The club's crowded tonight and some of the kids waiting out in back won't be able to get in. "Tainted Love" is playing, loudly, over the stereo system and the dance floor is packed with people, most of them young, most of them bored, trying to look turned on . We pass through the crowd and walk into the back leaving the thumping music and the smoke-filled room behind us. Eighteen-year-old college student Clay is back in his hometown of Los Angeles for Christmas break. Clay is three things: rich, bored and looking to get high. As he reacquaints himself with a familiarly limitless world of privilege, along with his best friend and his ex, his shocking, stunning and disturbing adventure is filled with non-stop drinking in glamorous nightclubs, drug-fuelled parties and endless sexual encounters. Published in 1985, when Bret Easton Ellis was just twenty-one, Less Than Zero is a fierce coming-of-age story which quickly defined a genre. A cult classic beloved for its dogged portrayal of hedonistic youth and the morally depraved, this extraordinary and instantly famous novel is a landmark in modern fiction: an inventive, precocious and invigorating story of getting what you want when you want it.

'An extraordinarily accomplished first novel' New Yorker 'The Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation' USA Today.