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Glue

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

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 30s. 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 else and seems to find catastrophe at every corner.

As we follow their lives from the '70s 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.

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.
©2001 Irvine Welsh (P)2001 Random House Audiobooks
Coming of Age Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction
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Critic Reviews

"Full of incident, mad, crackling dialogue, attractively appalling characters, and some of the funniest and rudest sex scenes." ( Sunday Times)

What listeners say about Glue

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Profile Image for Ray Hecht

No Trainspotting but Juice Terry is fun

It's nowhere near the caliber of Trainspotting, which must be mentioned every time one reviews anything by Irvine Welsh, but Glue was an interesting attempt to write something in that same Extended Universe with quite different themes.

Also about four Scottish friends growing up in the dredges of society and one of them dies of AIDS, but the biggest difference is that many of these characters are actually successful. Welsh explores some more colorful characterization, with a famous DJ and a famous boxer who both get to escape their humble origins. There's also another celebrity who turns up, an American singer touring, which at least gets to show Welsh's range in writing about different worlds and economic classes.

A surprisingly sentimental and sappy take on friendship, and very compassionate towards those souls who constantly end up in and out of prison. The biggest impact of the book is the introduction of one sex addict Terry Lawson, certainly the grossest of the group who gets to have the staying power to return in multiple future books. Worth reading for that fact alone.

Also: If you listen to the audiobook then just the abridged version is fine...

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Profile Image for Anonymous User

appalling

The great Welsh and Tam Dean Burn humbled by the pathetic length of this towering classic. Welsh's greatest underated book reduced to a pathetic mewling wreck. The version of Porno abridged was ok but this putrid filth glosses over some of the finest scenes and totally fails to capture. Surprised the aforementioned author and reader allowed it. Will never listen or more importantly pay for an abridged version of anything ever again.

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