Books like The Man with the Golden Arm
Frankie Machine, a card dealer in Chicago's Polish neighbourhood, back from the war with a morphine habit, wants to be a jazz drummer and to get clear of the life.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Man with the Golden Arm
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Loretta Wendall and her children, Jules and Maureen, struggle through poverty and violence in Detroit from the 1930s to the riots of 1967.
Requiem for a Dream
Four New Yorkers, a widow taking diet pills so she can appear on a TV game show, her son, his girlfriend and his best friend, who start dealing heroin, slide into addiction in Selby's airless prose.
Lord of Misrule
At a run-down racetrack in West Virginia in 1970, a young trainer and his girlfriend turn up with four horses and a scheme to win races at long odds.
Trainspotting
Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, and Spud run together through heroin-era 1980s Leith in a novel written out in the Edinburgh that English-reading publishing had previously been allowed to leave out.
The Hive
A few days in Madrid in 1943, through some three hundred people whose lives cross in and around Doña Rosa's café.
Jesus' Son
Short, hallucinatory stories narrated by a nameless young addict drifting through the American margins of the 1970s, spare and strange and full of grace.
Dangling Man
In Chicago in the winter of 1942, Joseph, who has quit his job to wait for his army call-up, keeps a journal of the months in which nothing happens.
Junky
Burroughs's first book, a flat, exact account of a heroin user's life in 1940s New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, told by a man who has learned everything about the drug except how to stop.
Demon Copperhead
Damon Fields, born to a teenage single mother in the mountains of southern Appalachia, survives foster care, child labour and the opioid epidemic in a modern retelling of David Copperfield.
Narcopolis
In an opium den on Shuklaji Street in Bombay in the 1970s, the narrator meets Dimple, a eunuch who prepares the pipes, and the den's world changes as heroin arrives.
The Harp in the South
The Darcys, a poor Irish Catholic family, live in a crowded terrace in Surry Hills in Sydney in the 1940s, where Roie, the elder daughter, is growing up.
The Bread of Those Early Years
Walter Fendrich, who went hungry in the bombed-out cities after the war and now has money and a girlfriend, is sent to meet a girl from his home town at the station and falls for her on sight.