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Interviews

‘I don’t fear death’: 21 Questions with Irvine Welsh￼

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Where to start with Irvine Welsh

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Reading lists

The best festive scenes in literature

With the dawn of a new millennium about to break, the Nineties was a strange, floating decade of positivity, hope and something called the World Wide Web. 

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Books that defined the 1990s

Irvine Welsh: 'I knew one of these guys had to die'

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Features

Irvine Welsh: I knew one of these guys had to die

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Podcasts

Counterculture: The Outsider

The Penguin Podcast: Irvine Welsh

The Vintage Podcast: Irvine Welsh Special

The Long Knives

The highly-anticipated second instalment in the CRIME trilogy, now a hit TV Series 
 
In Edinburgh, Detective Inspector Ray Lennox is investigating a brutal crime... 
 
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. 
 
As Lennox unravels the truth, and the list of shocking attacks grows, he must put his personal feelings aside. But one question refuses to go away: who are the real victims here? 
 
'Sharp, fearless, passionate and brilliant' Independent 
 
'An ingeniously plotted and propulsive thriller' Literary Review

An ingeniously plotted and propulsive thriller... bristling with risky satire and moral disgust.

If you like your crime dramas Scottish and sweary, this one's for you.

Evening Standard, *Books to Look Out For 2022*

A triumph... A great, redemptive book... It leaves you wanting more, much more

Powerful, passionate writing... Welsh gets it just right

Powerful... A bracing and engaging read

Sharp, fearless, passionate, and brilliant.

Intelligent, propulsive, passionate

Irvine Welsh was born and raised in Edinburgh. His first novel, Trainspotting, has sold over one million copies in the UK and was adapted into an era-defining film. He has written thirteen further novels, including Crime and the number one bestseller Dead Men's Trousers, four books of shorter fiction and numerous plays and screenplays. Irvine Welsh currently lives between London, Edinburgh and Miami.

Dead Men's Trousers

**A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
Mark Renton from Trainspotting is back – and he’s 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? 
 
‘Welsh is on compulsively readable, searingly funny form’ The Times 
 
‘No one captures the competing affections and resentments that underpin lifelong friendships like Welsh’ Esquire

Fast and furious, scabrously funny and weirdly moving, this is the final chapter in the Trainspotting story.

Welsh is on compulsively readable, searingly funny form in what has been billed as the final Trainspotting novel… What I really like about Welsh’s storytelling is that he makes these amoral misadventures so propulsive, so joyfully awful, that you have to go with the flow… this roués’ romp is about as much fun as you can have between two book covers.

Dead Men’s Trousers is Welsh at his scabrous, foul-mouthed best as the Trainspotting crew of 
Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy and Spud are reunited in a high-velocity tale of drug dealing, 
prostitution and the Hollywood art scene – with the odd compulsory organ donation casually 
tossed in with sadistic aplomb.

Some things never change. Violence lurks beneath the surface. Football still resonates. And, best of all, the Scots dialect retains its colloquial zing. Welsh fans are in for another witty, scabrous treat.

Irresistible... No one captures the competing affections and resentments that underpin lifelong friendships like Welsh, and the original lads – Sick Boy and Spud in particular – still bring out the best in him... keeping you gripped and choking on bursts of shocked laughter.

A vignette-like study of modern masculinity… This final book in Welsh’s self-described “Harry Potter franchise” is as much character study as social commentary, and a sympathetic observation about how growing older doesn’t necessarily mean growing wiser.

Blackly funny... It’s ultimately a mark of Welsh’s magic in having created such memorable characters.

Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy and Spud are back in this wildly farcical story of revenge, sentimentality and psychedelic drugs... a whooping last hurrah (possibly) for the Trainspotting gang... very funny.

Crackling with energy and verve, it’s all brilliant fun... But the onset of middle age, and a shocking death add poignancy to [Dead Men’s Trousers].

Fast and furious, scabrously funny and weirdly moving, this is a spectacular return of the crew from Trainspotting.

Vintage Minis

Rave

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 spot of disc jockeying and closes in, gradually, on some kind of redemption… 
 
Selected from Irvine Welsh's novel Ecstasy. 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Home by Salman Rushdie 
Dreams by Sigmund Freud 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Work by Joseph Heller

Vintage Minis bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between

The Blade Artist

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.

The most terrifying character in Trainspotting returns – with his own novel

Back to his violent best… Dark, gruesome and captivating.

It’s a thriller in the mode of Tarantino making war films or westerns; hiding grand themes within genre.

Intense, electrifying… Welsh has delivered a tremendously entertaining book – a whodunit, a thriller, and a probing character study – that’s obsessed with conflict, both physical and mental… A surprisingly poignant, evocative read – highly recommended.

In a year when filming begins on Danny Boyle’s sequel of sorts to Trainspotting, it seems perfect timing to revisit its most visceral force.

[Begbie’s] intelligence and instinct make him compelling, and Welsh keep the plot roaring along… This is a dark, guilty pleasure and written with – it seems to me – the cinema screen in mind.

