Glue

Glue is the story of four boys growing up in Edinburgh’s public housing developments, and about the loyalties, the experiences – and the secrets – that keep them bonded into their thirties.

Four boys become men: Juice Terry, the work-shy pimp 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 Gally, the doomed one, whose skin is thinner than everyone else’s and who seems to find catastrophe at every corner.

As we follow their lives from the seventies into the new century – from punk to techno, from speed to Es – we see them trying to struggle out of the conditioning of class and culture, peer pressure, and their parents’ hopes. What binds them together is the friendship formed by the scheme, their school, and their ambition to escape from both.

Glue has all Irvine Welsh’s usual pace and vigour, crackling dialogue, scabrous set-pieces and black, black humour, 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.

Author: Irvine Welsh

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Released Date: 2001

ISBN: 9780224061261