Leonard Cohen was born and raised in the affluent Westmount district of Montreal and graduated from McGill University in 1955. For a short time, Cohen attended graduate school at Columbia. Throughout the 1960s, Cohen's verse, both as song and poetry, became extremely popular. His "Suzanne" was one of the most-recorded songs of the decade. Always a poet whose work reflected the attitudes of society's nonconformists, Cohen successively identified with the Beat Generation of the 1950s, the rhetoricians of protest of the mid-1960s, and the more meditative disillusionment of the 1970s. Cohen's best-known work, Beautiful Losers (1966), is a dazzling novel that is an abstraction of all searches for a lost innocence. In Death of a Lady's Man (1978), one of Cohen's collections of poetry, his preoccupation with the duality of beauty and decadence is once again explored.

One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, this uninhibited tale centres on the hapless members of a love triangle, and their sexual obsession and shared fascination with a mythic saint.Revolving around four central ' and intrinsically flawed ' characters, 'Beautiful Losers' is the frank and humorous story of a nameless narrator, his wife Edith, their domineering friend and mentor 'F' and Catherine Tekakwitha, a mythic 17th-century Mohawk virgin saint. The complexities of this three-way love, pain and lust are sent spiralling by the death of Edith and 'F' at the novel's start, leading the damaged narrator to question the nature of love, sexuality and spirituality in a series of explicit flashbacks.The extraordinary and inimitable singer-songwriter's classic novel, this is Leonard Cohen's most critically acclaimed literary work, echoing the dark poetry and wry humour of his timeless songs of loss, love, sex and religion.Not just an extremely funny novel, but an incredibly original and explicit examination of friendship, sex and spirituality.