In My Skin: a memoir Kate Holden Canongate, 286pp, £9.99 ISBN 1841957917

Kate Holden was a bright arts graduate from a good home in Melbourne. One day she tried heroin with friends, "just to know". She soon became addicted. Though by no means the first account of a middle-class girl going off the rails, In My Skin is unusual in many ways. Holden started working as a hooker to feed her habit, only to find it perversely empowering. She invented Lucy - her "braver" alter ego - and developed a sense of pride, discipline and "professionalism".

Her narrative is unwaveringly honest: she does not gloss over the brutality of some of her clients, but towards others she feels generosity, sympathy, lust and even love. Her writing is fluent, lyrical and inventive, and she offers some unique (and terrifying) insights into the mindset of an addict. If the book has a flaw, it is that Holden's descriptions of her attempts to get clean become repetitive. Yet even this is part of the design: as our skins thicken to her failures, we feel something akin to her addiction-induced "numbness".

Heroin, Holden tells us "insulates against sensation". As the drug takes hold, we catch fewer glimpses of what is happening outside her "shell". This is a complex, thought-provoking and brilliantly unsettling book.

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