An epic novel about the bonds of friendship from the author of Trainspotting.

The story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh projects, Glue is about the loyalties, the experiences, and the secrets that hold friends together through three decades. The boys become 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, exceedingly thin-skinned and vulnerable to catastrophe at every turn. We follow their lives from the seventies into the new century – from punk to techno, from speed to E. Their mutual loyalty is fused in street morality: Back up your mates, don't hit women, and, most important, never snitch – on anyone. Glue has the Irvine Welsh trademarks – crackling dialogue, scabrous set pieces, and black, black humor – 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.

"Reading this novel is something like spending 20 years in a pub, listening to boys talk about the things they talk about when the girls aren't around (though one gets plenty of play-by-play of what happens when the girls are around as well, including not a few sex scenes...Welsh's novel describes a highly scripted, slangy, violent, sexy, drunken series of events that, over time, constitutes a fully realized vision of the world. (And, like a night dancing on E. to acid house, it's often a damn good time.) You can't ask for much more than that." Amy Benfer, Salon.com (read entire Salon.com review here)

"Welsh continues to demonstrate a keen ear for the Scottish dialect and a black humor appropriate to the bleak settings. Along with James Kelman, Welsh is proof that Scotland has not only its own Parliament but its own literature as well." Library Journal

"Imbued with the quality of oral epic by the argot of the Edinburgh pubs and projects, this novel follows the growth to middle-aged dissolution of four boyhood friends whose only limitless prospect is for self-destruction." The New York Times Book Review, Summer Reading 2001 selection

"Stocked with his usual quirky, sympathetic characters, this rollicking new tale sparkles with the writer's trademark satiric wit. Its heft and narrative breadth should convince any remaining skeptics that Welsh – now effectively the grand old man of in-your-face Scottish fiction – is a writer to be taken seriously." Publishers Weekly starred review

"Don't worry: It's not all dialect. And even at its thickest, the effort is worth it for this excess-ridden, demon-plagued, culture-transcending novel....Infused with comedy of the darkest sorts, a scathing attack on conventionality and the norms of society, and an insightful exploration of friendship, Glue took me by surprise. I had bogged down in the first 100 pages, as, perhaps, will others new to Welsh, but reading beyond the somewhat slow beginning provides a refreshing immersion into the author's kinetic language and brilliant characterization." Christopher Lewis, The Oregonian

The new novel by the author of the cult bestseller "Trainspotting" delivers the story of four boys growing up in Edinburgh, and about the loyalties, the experiences--and the secrets--that hold them together into their 30s.

Irvine Welsh was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he grew up in a "scheme" or housing project outside the city. He left school at the age of sixteen, took a series of dead-end jobs, and eventually received a Master of Business Studies degree.

While traveling across the United States in a Greyhound Bus, he began to jot down notes on a pad. That was the beginning of his writing career. His first novel, Trainspotting, published in Britain in 1993, was shortlisted for the distinguished Booker Prize, and achieved stunning popularity and critical attention.

W. W. Norton introduced Irvine Welsh to American readers in May, 1995, with The Acid House, his second book, a collection of short stories and a novella set in the underworld of British drifters, dopers, thieves, killers, maniacs, sex fiends and losers. The book was praised by the press as "mindbendingly original" (The New York Times Book Review).

Marabou Stork Nightmares (Welsh's third book) followed from Norton in January, 1996. This novel, which lured readers into the mind of a comatose soccer thug and gang rapist, was called "a harrowing, hard-core and brilliant realistic novel of lower-class British society" by Stephen Stark in The Washington Post.

Norton published Trainspotting in July, 1996. This book (whose title uses the British hobby of noting down numbers on train locomotives as a metaphor for the pointless lives of Britain's disenfranchised young working class) catapulted Welsh to instant fame on this side of the Atlantic. Trainspotting was made into a box office smash the same year and established Welsh as "the voice of a generation" (Jenifer Berman, Bomb) and "the hottest and probably the best of a new, distinct, and talented generation of writers currently emerging in Britain" (James Lasdun, The Village Voice).

Ecstasy, three novellas comprising Welsh's fourth book, was published by Norton in August 1996 and effectively created its own genre: the chemical romance.

Filth, Irvine Welsh's fifth book and Village Voice Literary Supplement's "25 Favorite Books of 1998," was his last book published before Glue.

Welsh lives in London.