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.

*THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* Mark Renton is finally a success. An international jet-setter, he now makes significant money managing DJs, but the constant travel, airport lounges, soulless hotel rooms and broken relationships have left him dissatisfied with his life. He's then rocked by a chance encounter with Frank Begbie, from whom he'd been hiding for years after a terrible betrayal and the resulting debt. But the psychotic Begbie appears to have reinvented himself as a celebrated artist and - much to Mark's astonishment - doesn't seem interested in revenge. Sick Boy and Spud, who have agendas of their own, are intrigued to learn that their old friends are back in town, but when they enter the bleak world of organ-harvesting, things start to go so badly wrong. Lurching from crisis to crisis, the four men circle each other, driven by their personal histories and addictions, confused, angry - so desperate that even Hibs winning the Scottish Cup doesn't really help. One of these four will not survive to the end of this book. Which one of them is wearing Dead Men's Trousers? Fast and furious, scabrously funny and weirdly moving, this is a spectacular return of the crew from Trainspotting.

Glue Is The Story Of Four Boys Growing Up In The Edinburgh Schemes, And About The Loyalties, The Experiences - And The Secrets - That Hold Them Together Into Their Thirties. Four Boys Becoming Men: Juice Terry, The Work-Shy Fanny-Merchant, With Corkscrew Curls And Sticky Fingers; Billy The Boxer: Driven, Controlled, Playing To His Strengths; Carl, The Milky Bar Kid, Drifting Along To His Own Soundtrack; And The Doomed Gally - Who Has One Less Skin Than Everyone And Seems To Find Catastrophe At Every Corner. As We Follow Their Lives From The Seventies Into The New Century - From Punk To Techno, From Speed To Es - We Can See Each Of Them Trying To Struggle Out From Under The Weight Of The Conditioning Of Class And Culture, Peer Pressure And Their Parents' Hopes That Maybe Their Sons Will Do Better Than They Did. What Binds The Four Of Them Is The Friendship Formed By The Scheme, Their School, And Their Ambition To Escape From Both; Their Loyalty Fused In Street Morality: Back Up Your Mates, Don'T Hit Women And, Most Importantly, Never Grass On Anyone.

Roy Strang is engaged in a strange quest in a surrealist South Africa. His mission is to eradicate an evil predator-scavenger bird, the marabou stork, before it drives away the peace-loving flamingo from the picturesque Lake Torto. But behind this world lies another: the world of Roy's bizarre family, the Scottish housing scheme in which he grew up, his mundane job, a disastrous emigration to Africa, and his youthful life of brutality with a gang of soccer casuals. As one world crashes into the other, this potentially charming story of ornithological goodwill mutates into a filthy tale of violence, abuse and redemption.

Available for pre-order now From #1 Sunday Times bestseller Irvine Welsh, the brand new novel in the CRIME series featuring former detective Ray LennoxOLD TRUTHS HAVE NEW CONSEQUENCESRay Lennox is determined to move on from his darkest days. The maverick former detective has left Edinburgh for a fresh start in Brighton. Soon, his fixations and addictions have been replaced with quiet evenings and a rigorous fitness regime.Then Lennox meets Mathew Cardingworth. Rich, smooth-talking and immaculately dressed, he presents himself as a successful, and respectable, property developer. Yet their encounter reawakens memories that have haunted Lennox for decades, sending him into a spiral of confusion and rage.Lennox has no choice - he must confront the events of his childhood. But the more he identifies the links between Cardingworth, the disappearance of a group of foster care boys and the violence of his past, the more he finds himself asking:What will he sacrifice to achieve resolution at last?

Shortlisted for the 2015 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction A rampaging force of nature is wreaking havoc on the streets of Edinburgh, but has top shagger, drug-dealer, gonzo-porn-star and taxi-driver, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson, finally met his match in Hurricane ‘Bawbag’? Can Terry discover the fate of the missing beauty, Jinty Magdalen, and keep her idiot-savant lover, the man-child Wee Jonty, out of prison? Will he find out the real motives of unscrupulous American businessman and reality-TV star, Ronald Checker? And, crucially, will Terry be able to negotiate life after a terrible event robs him of his sexual virility, and can a new fascination for the game of golf help him to live without… A DECENT RIDE? A Decent Ride sees Irvine Welsh back on home turf, leaving us in the capable hands of one of his most compelling and popular characters, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson, and introducing another bound for cult status, Wee Jonty MacKay: a man with the genitals and brain of a donkey. In his funniest, filthiest book yet, Irvine Welsh celebrates an un-reconstructed misogynist hustler – a central character who is shameless but also, oddly, decent –and finds new ways of making wild comedy out of fantastically dark material, taking on some of the last taboos. So fasten your seatbelts, because this is one ride that could certainly get a little bumpy…

In Bruce Robertson, Welsh has created one of the most corrupt, misanthropic characters in contemporary fiction, and has written a dark, disturbing and very funny novel about sleaze, power, and the abuse of everything.

