Blueschild Baby
George Cain
HarperCollins
<p>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 </p><p>Blueschild Baby takes place during the summer of 1967&#8212;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&#8212;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&#8212;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...</p>