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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 rated T Leggi tutto

I realize I haven't read Trainspotting, or even a great deal of Irvine Welsh's work, but let me go out on a limb here and say that this is my favorite. The characters, especially the main character, are all deliciously real. Characteristic of Welsh, in my experience, is the atmosphere of darkness and Leggi tutto

Stylistically this is Welsh's best work. Along with Glue it's the books of his that show him to be a really great writer who has much more up his sleeve than just drugs and violence (although he writes about these things so well, that it's not a bad thing when I say that). Why this book isn't one of Leggi tutto

It’s about a coma patient who calls everyone a cunt as he’s chasing a big stork through South Africa.

Turns out that Irvine Welsh is not a one-trick pony, he's a one and a half trick pony. He wowed us all with his filthy funny tales of Scottish smackheads in Trainspotting, one of the ALL time black comedies, they don't come any blacker or funnier, and then it was kind of - follow that. So this one d Leggi tutto

In many ways, this book was brilliant: the structure of flitting between his coma state, memories of his childhood, and an African hunting fantasy. Also, the way he physically structures words on the page really conveys the polyphonic stream of consciousness of a person in a coma. And the Scottish p Leggi tutto

Harsh, inventive, horrifying, and desperately sad. Lacks the glorious sprawl of Trainspotting , which directly preceded it, opting instead for what may be Welsh's most tightly-coiled plotting to date. And his greatest sense of conscience, his strongest turn as a social reformer. The ending, through a Leggi tutto

Possibly the most disturbing book I have ever read. After I finished the last page I felt like I had been run over by a truck.

I think my own books are probably mostly influenced by King and Koontz (in a non-horror way), but if ever I need to justify the dialect (in Boys of Summer) or the graphic nature (in Girl Afraid), I turn to Irvine or to Chuck. When people say 'Oh, readers will find it hard to understand what your cha Leggi tutto

This is probably one of the most horrific books I have ever read in my entire life. The list of what wasn't in this book would probably be shorter than what was in this book. TW: death, gore, animal abuse, graphic animal death, rape (child and gang), violence, torture, drugs, racism, sexism etc Marabo Leggi tutto