Irvine Welsh Books

One of a hand-picked selection of some of the most popular and cult-worthy titles on Faber and Faber's extensive list of film scripts. schovat popis

The use of recreational drugs has become the subject of an unprecedented national debate over the past year. The outbreak of media hysteria following the death of Leah Betts and others has provoked leading politicians into declaring a war on drugs.

GENERAL & LITERARY FICTION. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting on a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fucking embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you've produced. Choose life.

The Seal Club is a three-novella collection by the authors Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh and John King, three stories that capture their ongoing interests and concerns, stories that reflect bodies of work that started with Morvern Callar, Trainspotting and The Football Factory - all best-sellers, all turned into high-profile films.

But it's also a proper novel about the Trumpian era, of the reality TV era, the fake news era.

These two blackly humorous screenplays are both set in Edinburgh. "Trainspotting" is based on Irvine Welch's novel about heroin addicts and the underbelly of Edinburgh life. In "Shallow Grave" three young people discover a dead body and a suitcase full of money in their flat.

Mark Renton has it all: he's good-looking, young, with a pretty girlfriend and a place at university. But there's no room for him in the 1980s. Thatcher's government is destroying working-class communities across Britain, and the post-war certainties of full employment, educational opportunity and a welfare state are gone. When his family starts to fracture, Mark's life swings out of control and he succumbs to the defeatism which has taken hold in Edinburgh's grimmer areas. The way out is heroin. It's no better for his friends. Spud Murphy is paid off from his job, Tommy Lawrence feels himself being sucked into a life of petty crime and violence - the worlds of the thieving Matty Connell and psychotic Franco Begbie. Only Sick Boy, the supreme manipulator of the opposite sex, seems to ride the current, scamming and hustling his way through it all. Skagboys charts their journey from likely lads to young men addicted to the heroin which has flooded their disintegrating community. This is the 1980s: a time of drugs, poverty, AIDS, violence, political strife and hatred - but a lot of laughs, and maybe just a little love; a decade which changed Britain for ever. The prequel to the world-renowned Trainspotting, this is an exhilarating and moving book, full of the scabrous humour, salty vernacular and appalling behaviour that has made Irvine Welsh a household name.