Product Description

A jarring, fragmented ride through the dark underbelly of Edinburgh, the festival city. There is not an advocate, a festival performer or a fur coat in sight as, with bitter passion and rancid humour, Welsh lays bare the lives of this ill-starred bunch of addicts, alcoholics and no-hopers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26667 in Books
• Published on: 1994-07-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
This collection of loosely gathered tales centres on the bleak lives of a group of twentysomething friends (or rather associates; 'Nae friends in this game.') in Edinburgh. Addiction, violence, sex and the baser bodily functions are the main concerns of the slacker characters and these topics are treated with a direct language that may not be to everyone's taste. Innovative in its prose-style, ground-breaking in its subject matter, startling and gripping in its voice - I should say voices for Welsh is wondrously profligate with the characters he invents, the stories they tell, the many different yarns, opinions, jokes and rants that pour out of the mouths of his pithily (and sometimes painfully) observed Edinburgh folk. That's one way the novel triumphs over the (admittedly very enjoyable) film version: it's so much richer, more complex, truer to life as it's lived by millions of people today, in Scotland and beyond. If the structure of Trainspotting is a little loose and baggy, well, the same could be said of the Canterbury Tales and Oliver Twist. A startling first novel that will leave your head buzzing. (Kirkus UK)

Synopsis
A jarring, fragmented ride through the dark underbelly of Edinburgh, the festival city. There is not an advocate, a festival performer or a fur coat in sight as, with bitter passion and rancid humour, Welsh lays bare the lives of this ill-starred bunch of addicts, alcoholics and no-hopers.

From the Publisher
The seminal novel that changed the face of British fiction

Customer Reviews

jawdropping
this book goes beyond anything i've ever read; it completely changed my outlook on life, my view on literature and my view of myself.

people who think this is a book about drugs, sex and violence would be right. But it is about so much more - it is so beautiful, poetic and heartfelt.

i would recommend that everyone read this book at some point in their lives.

A cult classic that has stood the test of time
Originally published in 1993, Irvine Welsh's seminal novel about a group of Edinburgh junkies is still as forcefully mesmerizing today as it was the first time I read it some 12 years ago. The characters - Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud et al, who have become immortalised and entrenched in the collective consciousness of the nation's movie-watching public, thanks to Danny Boyle's 1996 film - are every bit as captivating and pathetic as their celluloid counterparts, as hideous as they are hilarious, and yet they are rendered far more realistic - and terrifyingly so at that - by Welsh's masterful pen. The use of multiple narratives, for example, with each character contributing their own, unique take on events is a stroke of genius, and an approach to fiction-writing that has since become common-place. Seldom has it been done better, however. Similarly, Welsh's use of dialect in his writing is nothing less than poetic, despite - or perhaps because of - the explosion of profanities and the baseness of the activities it describes. This novel is not without humour or tenderness, but it is used sparingly and in the same way as, say, television's The Royle Family occasionally brings a tear to your eye amid all the inanity, Welsh reminds the reader that these are, in fact, real people about whom he is writing.

If you've seen the film, then you really should read the book, and if this is your first encounter with the works of Irvine Welsh, it's also the obvious starting point. His other books - especially Acid House, Marabou Stork Nightmares, and Porno, which re-visits Trainspotting's characters a decade on - are well worth checking out too.

Matt Pucci

A cult classic that has stood the test of time
Originally published in 1993, Irvine Welsh's seminal novel about a group of Edinburgh junkies is still as forcefully mesmerizing today as it was the first time I read it some 12 years ago. The characters - Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud et al, who have become immortalised and entrenched in the collective consciousness of the nation's movie-watching public, thanks to Danny Boyle's 1996 film - are every bit as captivating and pathetic as their celluloid counterparts, as hideous as they are hilarious, and yet they are rendered far more realistic - and terrifyingly so at that - by Welsh's masterful pen. The use of multiple narratives, for example, with each character contributing their own, unique take on events is a stroke of genius, and an approach to fiction-writing that has since become common-place. Seldom has it been done better, however. Similarly, Welsh's use of dialect in his writing is nothing less than poetic, despite - or perhaps because of - the explosion of profanities and the baseness of the activities it describes. This novel is not without humour or tenderness, but it is used sparingly and in the same way as, say, television's The Royle Family occasionally brings a tear to your eye amid all the inanity, Welsh reminds the reader that these are, in fact, real people about whom he is writing.

If you've seen the film, then you really should read the book, and if this is your first encounter with the works of Irvine Welsh, it's also the obvious starting point. His other books - especially Acid House, Marabou Stork Nightmares, and Porno, which re-visits Trainspotting's characters a decade on - are well worth checking out too.

Matt Pucci