At the age of 24, Jordan Barnes woke up next to a lifeless body, rifled through his dead friends’ pockets for any remaining heroin, and went right back to using. Strung out and homeless during the supposed best years of his life, there was no clear way out of the opioid crisis ravaging the streets of Portland, Oregon. But though Jordan had long accepted his fate, his parents still held out hope and would do everything in their power to get him the help he so desperately needed. 

In her tour-de-force first novel, Juliann Garey takes us inside the restless mind, ravaged heart, and anguished soul of Greyson Todd, a successful Hollywood studio executive who leaves his wife and young daughter and for a decade travels the world giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he's been forced to keep hidden for almost 20 years.

These 12 stories - published over the last five years in Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney's, Playboy, and other publications - veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.

Leaving behind a nightmarish college experience, 19-year-old Nicole and her best friend Eric escape their home of Bangor, Maine to start a new life in Boston. Fragile and scared, Nicole desperately seeks a new beginning to help erase her past. But there is something besides freedom waiting for her in the shadows - a drug that will make every day a nightmare.

Few people who have been slave to an addiction as vicious, as destructive, and as unrelenting as Colin Broderick's have lived to tell their tale. Fewer still have emerged from the darkest depths of alcoholism - from the perpetual fistfights and muggings, car crashes and blackouts - to tell the harrowing truth about the modern Irish immigrant experience.

Dr Gabor Maté is one of the world’s most revered thinkers on the psychology of addiction. His radical findings - based on decades of work with patients challenged by catastrophic drug addiction and mental illness - are reframing how we view all human development. In this award-winning modern classic, Gabor Maté takes a holistic and compassionate approach to addiction, whether to alcohol, drugs, sex, money or anything self-destructive. He presents it not as a discrete phenomenon confined to a weak-willed few but as a continuum that runs through (and even underpins) our society.

Journalist Jenny Valentish investigates the female experience of drugs and alcohol, using her own story to light the way. Mining the expertise of leading researchers, she explores the early predictors of addiction, such as childhood trauma and temperament, and teenage impulsivity. Drawing on neuroscience, she explains why other self-destructive behaviours - such as eating disorders and high-risk sex - are interchangeable with substance use.

That's What Junkies Do is a brutally honest, often dark journey of one man's struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction. The story starts innocently enough in 1980's Brooklyn, NY, with a young boy, Thomas Figlioli, making a bad choice so he could gain the respect of a group of kids he looked up to and admired. Alcohol gives him the courage to be the person he always wanted to be. His fear and insecurity leaves and his lifelong struggle begins. When thoughts of ending it all become a better choice than living how he is, Thomas finally asks for help.

Susan has been trying for a baby for years, and when a one-night stand makes her dream come true, she’ll do anything to ensure her husband doesn’t find out - including the unthinkable. Her secret is safe. For now. But as governments embark on a genetic arms race and children around the globe start experiencing a host of distressing symptoms, something truly horrendous is unleashed. Because those children have only one thing in common and people are starting to ask questions.

The story of a young man fighting to recover from a devastating psychotic break and the mother who refuses to give up on him. Zack McDermott, a 26-year-old Brooklyn public defender, woke up one morning convinced he was being filmed as part of an audition for a TV pilot. Every passerby was an actor; every car would magically stop for him; everything he saw was a cue from 'The Producer' to help inspire the performance of a lifetime.

With heart-racing urgency and unflinching honesty, Jenkins takes you inside the grips of addiction and the desperate decisions it breeds. She is a born storyteller who lived an incredible story, from blackmail by an ex-boyfriend to a soul-shattering deal with a drug dealer, and her telling brims with suspense and unexpected wit. But the true surprise is her path to recovery. Tiffany breaks through the stigma and silence to offer hope and inspiration to anyone battling the disease - whether it’s a loved one or themselves.  

A startlingly frank memoir, Quitter documents one woman's struggles with alcoholism and recovery, with essential new insights into addiction and treatment.

Elizabeth Burton-Phillips is a teacher, an ordinary middle-class mother who had always tried to do the best for her children. She never imagined that her identical twin sons, who had been doing so well at school, would become involved in drugs. She was shocked when they were suspended from school for smoking cannabis, but this was just the start of a terrible, unimaginable journey - culminating in the knock on the door in the early hours by the police. They gave her the devastating news that her son Nick had killed himself in despair at his heroin addiction. 

Heroin is a Beast, and that Beast has infiltrated every town and city in America. The Beast has come for your sons and daughters. The Beast is hunting for your fathers and mothers. And that Beast has only one mission, to bury as many Americans as possible. I Am a Heroin Addict is the story of how Ritchie Farrell survived a ten-bag-a-day heroin habit to become a best-selling author, WGA screenwriter, and recipient of the prestigious du-Pont-Columbia Award for excellence in journalism. 

This is the age of addiction, a condition so epidemic, so all encompassing and ubiquitous, that unless you are fortunate enough to be an extreme case, you probably don't know that you have it. What unhealthy habits and attachments are holding your life together? Are you unconsciously dependent on food? Bad relationships? A job that doesn't fulfill you? Numb, constant perusal of your phone, looking for what? My qualification for writing this book is not that I am better than you, it's that I am worse.