"A scorching account of a childhood, an adolescence, a life of ugliness, pain, escape, alcohol, loneliness. Often it's funny - often it's disturbing - Ham on Rye is a powerful book." Roddy Doyle
Legendary barfly Charles Bukowski's fourth novel, first published in 1982, is probably the most autobiographical
and moving of all his books, dealing in particular with his difficult relationship with his father and his early childhood in LA.
Ham on Rye follows the path of Bukowski's alter-ego Henry Chinaski through the high school years of acne and
rejection, and into the beginning of a long and successful career in alcoholism. The novel begins against the backdrop of an America devastated by the Depression and takes the Chinaski legend up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ham on Rye is arguably Bukowski's finest novel.
"Both powerful and, where appropriate, extremely funny." Sunday Telegraph
"Sometimes funny and always sad, Ham on Rye is written in an admirably hard, bare, vivid style. It offers grim
insights into the construction of masculinity and American life between the wars." Times Literary Supplement
"In an age of conformity, Bukowski wrote about the people nobody wanted to be: the ugly, the selfish, the lonely,
the mad." Observer

Charles Bukowski, who died in 1994, was the legendary Californian writer who became famous for his semi-autobiographical books about low-life America. Novels such as Factotum and Post Office made this one-time bum, and lifelong alcoholic, rich and famous, and culminated in the making of Barfly, a major Hollywood movie based on his life starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.