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The Blade Artist cover art

The Blade Artist

By: Irvine Welsh
Narrated by: Tam Dean Burn
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Publisher's Summary

Jim Francis has finally found the perfect life - and is now unrecognisable, even to himself. A successful painter and sculptor, he lives quietly with his wife, Melanie, and their two young daughters in an affluent beach town in California. Some say he's a fake and a con man while others see him as a genuine visionary.

But Francis has a very dark past, with another identity and a very different set of values. When he crosses the Atlantic to his native Scotland for the funeral of a murdered son he barely knew, his old Edinburgh community expects him to take bloody revenge.

But as he confronts his previous life, all those friends and enemies - and, most alarmingly, his former self - Francis seems to have other ideas. When Melanie discovers something gruesome in California that indicates her husband's violent past might also be his psychotic present, things start to go very bad very quickly.

The Blade Artist is an elegant, electrifying novel - ultraviolent but curiously redemptive - and it marks the return of one of modern fiction's most infamous, terrifying characters: the incendiary Francis Begbie from Trainspotting.

©2016 Irvine Welsh (P)2016 Random House Audiobooks

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What listeners say about The Blade Artist

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  • Overall
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Brilliant!

Loved it all, the story, the narration.... Frank Begbie is s classic. Worth your time!

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    5 out of 5 stars
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excellence

A little slow to begin but as usual Welsh delivers again and again. Well worth the time.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Not for the faint of heart

A very gritty book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Language is very rough, but that's life.
It is the first of the series I have read, but the characters are well developed and I felt they stood alone nicely within this book.
I will read more by this author.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Great narration, fantastic story around Begbie

i Liked how the narrator changed accents and tone between characters, great sequel to T1 and T2 brilliant!

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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Excellent

Once again a Welsh book is not only read by Tam Dean Burn but explained by him. I was moved to picture the scenes on the beach in California and could feel the slick on the street in a cold Leith. I expected a lot from a standalone book (relatively) about Welsh's most disturbed and fearsome character, but was not at all disappointed.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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Oan yersel Franco

Good story for the Begbie fans. While it's refreshing that the narrator is Scottish and gets the Slang spot on he can't do other accents or voices to save himself. That said, Irvine Welsh's visual writing style brings the story into the imagination so vividly it brings the book back up to a 5er.

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