Glue: From the bestselling author of Trainspotting and Crime

(Paperback)

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Description

Glue is the story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh schemes, and about the loyalties, the experiences - and the secrets - that hold them together into their thirties. Four boys becoming men: Juice Terry, the work-shy fanny-merchant, with corkscrew curls and sticky fingers; Billy the boxer: driven, controlled, playing to his strengths; Carl, the Milky Bar Kid, drifting along to his own soundtrack; and the doomed Gally - who has one less skin than everyone and seems to find catastrophe at every corner. As we follow their lives from the seventies into the new century - from punk to techno, from speed to Es - we can see each of them trying to struggle out from under the weight of the conditioning of class and culture, peer pressure and their parents' hopes that maybe their sons will do better than they did. What binds the four of them is the friendship formed by the scheme, their school, and their ambition to escape from both; their loyalty fused in street morality: back up your mates, don't hit women and, most importantly, never grass - on anyone.

Reviews

Wild, brave and funny * Sunday Times *
Welsh is brilliant at what he does... This is his most readable and memorable novel since Trainspotting * Independent on Sunday *
His most ambitious, but also his most complete and engaging work to date... arguably, his best book * Times Literary Supplement *
Full of incident, mad, crackling dialogue, attractively appalling characters and some of the funniest and rudest sex scenes I have read since Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint * Sunday Times *
With razor-sharp dialogue, a powerful odour of ordinary desperation and an incisive understanding of what makes these men's friendship tick, Welsh is at the top of his game * The Face *

Author Bio

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