Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen

Combining spirituality with intense eroticism, wild and surreal humour with deadly serious intent, Beautiful Losers revolves around four characters - a husband, a wife, their ambiguous mentor, and a mythic seventeenth-century Irquois virgin. The lives of the couple and their friend, F., are bound together by love, sex and a lunatic spirit of experimentation, their relationship a tangle of jelousies, obsessions and affections. Cohen's brilliant and controversial book is characterized by a voice which is quite unique - lucid, tormented, nonchalant and wry. The result is not just an extremely funny novel, but an incredibly original and explicit examination of friendship, sex and spirituality.