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Glue

Irvine Welsh

704 pages

A chaotic, darkly hilarious, and surprisingly tender plunge into the decades-long loyalty of four working-class Scottish boys.

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What it feels like

Reading this novel feels like being dragged by the collar through decades of Edinburgh's underground history, moving at a breakneck pace from the punk rock seventies into the techno-fueled nineties. The atmosphere is thick with cigarette smoke, spilled pints, and the frenetic energy of youth, gradually giving way to the sobering, melancholic hangover of adulthood. Written in a thick, rhythmic Scottish dialect that demands you hear every profane, crackling line of dialogue out loud, the prose is as aggressive as it is deeply empathetic. It is a gritty, scabrous, and darkly hilarious experience that captures the suffocating weight of class and the fierce, sometimes toxic loyalty of male friendship. This is for readers who want their coming-of-age stories stripped of sentimentality, soaked in realism, and pulsing with an undeniable, beating heart.

Mood
  • chaotic
  • nostalgic
  • grimy
  • frenetic
Tone
  • darkly comic
  • scabrous
  • unsentimental
  • kinetic
Pace
propulsive
Themes
bonds of male friendship · working-class masculinity · shifting cultural eras · weight of class conditioning · loyalty and betrayal
The writing
Written in a phonetic Scottish dialect, the prose is profane, rhythmic, and relentlessly energetic.
The arc
Moves from the invincible, chaotic energy of youth through the sobering, often tragic realities of adulthood as lifelong bonds are tested by time.
Who it's for
Readers who crave gritty, unapologetic explorations of working-class life, pitch-black humor, and the messy complexities of lifelong friendships.
Content notes
  • drug use and addiction
  • graphic violence
  • sexual content
  • profanity and slurs
  • poverty and trauma

About the book

Keynote/Publisher's Comments: Despite its scale and ambition, 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.Glue is the story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh schemes, and about the loyalties, the experiences - and the secrets - that hold them together into their thirties. Four boys becoming men: Juice Terry, the work-shy fanny-merchant, 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 the doomed Gally - who has one less skin than everyone and 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 can see each of them trying to struggle out from under the weight of the conditioning of class and culture, peer pressure and their parents' hopes that maybe their sons will do better than they did. What binds the four of them is the friendship formed by the scheme, their school, and their ambition to escape from both; their loyalty fused in street morality: back up your mates, don't hit women and, most importantly, never grass - on anyone.

Description from Open Library.

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