Trainspotting

Irvine Welsh 1993

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
addiction poverty literary fiction trauma loss

Our Take

Welsh drops you into Edinburgh's heroin culture with phonetic Scots dialogue and no moral guidance. Renton's choose life monologue is irony at its darkest. The death of Baby Dawn is the scene that makes everything else unforgivable, and unforgettable. A novel about poverty that refuses to make poverty poetic.

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