A Scanner Darkly

By: Philip K Dick

Narrated by: Paul Giamatti

Substance D - otherwise known as Death - is the most dangerous drug ever to find its way on to the black market. It destroys the links between the brain's two hemispheres, leading first to disorentation and then to complete and irreversible brain damage.

Bob Arctor, undercover narcotics agent, is trying to find a lead to the source of supply, but to pass as an addict he must become a user and soon, without knowing what is happening to him, he is as dependent as any of the addicts he is monitoring.

Read by Paul Giamatti

(p) 2006 Penguin Random House LLC©1977 Philip K Dick

Critic reviews

The best book of the year - extraordinary (BrianAldiss)

One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction, Dick made most of the European avant-garde seem like navel-gazers in a cul-de-sac

My literary hero

The most brilliant SF mind on any planet

For everyone lost in the endlessly multiplicating realities of the modern world, remember: Philip K. Dick got there first

The most consistently brilliant SF writer in the world (John Brunner)

Dick is Thoreau plus the death of the American dream (Roberto Bolaño)

Dick quietly produced serious fiction in a popular form and there can be no greater praise (Michael Moorcock)

In all his work he was astonishingly intimate, self exposed, and very dangerous. He was the funniest SF writer of his time, and perhaps the most terrifying. His dreads were our own, spoken as we could not have spoken them