Trainspotting

Author	William Golding
ISBN	0140283331

At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing,...

Author	Hubert Selby Jr.
ISBN	1560252480

In Coney Island, Brooklyn, Sarah Goldfarb, a lonely widow, wants nothing more than to lose weight and appear on a television game show. She becomes addicted to diet pills in her obsessive quest, while her junkie son, Harry, along with his girlfriend, Marion, and his best friend, Tyrone, have devised...

Author

Margaret Atwood

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,...

Author	J.K. Rowling
ISBN	0545010225

Harry Potter is leaving Privet Drive for the last time. But as he climbs into the sidecar of Hagrid’s motorbike and they take to the skies, he knows Lord Voldemort and the Death Eaters will not be far behind.

The protective charm that has kept him safe until now is broken. But the Dark Lord is breathing...

Author

Leo Tolstoy

Acclaimed by many as the world's greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who...

Author	Jonathan Coe
ISBN	0140294562

One of the true joys in life, in my opinion, is the right to differ. Few things can be compared to the feeling you get when you read a book (or see a movie) which everyone has been raving about and realize that it's utter crap. I really wanted that to be the case with What A Carve Up, although, having read Coe in...

Author

Iain Banks

'It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.'

Prentice McHoan has returned to the bosom of his complex but enduring...

Author	William S. Burroughs
ISBN	0142003166

Before his 1959 breakthrough, Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junky, his first novel. It is a candid eye-witness account of times and places that are now long gone, an unvarnished field report from the American post-war underground. Unafraid to portray himself in 1953 as a confirmed...

Author

Jim Carroll

The urban classic coming-of-age story about sex, drugs, and basketball.

Jim Carroll grew up to become a renowned poet and punk rocker. But in this memoir of the mid-1960's, set during his coming-of-age from 12 to 15, he was a rebellious teenager making a place and a name for himself on the unforgiving...

Author	Craig Clevenger
ISBN	1931561486

John Vincent Dolan is a talented young forger with a proclivity for mathematics and drug addiction. In the face of his impending institutionalization, he continually reinvents himself to escape the legal and mental health authorities and to save himself from a life of incarceration. But running...

Author	Alan Sillitoe
ISBN	0452269091

To Arthur Seaton, Key worker on a lathe in a Nottingham cycle factory, life is one long battle with authority. You don't need to give Arthur more than one chance to do the Government or trick the foreman.

And when the day's work is over, Arthur is off to the pubs, raring for adventure. He is a warrior...

Author	Lewis Grassic Gibbon
ISBN	0862411793

Voted "Best Scottish Book of All Time" by "the public" in 2005

Look here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/sc...

The lines are gorgeous. When you listen to this you are there in the Scottish Highlands. When? At the beginning of the 20th century. Writing can be all about creating...

Author	William McIlvanney
ISBN	0340407573

His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.

Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his...

Author	Will Christopher Baer
ISBN	1596921862

Have you ever loved someone who's mortally wounded you? Phineas Poe, disgraced cop and morphine addict, has just been released from a psych ward when he meets a beautiful woman named Jude in a hotel bar. Red dress, black hair, body like a knife. He takes her back to his room and wakes the next morning in a...

Author

James Kelman

One Sunday morning in Glasgow, shoplifting ex-con Sammy awakens in an alley, wearing another man's shoes and trying to remember his two-day drinking binge. He gets in a scrap with some soldiers and revives in a jail cell, badly beaten and, he slowly discovers, completely blind. And things get worse:...

Author

Alasdair Gray

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.



Inflated Footnotes: "Lanark - A Life in Four Books" by Alasdair Gray




(Original Review, 1981-03-10)



I don't have problem with intertextual interpretation as such. It's only that...

Author	John Hodge
ISBN	0786882212

Trainspotting, based on the novel by Irvine Welsh


Trainspotting is a phenomenal work that has achieved cult status, provocative, challenging, intriguing, creative, humorous, edgy as it is, the motion picture that has launched the career of a few excellent performers, from Ewan McGregor...

Author

Alan Warner

Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern's reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What...

Author	Paul Perry
ISBN	1560256052

Fear and Loathing creates a sharp and savvy profile of one of the most provocative voices and distinctive personalities of our time. To Hunter S. Thompson, being a Gonzo journalist means doing whatever it takes to get to the truth; everything from dropping acid with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters...

Author	Jann S. Wenner
ISBN	0316005274

Few American lives are stranger, more action-packed, or wilder than that of Hunter S. Thompson. Born a rebel in Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson spent a lifetime channeling his energy and insight into such landmark works as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - and his singular and provocative style challenged...

Author	Christopher Brookmyre
ISBN	0349114137

Jack Parlabane, the investigative journalist who is not averse to breaking the law for the sake of a good story, has finally been caught on the petard of his own self-confidence and is experiencing accommodation courtesy of Her Majesty. The fledgling Scottish parliament is in catatonic shock after...