Welsh's ear for dialect is superb, and the opportunity to observe Edinburgh's dark underbelly from the perspective of someone used to a gentler lifestyle far away leads to shrewd cultural insights.

While Welsh’s sense of humour is never far from the surface of his writings…this is very much a work of dark crime fiction rather than comedy or social satire with a touch of James Ellroy.

The Blade Artist is lean...clever and propulsive. The shorter length concentrates Welsh’s energy… There is a reason people still read him.

No one writes about violence and class with such wit and insight as Welsh. He’s a social satirist of the highest order and, with its themes of vengeance and redemption, this is a deceptively comic book with a very dark heart.

Welsh may be a reformed character but he's still got it, and The Blade Artist is fab.

This Ultra-violent but curiously redemptive new novel is both elegant and electrifying.

An ultra-violent odyssey through the darkest recesses of urban life.

Unique mix of raw Scots dialect, ultra-violence and sickening social comedy.

Offers biting social commentary and razor-sharp humour.

Welsh with his trademark wit and observation unpeels a layer of his character to offer an unsettling glimpse into Begbie’s psyche.

The dialogue is zippy, the pace rarely flags and Welsh is excellent on the milieu of the ageing career hard-man.

Maintains his forensic command of the Edinburgh demotic.

Welsh shows his hardman character in a new light.

Disturbing but also intensely gripping… If you’re a fan of intense character studies, you’ll kick yourself –violently- if you miss it.

Especially intriguing… it’s Welsh’s prose that gives the story its edge… The language really gets into your head, and you start thinking in Scots, and it’s one of the most immersive literary devices I’ve ever encountered

T2 Trainspotting

Now a major film directed by Danny Boyle reuniting the cast of Trainspotting 
 
Years on from Trainspotting Sick Boy is back in Edinburgh after a long spell in London. Having failed spectacularly as a hustler, pimp, husband, father and businessman, Sick Boy taps into an opportunity which to him represents one last throw of the dice. However, to realise his ambitions within the Adult industries, Sick Boy must team up with old pal and fellow exile Mark Renton. Still scheming, still scamming, Sick Boy and Renton soon find out that they have unresolved issues to address concerning the unhinged Begbie, the troubled, drug-addled Spud, but, most of all, with each other. 
 
T2 Trainspotting was previously published as Porno.

Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and Spud are back – now a major film directed by Danny Boyle reuniting the cast of Trainspotting

A brilliant satirical study of the ugly dynamic which draws together predators and prey

Not for the fainthearted... Highly entertaining

A worthy sequel... A touching love song to the possibilities and limits of friendship. Charming, funny and sly, Porno is a good poke at all kinds of pretence and moral tidiness

Captures and celebrates the hangover of youth

A Decent Ride

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…

How important is a decent ride? 
 
Shortlisted for the 2015 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction

Without question, our most distinguished living exponent of the so- called “excremental vision of life” — a line that goes back (to pick a few names) via James Joyce, Swift, and Ben Jonson, to Chaucer, writers who have explored what meanings of human existence are to be found in the toilet bowl.

Irvine Welsh, I think it’s safe to say, is not a writer who’s mellowing with age... Welsh’s [language is an] astonishingly supple invention: one that can combine scabrousness and lyricism, comedy and ruefulness in the same paragraph... [if] you fancy an authentic and often thrilling blast of full-strength Irvine Welsh, then you’re in for a treat.

It's a stern reader who wouldn't fall for his filthy charm.

Whether your interest is piqued by the ridiculously expensive bottles of whiskey and the extraordinary lengths an American will go to own them or your heart strings are pulled by Wee Jonty’s anguished love story, there’s a multitude of ideas and human emotions that Welsh brings out among the laughter.

When the humour works, we can enjoy the novel for what Welsh clearly intended it to be — a luridly exuberant caper, a series of glossy and gritty snapshots. It won’t make converts out of detractors, but then one senses that a novelist like him wouldn’t want it any other way.

Welsh’s ingenuity, flair, sharp observation, and satirical talent make this not just a decent ride for the reader but an exhilarating one.

It’s filthy and hilarious in equal measure.

An unashamedly indecent read. Welsh fans will love it.

Few can match Welsh's verve for spinning a yarn, for putting you inside the minds of characters that are by turn grotesque, joyful, hilarious and – crucially – utterly compelling.

A Decent Ride, while his most comedic novel, is also his darkest.

More furious, filthy brilliance from Welsh.

Packed with filthy charm and characters old and new, it was a comic triumph with plenty of depth through its exploitation of celebrity culture and the treatment of sex workers.

Welsh carries realism to its limits and sometimes beyond… [He] Creates a world more real than a great many worlds we enter in today’s fiction.

Irvine Welsh

A special edition of the cult classic

A beautiful hardback edition of the hilarious, dark, ingenious novel that changed the face of British fiction. 
 
Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. 
Choose life. 
 
'The best book ever written by man or woman... Deserves to sell more copies than the Bible' Rebel Inc 
 
'Welsh writes with a skill, wit and compassion that amounts to genius' Sunday Times 
 
VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful

Irvine Welsh and Miranda Sawyer in conversation at Spiritland