The Drinker is a novel by Hans Fallada

Hans Fallada

Hans Fallada , born Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen in Greifswald, Germany, was a German writer of the first half of the 20th century. Some of his better known novels include Little Man, What Now? and Every Man Dies Alone...

, first published in 1950.

Fallada began the novel (his third), in 1944, when he was imprisoned in a criminal asylum for the attempted murder of his wife. It is autobiographical, in diary form, and tells the story of a man in the grip of both morphine

Morphine

Morphine is a potent opiate analgesic medication and is considered to be the prototypical opioid. It was first isolated in 1804 by Friedrich Sertürner, first distributed by same in 1817, and first commercially sold by Merck in 1827, which at the time was a single small chemists' shop. It was more...

 and alcohol

Alcohol

In chemistry, an alcohol is an organic compound in which the hydroxy functional group is bound to a carbon atom. In particular, this carbon center should be saturated, having single bonds to three other atoms....

. Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Bainbridge

Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge, DBE was an English author from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her psychological novels, often set amongst the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker...

called it " both shocking and original".