Books

BooksSix characters in search of sobriety are the major dramatis personnae of The Twelfth Step (Scribner's, $4.95), by Thomas Randall, a pseudonymous first novel of close to 600 pages filled with drunkenness, paraldehyde, loneliness, booze, despair, vice, drunkenness, abortion, seduction, drunkenness, love, rage, hate, drunkenness, booze, sickness, depravity, more booze, more drunkenness – and throughout, the heroic and anonymous (natch) work of Alcoholics Anonymous, whose 12 steps to sobriety d...