Dead Men's Trousers
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4.5 • 165 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
**A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**
Mark Renton from Trainspotting is back – and he’s finally a success
An international jet-setter, he now makes significant money managing DJs, but the constant travel, airport lounges, soulless hotel rooms and broken relationships have left him dissatisfied with his life. He’s then rocked by a chance encounter with Frank Begbie, from whom he’d been hiding for years after a terrible betrayal and the resulting debt. But the psychotic Begbie appears to have reinvented himself as a celebrated artist and – much to Mark’s astonishment – doesn’t seem interested in revenge.
Sick Boy and Spud, who have agendas of their own, are intrigued to learn that their old friends are back in town, but when they enter the bleak world of organ-harvesting, things start to go so badly wrong. Lurching from crisis to crisis, the four men circle each other, driven by their personal histories and addictions, confused, angry – so desperate that even Hibs winning the Scottish Cup doesn’t really help. One of these four will not survive to the end of this book.
Which one of them is wearing Dead Men’s Trousers?
‘Welsh is on compulsively readable, searingly funny form’ The Times
‘No one captures the competing affections and resentments that underpin lifelong friendships like Welsh’ Esquire
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
More than 25 years after they first appeared in Trainspotting, all four of Welsh's hard-living Scottish friends reunite in Edinburgh, roped into an appropriately bizarre and macabre organ harvesting caper. Told from the perspectives of the four protagonists, the novel rolls slowly in the first half, updating their individual biographies separately readers new to Welsh's world need not be apprehensive and setting up the brisker, and inevitably bollixed, execution of the theft plot. Two of these former reprobate mates have successfully escaped their pasts. Renton travels the globe as a music manager. Begbie, who runs into Renton on a plane in the opening chapter, is a successful artist living in California. Spud, whose narrative is most steeped in a slangy Scottish dialect, still lives on the edge and instigates the kidney-napping caper. Sick Boy, like Spud, is still in Edinburgh, and crashing with his sister, Carlotta, who screamingly blames him for the degeneration of her son, Ross, and husband, Euan, apparently on a debauched trip to Thailand. When the four finally get together, much comic mileage is wrung in rehashing old grievances. Not surprisingly, the crime unfolds like a Keystone Kops version of Ocean's 11, but with an irrevocable final result. Welsh's entire oeuvre crackles with idiomatic energy and brio, and this rollicking novel is no different.
Customer Reviews
Brilliant.
Loved it.
A classic Renton, Franko, Spud page-Turner.
Ration it - you’ll be sad you read it too quickly!!
Another corker
Gobbled up in 3 days.
Absolute master of the old skool
The ultimate characters and storylines
Irvine you are pure class ma man feel like am ready for the summer know what a book of joy and real life hilarity and optimism , yet again smashed it “glory glory to the Hibees”