Jim Francis has finally found the perfect life – and is now unrecognisable, even to himself. A successful painter and sculptor, he lives quietly with his wife, Melanie, and their two young daughters, in an affluent beach town in California. Some say he’s a fake and a con man, while others see him as a genuine visionary. But Francis has a very dark past, with another identity and a very different set of values. When he crosses the Atlantic to his native Scotland, for the funeral of a murdered son he barely knew, his old Edinburgh community expects him to take bloody revenge. But as he confronts his previous life, all those friends and enemies – and, most alarmingly, his former self – Francis seems to have other ideas. When Melanie discovers something gruesome in California, which indicates that her husband’s violent past might also be his psychotic present, things start to go very bad, very quickly. The Blade Artist is an elegant, electrifying novel – ultra violent but curiously redemptive – and it marks the return of one of modern fiction’s most infamous, terrifying characters, the incendiary Francis Begbie from Trainspotting.

"Irvine Welsh's scintillating, disturbing, and altogether outrageous collection of stories—the basis for the 1998 cult movie directed by Paul McGuigan"--

Simon "Sick Boy" Williamson (first met in "Trainspotting") returns to his native Edinburgh. Having failed spectacularly as a hustler, pimp, husband, father and businessman, this time around he's a nascent film director, dreaming of directing and producing a pornographic film.

When Lucy Brennan, a Miami Beach personal-fitness trainer, disarms a gunman chasing two frightened homeless men, the police and the breaking-news cameras are not far behind and, within hours, Lucy is a media hero. The solitary eye-witness is the depressed and overweight Lena Sorensen, who becomes obsessed with Lucy and signs up as her client - though she seems more interested in the trainer's body than her own. When the two women find themselves more closely aligned, and can't stop thinking about the sex lives of Siamese twins, the real problems start

The highly-anticipated second instalment in the CRIME trilogy, now a hit TV Series Justice can be a blunt instrument "Men like him usually tell the story. In business. Politics. Media. But not this time: I repeat, he is not writing this story." Ritchie Gulliver MP is dead. Castrated and left to bleed in an empty Leith warehouse. Vicious, racist and corrupt, many thought he had it coming. But nobody could have predicted this. After the life Gulliver has led, the suspects are many: corporate rivals, political opponents, the countless groups he's offended. And the vulnerable and marginalised, who bore the brunt of his cruelty - those without a voice, without a choice, without a chance. As Detective Ray Lennox unravels the truth, and the list of brutal attacks grows, he must put his personal feelings aside. But one question refuses to go away... Who are the real victims here? *A 2022 Book to Look Forward To in the Evening Standard*

Hilarious, shocking and hugely entertaining, Reheated Cabbage has all the classic Irvine Welsh ingredients.In these pages you can enjoy Christmas dinner with Begbie, and see how warmly Franco greets his sister's boyfriend and the news of their engagement. You will discover, in 'The Rosewell Incident', how aliens addicted to Embassy Regal have Midlothian under surveillance, and plan to install the local casuals as the new governors of Planet Earth. You will not be surprised to read that a televised Hibs vs. Hearts game might matter more to one character than the life of his wife, or that two guys fighting over a beautiful girl might agree -- on reflection, and after a few pills and many pints of lager -- that their friendship is actually more important. And you will be delighted to welcome back 'Juice' Terry Lawson, and to watch what happens when he meets his old nemesis, retired schoolmaster Albert Black, under the strobe-lights of a Miami Beach nightclub.

Detective Inspector Ray Lennox finds himself trying to protect an abused girl from a gang of pedophiles while vacationing in Florida.

