Helen and Desire

How difficult it is to explain! The terribly mute hunger in our bodies! If I touch my thigh here in the near darkness of the tent my whole body is again instinct with the driving urge that brought me here, and I cannot explain it. As always, it is stronger than fear. For me it has always been that way . . . When the irrepressible Helen runs away from the small town she grew up in, she discovers a world of excitement and experience beyond even her imagination, from Sydney to Singapore, Bombay, Monte Carlo and the Sahara desert. A subversive and deeply suggestive masterpiece, Helen and Desire is Trocchi's greatest erotic novel.

Alexander Trocchi (1925–1984) is a novelist best-known for Young Adam and the semi-autobiographical heroin classic Cain's Book. His groundbreaking literary journal, Merlin, published for the first time such writers as De Sade, Appollinaire, Beckett, Henry Miller, and Vladimir Nabokov.