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.

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.

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.