Troubled environmental health officer Danny Skinner is engaged on a quest to uncover what he refers to as "the bedroom secrets of the master chefs." He regards the unraveling of this classified information as the key to learning genetic facts about himself and the crippling compulsions that threaten to wreck his young life. The ensuing journey takes him from Europe's festival city of Edinburgh to the foodie capital of America, San Francisco. But the hard-drinking, womanizing Skinner has a strange nemesis in the form of model-railway enthusiast Brian Kibby. It is his unfathomable, obsessive hatred of Kibby that takes over everything, threatening to destroy not only Skinner and his mission but also those he loves most dearly. When Kibby contracts a horrific and debilitating mystery virus, Skinner understands that his destiny is inextricably bound to that of his hated rival, and he is faced with a terrible dilemma. Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs is a gothic parable about the great obsessions of our time: food, sex and minor celebrity, and is a brilliant examination of identity, male rivalry and the need to belong in the world.

These five stories remind us that Welsh is a master of the shorter form, a brilliant storyteller and, unarguably, one of the funniest and filthiest writers alive. In Rattlesnakes, when three young Americans find themselves lost in the desert, how is it that one find himself performing fallatio on another while being watched by the bare-breasted Madeline and two armed Mexicans? Who is the mysterious Korean chef who has moved in with Chicago socialite Kendra Cross, in The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park, and what does he have to do with the disappearance of her faithful pooch, Toto? In the title story, can Mickey Baker, an English bar-owner on the Costa Brava, manage to keep all his balls in the air: maintaining his barmaid Teresa’s body weight at the sexual maximum while attending to the youthful Persephone, and dodging his persistent ex-wife and a pair of Spanish gangsters? In Miss Arizona, Raymond Wilson Butler is writing a biography of a legendary U.S. movie director. By what train of events does he end up as a piece of movie memorabilia? And how, in The Kingdom of Fife, will Jason King — diminutive ex-trainee jockey and Subbuteo star of Cowdenbeath — fare in the world of middle-class female equestrians?Irvine Welsh is the author of seven previous works of fiction, includingThe Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. He lives in Dublin.

Rebecca Navarro, Best-Selling Authoress Of Regency Romances, Suffers A Paralysing Stroke. Assisted By Her Nurse, Rebecca Plans Her Revenge On Her Unfaithful Husband. But Will Freddy Royle, Hospital Trustee, Celebrity And Necrophiliac, Thwart Those Plans? Dave Thornton, Soccer Thug, Has Lost His Heart To Flawed Beauty Samantha Worthington. Together They Go In Search Of The Man Who Marketed The Drug That Crippled Her - In Order To Cripple Him. Lloyd From Leith Has A Transfiguring Passion For The Unhappily Married Heather. Together They Explore The True Nature Of House Music And Chemical Romance. Will Their Ardour Fizzle And Die In The Grim Backstreets Of Edinburgh, Or Will It Ignite And Blaze Like A Thousand Suns?

Dopo l'esperienza africana di Weekenders, ancora una volta il Daily Telegraph ha riunito lrvine Welsh, Monica Ali, Michel Atherton, Bella Bathurst, Jenny Colgan, Simon Garfield, W. F. Deedes, Tony Hawks, Victoria Glendinning, Sam Millet e Colm Toibin per catapultarli a Calcutta: dal confort e dalla modernità delle loro occidentalissime città, Londra e Edimburgo, a un luogo dove il passato parla ancora e il futuro chiama più forte che mai. Da quell'esperienza sono nati i racconti compresi in questa antologia che, mescolando la fiction al reportage di viaggio, riflettono modi diversi di vedere una metropoli che è nel mondo simbolo di povertà e miseria e che i suoi abitanti chiamano la Città della Gioia.

Irvine Welsh, 'poet laureate of the chemical generation', exposes the seamy underbelly of rave's utopian dream. Lloyd, our permanently pilled-up protagonist, pushes his weekends to breaking point and beyond in this frazzled trip through Scottish clubland. He experiences the vertiginous uppers and downers of the Second Summer of Love, dabbles in a…

