Book description
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.
Irvine Welsh is the author of seven previous novels and four books of
shorter fiction. He currently lives in Chicago.
