Clay comes home to L.A. for Christmas vacation and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs. Morally barren, ethically bereft and tinged with implicit violence, Less Than Zero is a shocking coming-of-age novel about the casual nihilism that comes with youth and money.

`An extraordinarily accomplished first novel' New Yorker

`One of the most disturbing novels I've read in a long time. It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

`The Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation' USA Today

`Remarkable. A killer - sexy, sassy, sad' Village Voice