Raw Material

"Bukowski meets Withnail on schnapps. As beautiful a mess as the characters he wrote, Jörg Fauser's trawl through the anarchist squats of the 70s lays bare the seeds of Germany's new cool."DBC Pierre

"What you are about to read is, in many ways, like nothing else you will have read before. To foist a genre on it, it's a picaresque, but what a crazed, leaping, unmoored and hilarious voyage it is . . . [a] crazed cut-up collage of wanderings and wishes and the inevitable destruction of dreams. Tremendous."Niall Griffiths

"Sad, funny, cynical and deeply authentic, it's the best novel of the period I've ever read."Barry Miles

In Raw Material Jörg Fauser casts an eye over the times he lived in and his own life: a junkie in Istanbul, the move to a commune in Berlin and a squat in Frankfurt, work on an underground magazine and unceasing efforts to get a novel published. The autobiographical testament of Fauser's alter ego Harry Gelb is an unsparing, razor-sharp but often lovingly ironic portrait of the 1960s and 70s. It is a portrait of the artist to rank with the best, and a portrait of the ferment of Europe at that time.

Jörg Fauser was born in Frankfurt in 1944. After abandoning his studies he lived in Istanbul and London before moving back to Germany, where he made his living as a writer of fiction and poetry. He died in Munich in 1987.