In this autobiography John Healy describes his fifteen years living rough in London without state aid, when begging carried an automatic three-year prison sentence and vagrant alcoholics prowled the parks and streets in search of drink or prey.

Few modern writers have managed to match Healy's power to refine from the brutal destructive condition of the chronic alcoholic a story so compeling it is beyond comparison.

Healy describes how discovering chess helped him to re-enter society.

John Healy has written an astonishing autobiography. By turns lyrical and brutal, The Grass Arena scalds the reader with the harsh intensity of its vision.

Winner of the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography

From the afterword by Colin Mac Cabe:
"Beside it, a book like Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" seems a rather inaccurate tourist guide."

Literary Review:
"Sober and precise, grotesque, violent, sad, charming and hilarious all at once"

Guardian:
"Brilliant...universally acclaimed."

Irish Post:
"An autobiographical classic."

Literary Review:
"Sober and precise, grotesque, violent, sad, charming and hilarious all at once."

The Sunday Times:
"Compellingly readable."

Anne Holohan, The Irish in Britain:
"Eloquent and brutal."

Colin McCabe:
"The only book which even begins to evoke a real comparison in English is William Burroughs' 'Junkie'."

Iain Sinclair, London Review of Books:
"The Grass Arena is a devastating account, told directly and without subterfuge. These painfully retrieved highlights stun the reader like blows from an invisible assailant, leaving him dizzy, and slightly high, trembling in an amphetamine stutter."