Never Enough: A Way Through Addiction

'An ambitious, intelligent book' Observer

Three decades after quitting Class A drugs, Barney Hoskyns looks back - in sorrow and wonder rather than anger - at the addiction that gripped him for five years of his life.

Seeking to understand the forces that pushed him to destroy himself in his early twenties - and quoting from his journal entries in and after those years - Hoskyns tells the story of his drug use and its denouement: a slow journey out of darkness towards emotional and spiritual health. Central to the narrative is his account of an obsessive love affair that drove him to seek oblivion through heroin and cocaine.

This is not a war story. Rather, it's an effort to make sense of addiction as a condition: to see how it manifests not only in the individual but in society as a whole. Drawing on over 30 years without chemicals, Hoskyns explores the full implications of what M. Scott Peck called 'the sacred disease' and attempts to explain it from a new and holistic perspective.

Pulling together strands of dependency, decadence and self-hatred - and the parallel addiction that is sexual obsession - Never Enough is profoundly personal and discursively philosophical: an extrapolation from the particular to the general that speaks to the human condition of us all.

'Elegantly written, almost poetic at times' Mail on Sunday

'Artful, intense' Q