Patrick deWitt's debut novel is a grim, darkly comic portrait of addiction and service work, following an unnamed bartender through the long nights of a dive bar populated by drunks, dealers, sex workers and men coming apart.

Told almost entirely in the second person, the novel creates the unsettling sense that the narrator is both speaking to himself and watching his own life from a slight remove. Rather than following a conventional plot, Ablutions accumulates scenes, routines and observations until an emotional collapse becomes inevitable.

Written before The Sisters Brothers brought deWitt international recognition, Ablutions remains one of his sharpest books. It combines deadpan humour with genuine tenderness, capturing the strange intimacies of addiction without romanticising them. Readers drawn to Denis Johnson, Harry Crews or the bleaker corners of American literary fiction will find a novel that is as interested in exhaustion and self-deception as it is in recovery.

2012 Granta paperback edition. Light shelf wear to wraps with a clean, unmarked interior.