Trainspotting

It's blisteringly funny. It's worth making the effort with Trainspotting not merely because relatively few writers have rummaged through this particular enclave of British youth culture, but because even fewer have dug there so deeply.
The New York Times Book Review

The best book ever written... deserves to sell more copies than the Bible.
Rebel, Inc.

A group of young and desperately realistic people know that nothing or almost nothing is going to change. They live in the other Edinburgh, the European capital of AIDS and a paradise of unemployment, misery and prostitution. They are on board a whirlwind ride whose fuel is drugs, ''the elixir that gives them life, and takes it away''. Welsh writes with the sharp, colourful and vigorous language of the street. This is an ill-fated epic about those who have no way out except for escape, those who soften the blow of being alive with the first thing that falls into their hands.