Skagboys
Welsh, Irvine.
creator
text
novel
Suspense fiction.
enk
London
Jonathan Cape
2012
monographic
eng
548 p. ; 24 cm.
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. 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. This book 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 Trainspotting, this is an exhilarating and moving book, full of the scabrous humour, salty vernacular and appalling behaviour.
Irvine Welsh.
Humorous fiction
Nineteen nineties
Fiction
Heroin
Fiction
Edinburgh (Scotland)
Social conditions
20th century
Fiction
823.92
Trainspotting
Welsh, Irvine
9780224087902 (hbk.)
0224087908 (hbk.)
9780224087919 (pbk.)
UKMGB
120420
20240123095952.0
000049020609