Product Description: The most terrifying character in Trainspotting returns -- with his own novel. 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...read more

The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins taps into two great obsessions of our time, personal training regimes and real estate -- – how we look and where we live -- and tells a story so subversive and dark it blacks out the Florida sun.      When Lucy Brennan, a Miami Beach personal-fitness trainer, disarms an apparently crazed gunman chasing two frightened homeless men along a deserted causeway at night, the police and the breaking-news cameras are not far behind. Within hours, Lucy becomes a hero. Her celebrity is short-lived, though: the 'crazed gunman', Sean McCandless, turns out to be a victim of child sexual abuse and the two men are serial paedophiles.      The solitary eye-witness, the depressed and overweight Lena Sørensen, thrilled by Lucy’'s heroism and decisiveness, becomes obsessed with the trainer and enrols as a client at her Bodysculpt gym. It quickly becomes clear that Lena is more interested in Lucy's body than her own. Then, when one of the paedophiles she allowed to escape carries out a heinous sex attack, Lucy's transition from hero to villain is complete. When Lucy imprisons Lena in her mother's deserted real-estate blocks downtown, and can't stop thinking about the sex lives of Siamese twins, the real problems start.     In the aggressive, drill-sergeant trainer, Lucy Brennan, and the needy, manipulative Lena Sørensen, Irvine Welsh has created two of his most memorable female protagonists, and one of the most bizarre, sado-masochistic folie à deux in contemporary fiction. The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins taps into two great obsessions of our time, personal training regimes and real estate -- how we look and where we live -- and tells a story so subversive and dark it blacks out the Florida sun.

Both a prequel to the world-renowned Trainspotting, and an alternative version of it, Skagboys is Irvine Welsh's greatest work. Mark Renton seems to have it all: he's the first in his family to go to university, he's young, has a pretty girlfriend and a great social life. But 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 badly handicapped younger brother dies the family bonds start to weaken, his life flips out of control, and he succumbs to the defeatism and the heroin which has taken hold in Edinburgh's grimmer areas.  His friends face similar challenges. Spud Murphy is paid off from his job and faces long-term unemployment, while Tommy Lawrence feels that only love can save him from being sucked into a life of petty crime and violence -- exemplified respectively by the thieving Matty Connell and psychotic Franco Begbie. And then there is Sick Boy, the supreme manipulator of the opposite sex, scamming and hustling his way through life.  Skagboys charts their journey from likely lads to young men addicted to the heroin which has flooded their disintegrating community. This is the 1980s: not the sanitized version, of upbeat pop music, mullets, shoulder-pads and MTV, but a time of drugs, poverty, AIDS, violence, political strife and hatred -- 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.

Three stories explore different aspects of love, with a bedridden romance writer exacting revenge on her husband, a flawed beauty trying to get back at the man who marketed the drug that crippled her from birth, and the changing relationship of a miserable yuppie couple

Troubled Environmental Health Officer Danny Skinner is engaged on a quest to uncover what he refers to as 'the bedroom secrets of the master chefs'. This book presents a gothic parable about the great obsessions: food, sex and minor celebrity, and an examination of identity, male rivalry and the need to belong in the world.

Five short pieces by the author of Trainspotting include the tales 'Rattlesnakes,' in which three young Americans lost in the desert are accosted by two armed Mexicans; 'The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park,' in which a Korean chef and Chicago socialite bond over a missing dog; and the title story, in which an ex-pat English bar owner struggles to balance conflicting priorities. Original.

From running with the infamous Calton Tongs to running Calton Athletic, David Bryce's life story is a remarkable account of crime, violence, alcoholism and drug addiction in Glasgow's gangland. It took a 5-year battle before he got clean of his heroin addiction in 1982. This book is an inspirational tale of survival and success against the odds.

Features three interlinking stories about Edinburgh. This book presents three writers' radically different takes on Edinburgh life - a social mix that ranges from Welsh's Leith junkies to McCall Smith's New Town haute bourgeoisie.

A collection of tales that lay bare the hearts of darkness of the junkies, wide-boys and psychos who ride in the down escalator of opportunity in the nation's capital.

Follows the lives of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh projects, bound together by loyalty and friendship as they struggle with class conditioning, peer pressure, and their parents' hopes for their future.

Ten years after the events detailed in Trainspotting, Simon Williamson, a.k.a. Sick Boy, is back in Edinburgh to direct and produce a porn film along with university student Nikki Fuller-Smith and old friend Mark Renton. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

The author of the best-selling Trainspotting introduces a drug-addled, gastrointestinally afflicted, compulsively philandering Edinburgh detective who sees in a racially motivated murder case the chance to win a promotion. Original. 50,000 first printing. Tour.