I love Welsh. But recently some of his books (notably: Crime) have been fairly awful. Also, prequels tend to be pretty poor (i.e. Star Wars) and usually leave me think, "ah...that's why that story was left out of the first book." Skagboys had me feeling the exact same way. It started great and th...
There were parts of this short story collection which I absolutely hated. The writing, the characters, the plots, the pointless homophobia and the pointless misogynistic orientation of the plots. It certainly started out painfully labored as a collection with a couple of dire rambling stories sto...
The title of this book really says it all. Most of the stories are really very dull and uninteresting, and kind of confusing because it becomes tough to keep track of which character from Welsh's universe we're learning more about. One story, about aliens who learned everything they know about Ea...
The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins revolves around the relationship between two women - Lucy Brennan and Lena Sorenson. Lucy is a personal trainer who found herself in a position one night that brought out some bravery. She was stopped in the middle of the road at night with two men running at her, t...
Three Tales of Chemical Romance is a collection of three stories:Lorraine Goes to LivingstoneFortune's Always Hiding: A Corporate RomanceThe Undefeated: An Acid House RomanceLorraine Goes to Livingstone is a strangely feminist story - an 'historical (read: trashy) romance' writer, Rebecca, suffer...
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 embarrrass...
Glue is populated with strong characters. The four main friends the reader follows - Gally, Juice Terry, N-Sign Ewart, and Billy Birrell - stick together through thick and thin. From primary school to soccer riots (which is an hilarious scene) to teenage clubbing to middle age, the four remain fr...
Irvine Welsh was the literary hero among my generation of working-class Central Belt Scots for his graphic novels set in Edinburgh sink estates, riddled with sex, drugs, violence, and written in dextrously rendered phonetic dialect. I avoided reading Welsh, since a witless moron at my school rate...
This was the second book of Welsh’s that I have read, the first being of course the incomparable Trainspotting. This was a collection of short stories and a novella, some of which was along similar lines as his famous first novel, and other pieces that looked in other directions. Throughout the r...
This is the sequel to Trainspotting, and takes place ten years later. I've heard a lot of mixed reviews on this one, always comparing it to Trainspotting, but I have to say I like it just as much, if not more than, its predecessor.It's slightly less intense than Trainspotting and shows sex rather...
'Filth' sucks you deep into the disturbed, poetic, perverted, brilliant and fevered brain of Detective Sargent Bruce 'Robbo' Robertson. Bruce is in line for a big promotion to DI, and will stop at nothing to get it. Eliminating the competition with psychopathic precision, whilst indulging in his ...