WELSH, Irvine. Trainspotting. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015.

Octavo. Full grey leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Sewn-in satin leather bookmark. 344 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published London: Secker & Warburg, 1993.

Irvine Welsh (b. 1958) grew up in Leith, the port district of Edinburgh, left school early, worked various jobs, and used heroin himself before studying for an MBA at Heriot-Watt University. Trainspotting, written over a period of years and published in 1993 by Secker & Warburg — unusually, as a paperback original, because no publisher would commit to a hardback edition — arrived in British fiction like something that had broken in through a back window. The Sunday Times called it "the voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser and grown eloquent."

The novel is set in Edinburgh in the mid-1980s and follows a loose group of friends connected by heroin addiction, mutual loyalty, and the specific texture of life in a Scottish housing scheme in the era of Thatcher and mass unemployment. It has no single protagonist and no conventional plot: it proceeds through a series of linked episodes, each narrated in the voice of one of its characters — Mark Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, Begbie, Tommy — in a dense, phonetically rendered Scots dialect that was, at the time of publication, unlike anything that had appeared in published British fiction. The decision to write in the vernacular was not decorative: it was an assertion that these lives and these voices deserved to occupy the same space as the standard English of literary culture, and it was the quality that initially made publishers reluctant and eventually made the novel famous.

Trainspotting was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993, then considered too offensive for the shortlist by the judges — a decision that generated more publicity than a shortlisting would have. The 1996 film adaptation directed by Danny Boyle, starring Ewan McGregor as Renton and Robert Carlyle as the terrifying Begbie, was a cultural phenomenon: the British Film Institute ranked it tenth in its definitive list of the hundred greatest British films of all time. A sequel film, T2 Trainspotting, followed in 2017. Welsh's own sequel novel, Porno (2002), provided the source material for the second film. The novel itself has never been out of print.

Near fine. Some loss to cover gilt; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000527