'...I stare at the coffee I poured myself, and I think: caffeine is a poison that stimulates the heart. There are plenty of instances of people killing themselves with coffee, hundreds and thousands of them. Caffeine is a deadly poison, maybe almost as deadly as morphine. Why didn't it ever occur to me before: coffee is my friend!'

Drawing on Hans Fallada's own history of addiction, these two stories and are written with a remarkable, tough, spartan clarity. As a man desperately, haplessly tries to get enough morphine to make it through the day and a drunk embezzler struggles to get himself arrested, they are at one second crushing, the next darkly comic.

This book includes A Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism and Three Years of Life.