Product Description

Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3946 in Books
• Published on: 1994-07-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
'Welsh writes with a skill, wit and compassion that amounts to genius. He is the best thing that has happened to British writing for decades', Sunday Times .'One of the most significant writers in Britain. He writes with style, imagination, wit and force', Nick Hornby, Times Literary Supplement .'As clever as Alasdair Gray, as elegant as Jeff Torrington, as passionate as James Kelman, Welsh has got it all', Tibor Fischer, .'The voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser and grown eloquent', Sunday Times .'An unremitting powerhouse of a novel - Loud with laughter in the dark, this novel is the real McCoy', The Herald .'A novel perpetually in a starburst of verbal energy - a vernacular spectacular...the stories we hear are retched from the gullet', Scotland on Sunday .'This marvellous novel might feel like a bad day in Bedlam, but boy is it exhilarating', Jeff Torrington, .'The Scottish Celine', James Wood, Guardian

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

About the Author
Irvine Welsh is the author of eight previous works of fiction, most recently Crime. He lives in Dublin.

Customer Reviews

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

One of the best Welsh stories.
An excellent story by Welsh told with a gritty scottish text. An classic book far better than the film based on the novel.