Set around the Californian coast, it follows Jack Duluoz — Kerouac’s recurring self-mythologised double — as he tries to retreat from public attention and inner collapse.

Alas, he only finds that solitude does not save him from the damage already under way. It is still written in that rushing Kerouac sentence-music, but here the velocity feels less ecstatic than frayed.

This is one of the stronger late Beat books because it punctures its own legend. The freedom narrative has curdled; the open road has become claustrophobic; the friends are still there, but everyone is tired, drunk, needy, disappointed, or disappearing into their own damage. For readers of Beat writing, addiction narratives, American counterculture, coastal breakdown books, literary self-destruction, or anyone who wants the darker underside of On the Road rather than the poster version.

Penguin paperback. First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1962; published in Penguin Books in 1992. Good second-hand condition.