Near the end of Skagboys, there is a scene where the central character, Mark Renton, and four fellow junkies are trying, desperately and stupidly, to break into an Edinburgh facility where they think ...

Perhaps the descent into hell is just not as interesting as actually living in hell itself. That seems to be the central failing of Irvine Welsh's prequel to his enormously popular book "Trainspotting ...

A long long time ago, back in the early 1990s, there were only three novels about Edinburgh. There was Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (which wasn't actually set in ...

Few novels have been as deeply connected to the time and place of their birth as 1993’s Trainspotting. Written in a broad Scottish dialect, the book’s jagged episodes followed a group of young working ...

“Trainspotting” is back, and its menacing allure is clearer than ever. Scottish author Irvine Welsh has revisited the characters featured in his controversial 1993 debut, “Trainspotting.” “Skagboys” ...

IRVINE WELSH’s latest book, Skagboys, sees the return of Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and Spud: four characters whose manifold misadventures and tragedies, portrayed in the seminal Trainspotting, unveiled ...

It's been almost 20 years since Irvine Welsh first introduced Rent, Spud and Sick Boy — a group of gritty characters struggling to survive a... 'Skagboys': Heroin Highs In 'Trainspotting' Prequel The ...

Critical opinion is divided on whether it’s necessarily bad for a writer to go on doing the same thing over and over again. How you assess the writer’s motives depends how highly you esteem the thing, ...

Skagboys lacks the political urgency of its predecessor, and its success lies simply in its absorbing, energetic writing. Welsh's descriptive style is masterful – crude, violent and poetic by turns – ...

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