Filth

With the festive season almost upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson
is winding down at work and gearing up socially - kicking off Christmas with
a week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam. There are irritating flies in the
ointment, though, including a missing wife, a nagging cocaine habit,
a dramatic deterioration in his genital health, a string of increasingly
demanding extra-marital affairs. The last thing he needs is a messy murder
to solve. Still it will mean plenty of overtime, a chance to stitch up some
colleagues and finally clinch the promotion he craves. But as Bruce spirals
through the lower reaches of degradation and evil, he encounters opposition -
in the form of truth and ethical conscience - from the most unexpected quarter
of all: his anus. In Bruce Robertson, Welsh has created one of the most
corrupt, misanthropic characters in contemporary fiction and has written
a dark, disturbing and very funny novel about sleaze, power, and the abuse
of everything. At last, a novel that lives up to its name.


Glue

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 else 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. Despite its scale and ambition, Glue has all Irvine Welsh's usual
pace and vigour, crackling dialogue, scabrous set-pieces and black, black
humour, but it is also a grown-up book about growing up - about the way we
live our lives, and what happens to us when things become unstuck.

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