The classic bestseller from the star of Parts Unknown and No Reservations: 25th Anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Irvine Welsh. BEFORE THERE WAS THE BEAR, THERE WAS BOURDAIN. 'Elizabeth David written by Quentin Tarantino' A.A. Gill 'Fantastic: as lip-smackingly seductive as a bowl of fat chips and pungent aioli' Daily Telegraph After twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine, chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain decided to tell all - and he meant all. From his first oyster in the Gironde as a child, to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown; from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable, as shocking as they are funny. Kitchen Confidential will make your mouth water and your belly ache with laughter and leave you wanting more. 'Compelling ... with its intriguing mix of clever writing and kitchen patois ... more horrifically gripping than a Stephen King novel' Sunday Times 'Extraordinary ... written with a clarity and a clear-eyed wit to put the professional food-writing fraternity to shame' Observer

Dopo l'esperienza africana di Weekenders, ancora una volta il Daily Telegraph ha riunito lrvine Welsh, Monica Ali, Michel Atherton, Bella Bathurst, Jenny Colgan, Simon Garfield, W. F. Deedes, Tony Hawks, Victoria Glendinning, Sam Millet e Colm Toibin per catapultarli a Calcutta: dal confort e dalla modernità delle loro occidentalissime città, Londra e Edimburgo, a un luogo dove il passato parla ancora e il futuro chiama più forte che mai. Da quell'esperienza sono nati i racconti compresi in questa antologia che, mescolando la fiction al reportage di viaggio, riflettono modi diversi di vedere una metropoli che è nel mondo simbolo di povertà e miseria e che i suoi abitanti chiamano la Città della Gioia.

L'amore secondo Irvine Welsh: una storia ambienta in un'anonima cittadina di una popolosa regione a nord di Edimburgo e raccontarla in prima persona dai due protagonisti, Jason King e Jenni Cahill da Cowdenbeath, Fife centrale, Scozia. Lui, ventisei anni e poco più di un metro e mezzo d'altezza, ha archiviato le giovanili speranze di diventare un fantino professionista e si barcamena in un presente non troppo radioso da sottoccupato cronico e stella locale del subbuteo. Tra una partita e l'altra del «meraviglioso gioco da tavolo» e lavoretti più o meno leciti, Jason inganna la monotonia delle giornate di provincia ascoltando Cat Stevens, scolandosi quantità esagerate di Guinness e tampinando quasi ogni ragazza gli capiti a tiro. Da un po', però, a dare materia alle sue fantasie sono le morbide forme della dolce Jenni Cahill. Cavallerizza di scarso talento, con una passione per Marilyn Manson e vaghe aspirazioni suicide, lei non sembra tuttavia troppo entusiasta di ricambiare le attenzioni di quel «nanerottolo schifoso» di Jason. Ma si sa, le apparenze possono ingannare e al cuor non sempre si comanda, e saranno prima il caso e poi un tragico incidente a far scoprire ai due ragazzi di poter condividere qualcosa: il sogno di una nuova vita, lontana dal grigiore di ogni Cowdenbeath del mondo.

Wie wir aussehen, wer wir sind Lucy Brennan ist die härteste Fitnesstrainerin von Miami Beach – und ein Star: Seit sie dabei gefilmt wurde, wie sie per Frontkick einen Amokläufer zur Strecke brachte, kann sie sich vor Aufträgen kaum noch retten. Auch die Planungen für ihre eigene Reality-TV -Show machen Fortschritte. Doch dann meldet sich die unsichere, stark übergewichtige Künstlerin Lena Sorenson zum Personal Training bei ihr an; eine Frau, die all das verkörpert, was Lucy hasst. Langsam, aber unaufhaltsam gerät ihr erbitterter Kampf gegen die Fettleibigkeit außer Kontrolle …

Britský deník Daily Telegraph pozval sedm rozdílných anglických autorů na jeden víkend do Súdánu, „aby se osobně angažovali ve válce, která byla do té doby mimo jejich dosah...“ Každý z autorů je mistrem svého žánru – a každý z nich musel vykročit ze svého odlišného, nicméně podobně výlučného světa. Irvine Welsh, znalec drogové subkultury Edinburghu; Alex Garland, nonkonformní autor dobrodružných románů; Victoria Glendinningová, autorka zachycující životy z jiných století; Andrew O’Hagan, pronikavý kronikář současných životů; Bill Deedes, který je již 70 let novinářem, psal poprvé v životě beletrii; a Tony Hawks se pokoušel složit se súdánskými domorodci píseň. Pouze Giles Foden se skupinou necestoval. Jeho příspěvek, o který jsme požádali až později, jelikož jeho zkušenosti z Afriky dodaly knize další rozměr, byl napsán před hrozivými událostmi 11. září.