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  • Published: 5 April 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099285922
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 576
  • RRP: $24.99

Glue

From the bestselling author of Trainspotting and Crime




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.

'Welsh is brilliant at what he does... This is his most readable and memorable novel since Trainspotting' Independent on Sunday
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.

As we follow their lives from the 70s 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.

'His most ambitious, but also his most complete and engaging work to date... arguably, his best book' TLS

  • Published: 5 April 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099285922
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 576
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Irvine Welsh

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

https://www.facebook.com/irvinewelshauthor

https://twitter.com/IrvineWelsh

Also by Irvine Welsh

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Praise for Glue

His most ambitious, but also his most complete and engaging work to date... arguably, his best book

Times Literary Supplement

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

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

Welsh slams back into form with his sixth book - all brutal sentimentality and bleak, edgy humour... You have a coming-of-age story carved out with a broken bottle

Elle

Easily his best book since the one that made his name

Independent on Sunday

I've never felt so attached to characters as I did in that book and have definitely never stayed awake all night sobbing after reading a book, but I did when I read that

Hollie McNish, Good Housekeeping