Very seldom did anyone dare to so fervently recommend a novel. "It deserves to sell more copies than the Bible," said Rebel Inc., an insolent Scottish literary magazine. Immediately held by the strictest critics but read also by those who rarely approach books, "Trainspotting" became one of the literary and also extraliterary events of the last decade. It was quickly adapted to the theater and then brought to the screen by Danny Boyle, one of the young prodigies of English cinema. Its protagonists are a group of desperately realistic young people, nor do they think about the future: they know that nothing or almost nothing will change, inhabitants of the other Edinburgh, which does not appear in the famous festivals, European capital of AIDS and paradise of unemployment, misery and prostitution, embarked on a vital event whose fuel is the drug, "the elixir that gives them life, and takes it away." Welsh writes in the rough, colorful, vigorous language of the streets. And between peak and peak, between drunkenness and football, sex and rock and roll, black picaresque, the epic astrosa of those born on the hard side of life, those who have no choice but to escape, or dampen the pain to exist with the first thing that falls into their hands. "A novel that is the literary equivalent of a hydrogen bomb" (Martin Crawford, The Big Spoon). "The fundamental novel of a fundamental writer. Irvine Welsh, a master of popular language, with a boxer style without gloves, attacks with ferocity the body of our society. Sadly, but also of a wicked wit, he leads us on a hellish tour of the psychic ghettos where drug addicts, drunks, desperados and losers take refuge ... A terrible but at the same time sweeping novel "(Jeff Torrington). "The Scottish Celine of the Nineties" (The Guardian)