Modern De Quincey, A: Autobiography of an Opium Addict

Captain Robinson, completing a posting as a young British administrator in remote northern Burma, returned to Mandalay in 1923 to await a new assignment. One evening, Robinson and two friends came upon an opium den. While his friends called it a night, Robinson stayed on to sample the forbidden pleasures within—a decision that was to alter his life forever. Thus commences an incredible, autobiographical account of the seduction of a naive young romantic by the temptations of the East, and of his eventual narrow escape from death. First published in 1942, the book has become a sought-after rarity among British colonial accounts, now republished with a new foreword by Gerry Abbott.