Women

Henry Chinaski is in his fifties, living in Hollywood, and for the first time in his life having sex with a large number of women. The novel he writes about this period is, characteristically, both cruder and more honest than it sounds: a portrait of an aging man navigating desire and loneliness with a combination of braggadocio and genuine self-awareness, in prose of complete vernacular precision. Women is Bukowski at his most autobiographical — and, some would argue, his most revealing: the book in which the gap between the performance of callousness and the reality of need is most clearly visible.

Essential Bukowski — one of his finest novels. Published by Virgin Books.