The Brick and the Rose

"This is the kaleidoscopic drama of a young boy of the slums from the moment of his birth in a charity hospital, until his tragic death. In an effort to find something besides 'hardness and hitting out, and twisted people all afraid', Tommy turns to narcotics, and thus creates his own world: one in which he is not constantly gnawed by an acute awareness of the meaninglessness of what is going on around him. He meets Alice, in whom he sees his life-long search for beauty: the rose behind the hard brick city. He knows that he has only touched this beauty for an instant, and he sees it moving farther away from him. At last, in a final escape from the squalor around him, he takes an overdose of narcotics, and ends his search."--From publisher's website.