
Mark Renton has it all: he's good-looking young with a pretty girlfriend & a place at university. But there's no room for him in the 1980s. Thatcher's government is destroying working-class communities across Britain & the post-war certainties of full employment educational opportunity & a welfare state are gone. When his family starts to fracture Mark's life swings out of control & 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 & violence
- the worlds of the thieving Matty Connell & psychotic Franco Begbie. Only Sick Boy the supreme manipulator of the opposite sex seems to ride the current scamming & 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 & hatred
- but a lot of laughs & maybe just a little love; a decade which changed Britain for ever. The prequel to the world-renowned " Trainspotting" this is an exhilarating & moving book full of the scabrous humour salty vernacular & appalling behaviour that has made Irvine Welsh a household name."