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Fat Phil can’t believe his luck at dice, but when his friends turn nasty, he pleads with fate to let him lose; a salesman psychs himself up with encouraging messages from fortune cookies, until the advice turns sour; a young boy experiences the onset of puberty as a sudden crushing weight one summer’s afternoon.

Hubert Selby began as a writer of short stories and he excels in this form, plunging the reader headfirst into the densely realised worlds and dilemmas of his protagonists. He offers a passionate empathy with ordinary dreams, a brilliant ear for the street and for the voices of conscience and self-deceit that torment us all.

In Coney Island, Brooklyn, Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow, wants nothing more than to lose weight and appear on a television game show. She becomes addicted to diet pills in her obsessive quest, while her junkie son, Harry, along with his girlfriend, Marion, and his best friend, Tyrone, have devised an illicit shortcut to wealth and leisure by scoring a pound of uncut heroin. Entranced by the gleaming visions of their futures, these four convince themselves that unexpected setbacks are only temporary. Even as their lives slowly deteriorate around them, they cling to their delusions and become utterly consumed in the spiral of drugs and addiction, refusing to see that they have instead created their own worst nightmares.