it illuminated addiction in a frank and useful fashion, and tied childhood experience into adult problems insightfully.

Hannah McGill, Sunday Herald, Christmas round up

Riveting reading... We salute this book

Dazed & Confused

Stylised, artful memoir

Suzi Feay, Financial Times