Welsh Irvine download all books 7 books

Jim Francis has finally found the perfect life — and is now unrecognisable, even to himself. A successful painter and sculptor, he lives quietly with his wife, Melanie, and their two young daughters, in an affluent beach town in California. Some say he’s a fake and a con man, while others see him as a genuine visionary.

But Francis has a very dark past, with another identity and a very different set of values. When he crosses the Atlantic to his native Scotland, for the funeral of a murdered son he barely knew, his old Edinburgh community expects him to take bloody revenge. But as he confronts his previous life, all those friends and enemies — and, most alarmingly, his former self — Francis seems to have other ideas.

When Melanie discovers something gruesome in California, which indicates that her husband’s violent past might also be his psychotic present, things start to go very bad, very quickly.

The Blade ArtistTrainspotting

When Lucy Brennan, a Miami Beach personal-fitness trainer, disarms a gunman chasing two frightened homeless men, the police and the breaking-news cameras are not far behind and, within hours, Lucy is a media hero. The solitary eye-witness is the depressed and overweight Lena Sorensen, who becomes obsessed with Lucy and signs up as her client — though she seems more interested in the trainer's body than her own. When the two women find themselves more closely aligned, and can't stop thinking about the sex lives of Siamese twins, the real problems start…

In the aggressive, foul-mouthed trainer, Lucy Brennan, and the needy, manipulative Lena Sorensen, Irvine Welsh has created two of his most memorable female protagonists, and one of the most bizarre, sado-masochistic in contemporary fiction. Featuring murder, depravity and revenge — and amounts of food and sex — taps into two great obsessions of our time — how we look and where we live — and tells a story so subversive and dark it blacks out the Florida sun.

Mark Renton has it all: he's good-looking, young, with a pretty girlfriend and a place at university. But there's no room for him in the 1980s. Thatcher's government is destroying working-class communities across Britain, and the post-war certainties of full employment, educational opportunity and a welfare state are gone. When his family starts to fracture, Mark's life swings out of control and 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 and violence — the worlds of the thieving Matty Connell and psychotic Franco Begbie. Only Sick Boy, the supreme manipulator of the opposite sex, seems to ride the current, scamming and hustling his way through it all.

Skagboys Trainspotting

Shortlisted for the 2015 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.

A rampaging force of nature is wreaking havoc on the streets of Edinburgh, but has top shagger, drug-dealer, gonzo-porn-star and taxi-driver, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson, finally met his match in Hurricane ‘Bawbag’?

Can Terry discover the fate of the missing beauty, Jinty Magdalen, and keep her lover, the man-child Wee Jonty, out of prison?

Will he find out the real motives of unscrupulous American businessman and reality-TV star, Ronald Checker?

And, crucially, will Terry be able to negotiate life after a terrible event robs him of his sexual virility, and can a new fascination for the game of golf help him to live without… A DECENT RIDE?

A Decent Ride

In his funniest, filthiest book yet, Irvine Welsh celebrates an un-reconstructed misogynist hustler — a central character who is shameless but also, oddly, decent — and finds new ways of making wild comedy out of fantastically dark material, taking on some of the last taboos. So fasten your seatbelts, because this is one ride that could certainly get a little bumpy…

These five stories remind us that Welsh is a master of the shorter form, a brilliant storyteller and, unarguably, one of the funniest and filthiest writers alive.

In , when three young Americans find themselves lost in the desert, how is it that one find himself performing fallatio on another while being watched by the bare-breasted Madeline and two armed Mexicans?

Who is the mysterious Korean chef who has moved in with Chicago socialite Kendra Cross, in , and what does he have to do with the disappearance of her faithful pooch, Toto?

In the title story, can Mickey Baker, an English bar-owner on the Costa Brava, manage to keep all his balls in the air: maintaining his barmaid Teresa’s body weight at the sexual maximum while attending to the youthful Persephone, and dodging his persistent ex-wife and a pair of Spanish gangsters?

In , Raymond Wilson Butler is writing a biography of a legendary U.S. movie director. By what train of events does he end up as a piece of movie memorabilia?

And how, in , will Jason King — diminutive ex-trainee jockey and Subbuteo star of Cowdenbeath — fare in the world of middle-class female equestrians?

Bereft of both youth and ambition, Detective Inspector Ray Lennox has fled to Miami to escape the aftermath of a mental breakdown induced by stress and cocaine abuse, and a harrowing child sex murder case back in Edinburgh. But his his fiancée, Trudi, is only interested in planning their wedding, and a bitter argument between them sees Lennox cast adrift in Florida. A coke-fuelled binge brings him into contact with another victim of sexual predation, ten-year-old Tianna, and Lennox flees across the state with his terrified charge, determined to protect her at any cost. But can Lennox still trust his own instincts? And can he handle her inappropriate sexuality, while still trying to get to grips with the Edinburgh murder?